French Literature Reviews - 2026

The Making of the Present
Philosophy, Anthropology and Ideas

In a new essay, Felwine Sarr continues the reflection he initiated in Afrotopia (Philippe Rey, 2016), where he explored how African societies, grappling with their challenges, could expand the horizons of their possibilities within the realms of thought, imagination, and reality. In La fabrique du présent. Pour des utopies en actes, published by the same loyal publishing house, he invites us to examine The Making of the Present more directly, advocating For Utopias in Action. How can utopias be materialized in the present time? How can we enable the vast majority of these populations to experience a life of dignity and fulfillment, drawing on their inherent social and cultural potential? Six decades after gaining independence, African nations still face the challenge of completing their emancipation and jointly securing their well-being. Felwine Sarr outlines the contours of a political economy of dignity, forged within the spaces of knowledge, politics, economics, and the imaginary, which he urges us to reinvent. Facing a global order increasingly defined by force and brutality, he proposes a new ecology of relations and a cosmopolitics of hospitality as the foundations for a shared planetary life.

The volume extends a trajectory initiated in earlier reflections on African futures, imaginative horizons, and the active expansion of social possibilities. Addressing the postcolonial condition six decades after independence, the work engages with longstanding debates on economic sovereignty, cultural potential, and intellectual emancipation within the broader field of African political philosophy and postcolonial thought. The text examines how societies might foster conditions for widespread dignity through the reinvention of knowledge systems, political structures, and imaginative frameworks, responding to contemporary anxieties surrounding global power dynamics and planetary coexistence. Central to the discussion are notions of a political economy of dignity, an ecology of relations, and a cosmopolitics of hospitality, concepts that figure prominently in contemporary humanistic discourse on globalization, ethics, and alternative futures. Readers interested in contemporary African philosophy, political theory, and critical reflections on globalization may find this publication relevant to their inquiries into shared planetary life and social transformation.