Reverse Diaspora across the Black Atlantic: The Brazilian Returnees in Francophone African Fiction

Abstract In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, 3000–8000 Africans and African descendants from Brazil relocated to the Bight of Benin and developed a very successful settlement system in what is today Benin, Ghana, Nigeria, and Togo. Kangni Alem’s Les Enfants du Brésil (2017) and Florent Couao-Zotti’s Les Fantômes du Brésil (2006) portray these Brazilian returnee communities, also known as Aguda, who wielded considerable economic and political power. The analysis mobilizes Christin Hess’s concept of reverse diaspora to reveal the complexity of returnee identity and the ambiguous notion of home. Both novels mediate the diasporic returnee experience using specific writing strategies, such as diversity of narrative voices, intertextuality, and a nonlinear structure. Moreover, Alem and Couao-Zotti infuse their novels with historical and ethnological elements that are transformed by literature through what Alem calls “material imagination.” This approach showcases the power of fiction to recover history and reconstruct collective narratives.