This chapter explores the intersections between cosmopolitanism, hospitality and the African immigrant in Wilfried N'Sondé's novel Le Silence des esprits [The Silence of the Spirits] (2010). Born in Brazzaville, Congo, and currently residing in Berlin, the writer and musician made his literary debut with Le Coeur des enfants léopards [The Heart of the Leopard Children] in 2007, for which he won the prestigious Prix des cinq continents de la francophonie. He followed it up with Le Silence des esprits in 2010 and Fleur de béton [Flower in Concrete] in 2012. In all three texts the impoverished Parisian banlieues serve as the principal backdrop to the stories of second–generation immigrants, the anonymous first–person narrator in Le Coeur des enfants léopards, Clovis Nzila in Le Silence des esprits and Rosa Maria in Fleur de béton. While these narratives offer a realistic depiction of the lives of immigrants (of all ethnic and religious affiliations) who are economically, socially and ethnically marginalized from mainstream society, they also contain in their unfolding the redemptory poetry of hope and shared understandings. I am suggesting here that Wilfried N'Sondé's writing translates an ‘Afropean cosmopolitanism’ – a poetic blend of cosmopolitanism as hospitality (Baker, 2011) and guest friendship (Gandhi, 2006) that engages in a resisting discourse against the hegemonic violence of global interactions (de Sousa Santos, 2002) through the affective practice of cosmopolitanism as conversation (Appiah, 2006).

Cosmopolitanism as Conversation

In his introduction to Cosmopolitanism – Ethics in a World of Strangers, Kwame Anthony Appiah asks ‘What do we owe strangers by virtue of our shared community?’ (2006: xxi). He frames his response in the notion of cosmopolitanism, a term to which he attributes two strands: