The awarding of the Prix Goncourt to Marie NDiaye in November 2009 may at first sight appear to have brought further confirmation of the ‘Copernican revolution’ which, according to signatories of the manifesto ‘Pour une “littérature-monde” en français’, has been sweeping through the world of literatures of French expression, casting aside hierarchical distinctions inherited from the colonial era. Yet scarcely had the announcement of NDiaye's triumph been made when it unleashed a furore that showed her to be trapped in a web of identity politics which, in the optic of the manifesto, had supposedly been consigned to the trash can of history. Though the word was not publicly used, NDiaye was, I will argue, treated as a latter-day évoluée.

While deferring unconditional membership to that privileged club that was Frenchness, the French colonial authorities coined the category of évolués in order to designate certain colonized subjects who, through exposure to colonial educational and assimilationist mechanisms, had internalized French cultural and social norms. The racial advocacy organization founded in 2005 known as Les Indigènes de la République has emphasized the transcolonial and transhistorical connections inherent in such mechanisms of hierarchization in terms of their representation of ‘descendants of slaves and deported Africans, daughters and sons of the colonized and of immigrants’ (Mouvement des Indigènes de la République). The treatment meted out to NDiaye highlights the complex positions the writer has negotiated in the process of ‘belonging’ in France as a person of African descent, in a nation state whose Republican ideals and values are supposed to render ethnicity indistinguishable.