African literatures in Portuguese were first canonized in the 1970s. During and in the wake of decolonization, the main force driving their internationalization was the solidarity with the struggle for liberation. This trend weakened, however, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. At the same time, the 1990s marked a turn in the process of literary production that also corresponded with a shift in style, themes, and aesthetic inclination by a younger generation of writers. A few of these names became standard reference in the translational canon of these literatures: notably Mia Couto and José Eduardo Agualusa, the two most prominent beneficiaries of this system, alongside Paulina Chiziane, Germano Almeida, Pepetela, and Ondjaki. Offering a comparative mapping of this transnational canon alongside the publication and reception of these literatures in the Portuguese-speaking world will give us a better understanding of their relationship to world literature and of the functioning of the world literary consecration machine.

Today, it is not the former colonial metropolis (Portugal), but a former colony (Brazil) that has become the main legitimizing center of African literature in the Portuguese language. It is also in Brazil that the largest number of studies on African literature written in other languages is produced. To illustrate this state of affairs, we begin by demonstrating how the work of Alain Mabanckou has penetrated the literary market and the Brazilian academy. After contextualizing the historical institutional dependence that characterizes French-speaking African literature in relation to the “center” (Paris) and situating Mabanckou in this dynamic, we look at how his work arrived in Brazil, the growing interest that it has awakened, and the type of studies conducted there. In the last part of the article, we show that Mabanckou is not an isolated phenomenon and is part of a historical process that began more than fifty years ago: due to the flow of translations and academic studies on works from different linguistic contexts, Brazil helps to unsettle the linguistic self-centeredness that characterizes African literary studies and reduces distances between “center” and “periphery” that guide the world literary game.