Mondialisation et identite: le cas de Vassilis Alexakis
Globalisation and Identity: Vassilis Alexakis’s case

Summary/Abstract: This article seeks to demonstrate how Alexakis, a Greek-French-speaking author, through his writing, produced in a set claimed to be multicultural, escapes the risk to undermine his identity self-determination, how he is ensured on his own originality through this mosaic and, how he finally acquires a universal dimension. At first sight, the concepts of identity and universalization seem radically opposite: the personal versus the universal one. The case of Alexakis, on the contrary, testifies how the identity, by its nature into full becoming, can go through several stages and acquire, finally, universal dimensions, although often anchored in the local. Typical representative of all emigrants, with the constant reference to his own situation of emigrant, all his work is a game of identity unfolding, aiming at deciding which culture (that of birth, the Greek one, or that of adoption, the French one) he belongs to. This bi-directional course takes various forms being expressed through a specific set of themes, common to the entire human community (death, love, language, exile). The solution to this dilemma is given through an African “minor” language, the sango, which shows him the way to dodge the French-Greek bi-polarity. Thanks to this dialect, his writing is set up to a planetary standard, since it is a writing which implies the feeling of belonging to the same interdependent community, of a mutual sharing of values across nationalities, borders and cultures, towards the respect of the others, including its differences, in favor of the cultural diversity and the pluri-linguism. This attempt opened the door to a more widened reception of Alexakis’ work and it could be used as a starting point towards the concept of a global human identity.

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