How can we recognize agency when it refuses the familiar opposition between collaboration and resistance? Imane Terhmina argues that Francophone African aesthetics offers powerful and counterintuitive answers to this question. This book contends that subaltern actors often appear as “illiberal subjects”: figures whose emancipatory aspirations remain entangled with their partial adherence to competing norms of state, capitalist, religious, or traditional authority.

Through close readings of canonical writers such as Ousmane Sembène and Tahar Djaout, alongside relatively overlooked literary figures like Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Illiberal Subjects identifies four forms of illiberal subjects: indigenous collaborators in colonial French West Africa, indebted proletarian workers in postcolonial Senegal, revolutionary traitors in post-independence Algeria, and unrepentant migrants at the French border. Rather than merely complicit figures, these illiberal subjects become privileged sites where Bamana and Fulani cosmogonies, Wolof social ethics, and Muslim-centered worldviews intersect with liberal debt economies, colonial domination, state authority, and border regimes. By attending to these ambiguous aesthetic figures in Francophone North and West Africa, the book recenters ordinary, yet often illegible, experiences of subalternity, and proposes a new framework for thinking agency beyond emancipation from power.