Buata Malela

Buata Bundu Malela is a specialist in comparative literature and historian of the intellectuals of the Afro-West-Indian diaspora. He was born in Kinshasa, Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) in 1979 to Congolese and Senegalese parents.

He completed his studies in Belgium and in France, receiving a doctor of philosophy and letters degree from the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Brussels and the Université Paul Verlaine - Metz in France. He is specialized in the questions relating to the postcolonial studies, with the sociology of the Francophone literatures of Africa and of the Caribbean, with the accounts of slaves from France, the United Kingdom and the United States, with the migrant literatures, like with the relations between philosophy (African and Western) and literature of originating in Africa and in the Caribbean.

Moreover, Buata B. Malela is interested in the matters touching with cultural diversity, the postcolonialism and the relations between literature and cultural universalization. Author of many studies on the Afro-West-Indian intellectuals (such as René Maran, Léon Damas, Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Léopold Sédar Senghor) and of hexagonal France (in particular Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, etc.), he published a book on Afro-West-Indian writers in their relation with the Parisian intellectual world of the colonial era.

He was a researcher at University of Silesia (Katowice, Poland) and now he is Associate Professor of French and Francophone studies at Centre Universitaire de Mayotte.