| Summary: | This article analyzes the digital environment that accompanied the development and publication in 2018 by Lattès of the novel Empreintes de crabe by Patrice Nganang. Designating himself as a “digital man”, the writer presented his growing use of the Internet as the result of a crucial turning point in 2011. Evoking firstly the stages of this trajectory and its political and poetic stakes, the essay compares secondly the born-digital material produced by Nganang with his other writings regarding the novel Empreintes de crabe. These texts include an interim manuscript finalized in 2013, which the author has reworked by making greater use of social networks, in particular Facebook and Twitter. Based on diversified textual material, including Nganang’s interventions in a digital public space, the article describes the genesis, which is partly digital, of a novel informed by a web poetics at the crossroads of the screen and the printed book. The exhibition of this literary production outside the book as object allows in particular to redirect it towards a Cameroonian public whose long-repressed historical memory is, within this novel, in part rehabilitated.
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