Postcolonial Discourse in Francophone African Literature: A Study of Selected Novels from Cameroon and Senegal

Francophone African literature constitutes a rich body of postcolonial discourse in which authors negotiate the legacies of French colonialism, construct alternative African modernities, and contest the epistemic frameworks of metropolitan French literary tradition. This study analyses postcolonial discourse in selected contemporary novels from Cameroon and Senegal, examining how narrative structure, language choice, and characterisation function as discursive strategies for postcolonial critique. A critical discourse analysis framework drawing on Bhabha's concepts of hybridity and mimicry, and Glissant's poetics of relation, was applied to six novels published between 2018 and 2023. Textual analysis focused on representations of colonial memory, constructions of African agency, negotiations of linguistic identity, and deployment of French as a postcolonial literary medium. Results reveal distinct national literary traditions within the francophone African space: Cameroonian novelists in the corpus consistently deploy francophone literary form as a site of linguistic subversion, incorporating Camfranglais and local language insertions as acts of linguistic decolonisation. Senegalese novelists in the corpus show greater formal adherence to French literary conventions while deploying cosmopolitan Atlantic identities as postcolonial critique. Gender and religious identity are significantly more foregrounded in the Senegalese texts. The study argues that reading francophone African literature as a unified corpus obscures important national and regional divergences in postcolonial literary strategy. Recommendations address the incorporation of contemporary francophone African texts into Nigerian university French literature curricula. Keywords: postcolonial discourse, francophone African literature, Cameroon, Senegal, critical discourse analysis