Linguistic Negotiations of Postcolonial Identity in Contemporary African Fiction: A Sociopragmatic Analysis

Cite this article as: Egbah, A. I., & Egbo, O. (2025). Linguistic negotiations of postcolonial identity in contemporary African fiction: A sociopragmatic analysis. Sokoto Journal of Linguistics and Communication Studies (SOJOLICS), 1(2), 193–205. https://www.doi.org/10.36349/sojolics.2025.v01i02.022

LINGUISTIC NEGOTIATIONS OF POSTCOLONIAL IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN FICTION: A SOCIOPRAGMATIC ANALYSIS

By

Andrew Ikpomwosa EGBAH, PhD

ikpomwosa.egbah@uniben.edu

Department of English and Literature, University of Benin, Benin City.

&

Ms. Oghenerukevwe Egbo

oghenerukevweegbo@gmail.com

Department of Educational Foundations (English and Literature Option),

Faculty of Education, University of Benin, Benin City.

Abstract

Postcolonial African identities, bearing the imprints of violent colonial heritage and ongoing sociopolitical struggles, are linguistically enacted in contemporary African prose. This article undertakes a comparative sociopragmatic analysis of four novels (Gurnah'sAfterlives, Slimani'sThe Country of Others, Dangarembga'sThis Mournable Body, and Soyinka's Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth) to examine how speech acts, modality patterns, metaphorical constructions, code-switching, and narrative voicing strategies perform postcolonial subjectivities across distinct regional contexts. Grounded in Norman Fairclough's critical discourse analysis and Homi Bhabha's theorisation of hybridity and the Third Space, the study reveals systematic pragmastylistic patterns through which characters negotiate colonial legacies, patriarchal constraints, and neoliberal pressures. Although regional variations emerge in terms of unique neocolonial challenges in Eastern, Northern, Southern, and West African subregions, the sociopragmatic strategies reveal transnational commonalities in how postcolonial subjects forge hybrid identities within linguistic Third Spaces. The research contributes methodologically to the field of postcolonial literary research through the application of empirical linguistic analysis to demonstrate that identity is not just a thematic construct but an observable linguistic practice.

Keywords: sociopragmatics; postcolonial identity, speech acts, modality, Third Space, hybridity, African fiction, critical discourse analysis, postcolonial sociolinguistics, pragma-stylistics

1.  Introduction

In postcolonial African literature, the construction of selfhood often reflects the lingering fractures of colonial rule. Frantz Fanon's argument that colonialism engenders a split consciousness in the colonised subject resonates through contemporary narratives (Fanon,  1963; Moore, 2005, p. 751), while GayatriSpivak's warning that subaltern voices are frequently silenced (Spivak, 2001, p. 12), and Homi Bhabha's theorisation of hybridity and the third space as features of cultural negotiation (Bhabha, 2004, p. 3) provide critical frameworks for examining how African novelists foreground identity in postcolonial works. These writers create literary works where their protagonists negotiate inherited traditions, imported norms, gendered discourse, and evolving national narratives, revealing identity as a continuously reconstructed element across different generations and regions.

Yet within postcolonial literary scholarship, investigations of identity have predominantly operated at the level of thematic analysis; investigating what the characters experience (such as displacement, trauma, and cultural negotiation) rather than how language itself constructs, performs, and contests these identity positions. Although scholars have productively analysed representations of hybridity, memory, and resistance in African fiction, systematic investigation of the pragmatic and discursive mechanisms through which these phenomena operate linguistically have not received adequate scholarly coverage (Anchimbe& Janney, 2011). This gap proves particularly significant given that Bhabha's theoretical concepts (such as hybridity, ambivalence, mimicry, and the Third Space) describe processes fundamentally enacted through language yet are seldom subjected to systematic linguistic scrutiny (Bhabha, 2004).

Recent developments in postcolonial sociolinguistics have established that language choice, code-switching, and discourse strategies constitute primary sites where colonial legacies and postcolonial subjectivities intersect (Anchimbe& Janney, 2011). Similarly, developments in narrative theory have explored how fictional discourse can be analysed for linguistic patterns portraying ideological positioning and power asymmetries (Fludernik& Ryan, 2019). However, these methodological innovations have rarely been applied to contemporary African fiction in ways that bridge postcolonial literary theory and sociopragmatic analysis.

Additionally, comparative studies examining how speech acts patterns, modality forms, metaphorical choices, code constructions, and modes of narrative voicing operate across regional and linguistic contexts to enact postcolonial identity negotiations remain conspicuously under-represented in the literature (Haugh, Kádár, and Terkourafi, 2021). Without empirical linguistic analysis, theoretical constructs risk remaining abstract metaphors rather than demonstrable phenomena that are established in textual evidence (Leech and Short, 2007).

This article addresses these lacunae by conducting a critical sociopragmatic analysis of four contemporary African novels: AbdulrazakGurnah'sAfterlives (2020), LeïlaSlimani'sThe Country of Others (2021), TsitsiDangarembga'sThis Mournable Body (2020), and Wole Soyinka's Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth (2021). These texts were selected for their geographical breadth (representing East, North, Southern, and West African contexts respectively) and for their engagement with distinct colonial legacies (German, French, British) and postcolonial challenges (neoliberal economic pressures, nationalist movements, systemic corruption). The study asks: How do speech act distributions, modality patterns, and metaphorical constructions in these novels linguistically instantiate postcolonial identity negotiations? In what ways do code choices and narrative voicing strategies reveal or challenge colonial power asymmetries? What regional variations emerge in the pragmatic representation of hybridity, displacement, and resistance?

The analysis employs Norman Fairclough's three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis (2003), which examines texts at the levels of linguistic description, discursive practice, and social practice (connecting linguistic choices to broader power structures including colonialism, patriarchy, and neoliberal capitalism). Complementing Fairclough's approach, the study draws on Bhabha's theorisation of postcolonial hybridity, particularly his concept of the "Third Space of enunciation" (Bhabha, 2004, p. 54). This paper's analysis, by integrating Fairclough's sociopragmatic methodology with Bhabha's postcolonial discourse theory, shows how linguistic features provide theoretical claims about identity formation, moving beyond impressionistic reading to the empirical pragmastylistic interpretation of postcolonial fiction

The objectives of this research are threefold: to conduct fine-grained pragmatic analysis of selected passages from each novel, identifying patterns in speech act usage, modality choices, metaphorical framing, code selection, and narrative voicing. Second, the study compares these linguistic patterns across the four texts, examining how regional contexts, colonial histories, and authorial strategies produce distinctive pragmastylistic profiles. Finally, the paper argues that identity in contemporary African fiction functions as a linguistic tool depicting themes of resistance, selfhood, loyalty, and power dimensions.

2. Theoretical Framework

This study integrates Fairclough’s sociopragmatic dimension of critical discourse analysis with Bhabha's theorisation of hybridity and the Third Space in order to show the linguistic enactment of postcolonial identity in contemporary African fiction. This dual approach helps in providing a systematic exploration of the multidimensional nature of the identity in these selected novels despite their geographical or thematic viewpoints.

The sociopragmatic framework is defined by Haugh, Kádár, and Terkourafi (2021, p. 1) as:

the study of users' perceptions of the contextual factors, including perceived sociocultural norms, underlying the interpretation and performance of communicative acts as (in)appropriate.

Sociopragmatics takes its roots in the foundational work by Geoffrey Leech and Jenny Thomas that posits communication as guided by social expectations and norms (Culpeper, 2021, pp. 15–16; Leech and Short, 2007; Thomas, 2014). Norman Fairclough's critical discourse analysis provides the methodological framework for the sociopragmatic approach in this paper. Fairclough (2003, 2023) conceptualises discourse analysis across three dimensions: textual analysis examines linguistic features including grammar and vocabulary; discursive practice investigates how texts are produced and consumed within institutional contexts; and social practice connects linguistic choices to power structures including colonialism and patriarchy. Crucially, his framework emphasises that language actively constructs social identities and relations rather than merely reflecting them in texts.

This study explores Fairclough's approach through the complement of embedded pragmatic tools selected for their capacity to reveal how linguistic features shape identities (such as individual or group) and depict power dimensions (Fairclough, 2023, pp. 11-22). Speech act theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969) examines how characters performatively issue directives, make commissives, or express psychological states, with differential access to speech act types encoding power asymmetries in postcolonial contexts. Modality analysis investigates how speakers encode attitudes through epistemic markers (certainty, doubt) and deontic markers (obligation, permission), revealing ambivalence when characters employ contradictory modality patterns (Palmer, 2001). Metaphor analysis examines conceptual mappings, particularly bodily metaphors (wounding, healing) and spatial metaphors (displacement, home), that structure understanding of colonial trauma and identity (Lakoff& Johnson, 1980). Code-switching between languages or registers indexes shifting allegiances and creates hybrid communicative spaces (García& Wei, 2014), with narrative voice, particularly free indirect discourse, simultaneously providing the tone of subjectivity by blending the narrator’s and character’s consciousness in the narrative (Fludernik& Ryan, 2019).

These pragmatic tools gain coherence through integration with Bhabha's postcolonial theory. Hybridity, as Bhabha (2004, p. 19) theorises, is not merely a mixture but a dynamic process where meaning is constantly contested, occurring within the Third Space which is an ambivalent site where cultural meanings are negotiated. Bhabha (2004, p. 54) positions this space as neither the coloniser's nor the colonised's, but a discursive environment where meaning is redefined through negotiation. Significantly, Bhabha emphasises its linguistic nature:

It is that Third Space, though unrepresentable in itself, which constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew (Bhabha, 2004, p. 55).

The Third Space thus represents a pragmatic phenomenon where conventional discourse strategies prove inadequate and speakers must improvise with features like code-switching, contradictory modality, and so on. Key elements of hybridity include ambivalence (Bhabha, 2004, pp. 36, 53), memory, and trauma (Bhabha 2004, pp. xix, 17). The theoretical integration of Sociopragmatics and postcolonial frameworks enables comparative pragmatism profiling across the four novels representing distinct contexts. The approach identifies shared sociocultural dynamics and regional variations in these narratives, using empirical tools to investigate how different colonial legacies produce distinctive linguistic profiles (Haugh, Kádár, and Terkourafi, 2021; Anchimbe& Janney, 2011). This unified framework methodologically addresses a critical gap in postcolonial literary criticism by examining the sociopragmatic mechanisms through which the negotiations of identity occur in African fiction.

3. Review of Literature

If, as Bhabha theorises, postcolonial identity emerges through negotiation within a Third Space where "the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity" (Bhabha, 2004, p. 55), then identity formation needs to be fundamentally discursive. This would involve enactments through specific linguistic practices rather than mere thematic descriptions. Yet postcolonial literary criticism has largely examined ‘what’ African characters experience (hybridity, displacement, trauma) without investigating ‘how’ language itself constructs these experiences through observable pragmatic strategies.

Globally, studies in postcolonial literature reflect cultural and regional differences. In South Asian and Pakistani scholarship (for example, Subaltern Studies), parallels are drawn regarding nationalism and hybridity, with recent studies by Hameed, Aziz, and Ilyas (2025) exploring postcolonial readings of identity and resistance in contemporary South Asian fiction, and Bilali, Elahi, and Farid (2025) examining postcolonial identity and resistance in Pakistani English novels. Critical approaches to postcolonial literature have evolved significantly, as unveiled by Parsons and Harding (2011) who connect post-colonial theory with action research, while Toth (2025) examines the transition from professional to non-professional practice in reading postcolonial literature. These studies, together with research by Bartels et al. (2019) and Boehmer (2023), suggest that identity in postcolonial societies is contested and multi-layered, shaped by both local traditions and colonial legacies.

Within African contexts specifically, robust studies in sociopragmatics, postcolonial pragmatics, and postcolonial sociolinguistics have analysed discourse practices, though their focus have predominantly focused on spoken interaction, digital communication, and linguistic features rather than literary analysis. A significant work by Anchimbe and Janney (2017) establishes postcolonial pragmatics as investigating links between postcolonial discourse and sociocultural issues. Related research has concentrated on West African varieties, particularly Nigerian English. For instance, Unuabonah (2024) explores Nigerian English-based proverbs' pragmatic functions (evaluating, criticising, advising, warning) across diverse situational contexts.

Similarly, within the realm of postcolonial pragmatics, pragma stylistics, and African fiction, Odebunmi's (2008) work on ‘names’ in Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah reveal how literary texts deploy culture-specific pragmatic resources. More recently, Maiwong (2025) employs critical discourse analysis to examine lexical strategies (code-switching, grafting, and transliteration) as forms of linguistic resistance in African Commonwealth writers. Conversely, Ebim's (2021) critical discourse analysis of Achebe's Things Fall Apart reveals how grammatical, syntactical, and lexical properties manifest power asymmetries. Yet these remain isolated studies of single authors or texts, lacking comparative frameworks that would reveal regional patterns or systematic methodologies applicable across diverse African contexts.

In contemporary African fiction more broadly, themes of hybridity, trauma, and memory dominate literary scholarship. Critics argue that AbdulrazakGurnah's works reflect challenges of hybridity in East Africa (Xu, 2023; Farooqi, Kayani, and Rizwan 2025; Zeriouh 2025). Soni and Singh (2025), Pokharel and Thapa (2025), and Salama (2024) demonstrate how Gurnah subverts colonial narratives through historiographic metafiction, ideological paradigms, reflection of trauma, and cultural hegemony. Dangarembga's works grapple with hybrid selfhood, with studies by Zarrinjooee (2012) and Zinhom and Aldahmani (2025) explaining that Western-style education, political structures, and religion impose "cultural hegemony" on African youths. Scholars like Bekkaoui (2023) and Norlaili and Istiani (2024) view Slimani's works as mirrors for exploring hybridity in North Africa. Several studies emphasise that Soyinka's works fuse African lore with Western modes, enabling social critique of corruption and religious duplicity in modern postcolonial contexts (Anyokwu 2025; Ahmed and Shekho 2024). Together, these scholarship finds that hybridity in African fiction is both an outcome of colonial history and a site of resistance: characters and cultures blend in ways that subvert strict colonial binaries. Yet these analyses remain at the thematic level, identifying hybridity as content without examining how code-switching patterns, metaphorical constructions, or speech act distributions linguistically signal hybrid subjectivity.

Gender constitutes another critical axis. As Spivak cautioned, colonialism often "silences" women's voices (Spivak 1988, 271), and postcolonial critics extend this to varying contexts. Several novels are frequently cited as examples of patriarchal subordination and female emancipation (Fernandi and Haryanti 2021; Zarrinjooee 2012; Uwakweh 2023; Lascelles 2024; Niemi 2021). Studies of Slimani's work by Norlaili and Istiani (2024) examine struggles in negotiating cultural identity, While Rizqi and Syamsuddin (2025) explore racial and gender discrimination, alongside emerging topics of transgender/LGBTQ as 'Other' (Shama 2025) and feminine stereotypes (Agwu, Acha, and Ashabua 2023). However, gendered analyses rarely examine pragmatic dimensions. how female characters' differential access to speech act types, modality markers, or code choices linguistically encodes patriarchal subordination.

Another major strand is concerned with how colonial histories and memories continue to "haunt" African societies. Through Slimani'sThe Country of OthersBekkaoui (2023) finds that the novel often reproduces colonial-era tropes rather than subverting them. In Dangarembga's work, scholars note that colonial education and institutions persist as barriers (Fernandi&Haryanti 2021). Studies in Soyinka's work identify a nexus between corruption and post-independence challenges (Fattah, 2016; Ahmed and Shekho, 2024). Gurnah's novels deal with colonial aftershocks reflected through characters' recollections (Ubah, Adebua, and Oye-Oluwafemi, 2024).

The critical gap emerges at the intersection of these bodies of scholarship. Sociopragmatic research has established sophisticated frameworks for analysing how multilingual speakers negotiate identity through code-switching, pragmatic markers, speech acts, and politeness strategies in naturally occurring discourse (Haugh, Kádár, and Terkourafi, 2021; Leech and Short, 2007). Postcolonial literary criticism has identified hybridity, displacement, trauma, and resistance as central themes in contemporary African fiction. Yet systematic bridging remains absent: studies examining how speech act distributions (directives, commissives, expressives), modality patterns (epistemic uncertainty, deontic obligation), metaphorical constructions (bodily wounding, spatial displacement), code-switching practices (multilingual alternation, register variation), and narrative voicing strategies (free indirect discourse, reported speech framing) operate across different African regional contexts to linguistically enact postcolonial subjectivities in literary texts are conspicuously lacking. Most existing studies examine authors or themes within a single region or work, lacking comparative frameworks. Analyses tend to isolate one category (hybridity or gender) rather than exploring how multiple factors interact intersectionally. Furthermore, despite the productive deployment of sociopragmatic methodologies in analysing African discourse, their application to literary fiction remains underdeveloped, creating a methodological vacuum where robust analytical tools exist but have not been widely systematically employed for comparative literary study.

This research addresses these gaps by integrating sociopragmatic methodology, specifically Fairclough's (2003) critical discourse analysis, with Bhabha's (2004) postcolonial theory to conduct comparative pragmastylistic analysis of four contemporary African novels representing distinct regional and colonial contexts. The study investigates how identity is shaped by overlapping forces of colonial legacies, sociocultural conflict, and historical hybridity through empirical analysis of the linguistic mechanisms (observable in speech acts, modality, metaphor, code choice, and narrative voice) through which postcolonial identities are performed, negotiated, and contested in literary representation.

4. Methodology

This qualitative study is a content analysis of the enactment of identity in four contemporary African novels. The research data is collected textually from award-winning prose fiction published during and after the COVID era (between 2020 and 2022) by native African authors, with each novel representing a distinct regional context and colonial legacy. From East Africa, Gurnah'sAfterlives (Tanzania, 2020) follows four protagonists who endure the aftereffects of German colonial violence and forced displacement. Slimani'sThe Country of Others (Morocco, 2021) centres around Mathilde, investigating mixed-race experience amid Morocco's independence struggle under French colonialism. Dangarembga'sThis Mournable Body (Zimbabwe, 2020) portrays Tambu's psychological turmoil as colonial promises give way to gendered postcolonial disillusionment in Southern Africa under British colonial legacy. Finally, Soyinka's Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth (Nigeria, 2021) satirises political corruption and the collapse of post-independence ideals in a West African state. Together, these novels (representing East, North, Southern, and West Africa) offer regional perspectives on how individuals reconstruct identity in the aftermath of imperialism as well as in the era of globalisation and neoliberal capitalism.

The analytical method integrates comparative textual and contextual strategies grounded in Fairclough's three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis. At the textual level, a comprehensive reading manually identifies key passages where identity negotiation is foregrounded, including interrogations, domestic confrontations, public ceremonies, internal monologues, moments of code-switching, or explicit articulations of hybrid positioning. Second, systematic coding applies the five pragmatic analytical frameworks to selected excerpts, creating detailed annotations documenting speech acts, modality markers, metaphorical vehicles and tenors, code choices, and narrative perspective. Third, comparative analysis examines patterns across the four novels, developing pragmastylistic profiles for each text that characterise dominant speech act types, modality preferences, metaphor domains, code patterns, and narrative voicing strategies. Fourth, theoretical interpretation connects observed linguistic patterns to Bhabha's concepts, demonstrating how speech acts perform resistance or submission, how modality encodes epistemic uncertainty or deontic compulsion, how metaphors construct conceptual frameworks for selfhood, how code choices index cultural allegiances, and how narrative voices distribute authority amongst competing discourses.

This multidimensional methodology permits cross-regional exploration while recognising that colonialism's effects. and responses to it. are shaped by specific historical and geopolitical conditions. By grounding Bhabha's theoretical concepts in systematic pragmatic analysis, the study indicates that postcolonial identity in these novels is the result of the authors intentionally manipulating linguistic elements to reflect how contemporary African fiction depict identity negotiations at various dimensions.

5. Analysis and Discussion

This section examines how the characters forge distinctive identities in contexts where colonial violence has fractured their sense of self, and the responses of such individuals in situations where postcolonial realities have failed to deliver promised freedoms.

Speech Acts and the Performance of Power

When one examines how the characters use language to command, promise, refuse, or declare, one perceives power relations playing out in real time. Directives (such as orders, requests, instructions) reveal who has authority and who must submit. In Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, Papa Davina's manipulation of the Seeker unfolds through a sequence of commands that connote identity disparities:

Move to that window. Draw back the curtain and look through... When you step into these grounds, it is essential that you forget what you are, and who you were. Think of yourself only as the Seeker. I shall be your guide... You are the Seeker. I am the Guide. Our thoughts can only lead to revelation. (Chronicles, p. 3)

Notice the rhythm: "Move," "Draw back," "look through," "forget." Each imperative builds on the last, creating an incantatory effect that mimics religious ritual. The phrase "it is essential that you forget" does not request. it obligates. Papa Davina declares himself "the Guide" in the same breath he names his victim "the Seeker," binding the relationship through language alone. The charlatan's linguistic manipulation replicates postcolonial patterns where indigenous subjects were commanded to abandon their identities and adopt imposed roles reminiscent of the previous controlling stance of the imperialists.

Afterlives offers a counterpoint. When Ilyas refuses to betray his friend, resistance takes the form of a negated promise:

I will not speak when they order me to (Afterlives, p. 114).

The future tense "will not" performs a vow. But the subordinate clause "when they order me" is crucial. it acknowledges that colonial authority will issue the directive yet commits to non-compliance. Silence becomes action.

In The Country of Others, domestic directives expose how colonial and patriarchal power systems intersect. Mathilde tries to intervene in her daughter's education:

Mathilde would find Selma asleep on a bench in the living room. She would scold Mouilala, who did not care about her daughter's education (The Country of Others, p. 19).

The verb "scold" matters. It is not "ask" or "tell". it is "scold," which implies Mathilde perceives herself as having authority to issue face-threatening directives. Yet Mouilala's indifference reveals the directive's failure. Mathilde occupies an impossible position: as a French woman, she carries colonial linguistic authority regarding education, but as an outsider in her Moroccan family, she lacks actual power.

This Mournable Body gives perhaps the most revealing pattern of such control. When Tracey Stevenson proposes commodifying village culture for tourists, her directive crumbles mid-utterance:

We have not done that before, that's unlocked value... minimal, like. agh, loincloths, naked... torsos (This Mournable Body, p. 258).

The business jargon "unlocking value" tries to sanitise what follows, but the ellipses, false starts, and filler "like" expose discomfort. She cannot complete the sentence smoothly. The fragmented syntax mirrors ethical incoherence: she is proposing exploitation under the guise of development, and the language itself rebels. The directive breaks down because it cannot articulate its own violence coherently.

Tambu's response? Non-response. She does not agree or refuse overtly; she simply fails to take up the directive. Her silence functions as refusal, but this also signals disempowerment: Tambu lacks access to direct confrontational speech. The second-person narration reinforces this splitting:

You reach for a stone. It is in your hand. Your arm rises in slow motion (This Mournable Body, p. 21).

She addresses herself as "you," treating her own body as other. This self-alienation linguistically performs what Bhabha calls the "unhomely". the condition of belonging nowhere fully.

 

Modality and Divided Consciousness

Modality. how speakers’ express certainty, doubt, obligation, or possibility. reveals the psychological splitting Bhabha terms ambivalence. Characters simultaneously internalise and resist colonial worldviews, and this contradiction surfaces in their language.

Amine in The Country of Others provides a clear example:

In public, he gave the impression that he had no problem with France after almost dying for its honour. But as soon as they were alone, Amine would shut himself away in silence and brood over his cowardice, his betrayal of his people (The Country of Others, p. 25).

The contrastive structure ("In public... But as soon as") divides performed identity from internal experience. Publicly, Amine expresses high epistemic certainty about his loyalty to France. he "gave the impression" of having "no problem." But privately, different modalities emerge: "cowardice" and "betrayal" carry moral evaluation, framing his service not as duty but as failure. The evaluative language lacks hedging. he does not think he "might have" betrayed his people; he broods over the betrayal as fact. Two incompatible truth claims coexist: France merited his service (public stance) and serving France was treasonous (private conviction). The linguistic evidence lies in the contradictory modality: certainty in one context, certainty in another, both held by the same person about the same actions.

Afterlives structures ambivalence differently. Hamza's exchange about his identity operates through contradiction:

You were a dreamer, though you marched like a soldier (Afterlives, p. 82)

The concessive "though" acknowledges two incompatible attributes: dreamers do not march like soldiers. Yet both describe Hamza. His response deepens the split:

I learned to follow orders, but my dreams belonged to the old songs my mother sang (Afterlives, p. 84).

The contrastive "but" separates acquired behaviour ("learned to follow orders". German military discipline) from retained interiority ("dreams belonged to... old songs". Swahili cultural memory). The possessive "my dreams belonged" treats dreams as property that can maintain allegiance despite bodily compliance. This creates provisional self-identity: Hamza moves between German formality and Swahili norms, never fully inhabiting either. The epistemic uncertainty is not explicit (no "maybe" or "perhaps") but structural. his identity exists in the gap between contradictory statements.

Kadour's positioning in The Country of Others uses modality to distance himself from political categories:

He uttered these words not in the way of nationalists or colonists. in the name of moral principles or an ideal. but simply as a landowner who was happy to own land (The Country of Others, p. 1).

The negation structure ("not... but") rejects political framing: he is neither nationalist nor colonist. The minimising adverb "simply" and hedged satisfaction ("happy to own") present his claim as modest, apolitical pragmatism. But the very act of negating those categories ("not in the way of nationalists or colonists") acknowledges their relevance. he must invoke them to refuse them. Kadour asserts connection to land While denying ideological allegiance, pragmatically navigating between competing demands by framing ownership as neutral when it manifestly is not.

Sir Goddie and other characters in Soyinka's Chroniclesepitomise the role of modals as manipulative tools in the hands of the speaker. During the media session, Sir Goddie assures:

“It will be my great pleasure to report to the president when I brief him tomorrow that nowhere did I hear one dissenting voice. The nation is in no danger. We retain our number-one position. the Happiest People on Earth. Chronicles, p.32

Sir Goddie's assurance, "It will be my great pleasure to report... that nowhere did I hear one dissenting voice", uses the modal ‘will’ to construct a deceptive identity of unwavering authority and success. Rather than simply forecasting a future event, his use of will serves two key purposes. First, the modal ‘will’ functions as a performative utterance of not just reporting the news but declaring the outcome of a supposedly open session. Also, it shows the assertion of total control on the part of Sir Goddie's confidence that he "will" report zero dissent signifying his absolute control over information and his ability to silence opposition.

 

Metaphor and Embodied Trauma

Metaphorical language does not just describe trauma in the narratives. it highlights how trauma is understood and felt by the characters. Across all four novels, bodily metaphors dominate, framing colonial violence as physical wounding and postcolonial subjectivity as a corporeal experience.

In Afterlives, Hamza links literacy to violence:

Official reports spoke of 'pacification' even as villages were razed, and I learned to write my name in German script with the same hand that bound my wounds (Afterlives, p. 68).

The parallelism "I learned to write... with the same hand that bound my wounds" equates colonial education with self-administered first aid. Both are survival responses to German violence. The scare quotes around "pacification" signal narrative irony. the text distances itself from the euphemism even as it reports colonial discourse's use of it. The juxtaposition ("pacification" / "razed," "learned" / "bound wounds") exposes competing claims to truth. The metaphor locates colonial encounters not in abstract "cultural contact" but in flesh: writing and wounding happen with the same hand.

This Mournable Body uses animal metaphor to frame self-destruction:

You arrived on the back of a hyena... You are an ill-made person. You are being unmade. The hyena laugh-howls at your destruction (This Mournable Body, p. 101).

The hyena carries specific cultural valence. scavenger, trickster, boundary-crosser between human and animal worlds. Tambu did not arrive under her own power; she "arrived on the back of a hyena," positioned as passenger rather than agent. The declaration "You are an ill-made person" treats identity as faulty construction, and the progressive "are being unmade" suggests active, ongoing destruction. The passive voice removes agency. something is unmaking Tambu, but the sentence does not name the actor. The hyena "laugh-howls," which anthropomorphises the animal while keeping it inhuman. it mocks but cannot speak. Tambu's second-person address ("You are... You are being") performs internalisation of judgment: she speaks to herself in voices that deny her worth.

The Country of Others locates identity strain in the body as well:

Aïcha had been asleep for a long time, her heart crushed by fear, when Amine came home (The Country of Others, p. 83).

"Crushed by fear" is metaphorical. hearts do not literally compress under emotional weight. but the verb "crushed" evokes physical violence. The understatement is striking: instead of elaborating the violence that produced this fear, the text compresses it into a single participial phrase. The metaphor does double work: it names trauma ("crushed") while concealing its source (fear of whom? from what specific acts?). The body bears witness when language withholds testimony.

Chronicles employs metaphorical elements prominently as Soyinka satirises Nigeria's social corruption, particularly through the figure of Chief Pitan‑Payne. When his son’s body lies abroad, OtunbaPitan‑Payne recoils at the idea of repatriation:

Is this idea of bringing him back so you can put him on the table and serve him for my dinner?” (Chronicles, 2022, p. 342)

This macabre jest reduces his dead son to a consumable object, exaggerating ritual dysfunction to underscore systemic decay. Such grotesque metaphor reveals how postcolonial elites (within and outside the continent) cannibalise communal values for private gain, exposing the “eating away” of social norms and values.

 

Code-Switching and Linguistic Hybridity

Language choice in the texts functions as markers of identity negotiation. When characters switch between colonial languages (English, French, German) and indigenous languages (Swahili, Arabic, Yoruba, Pidgin), they index shifting allegiances and create hybrid communicative spaces.

Chronicles provides the clearest example through Papa Davina's syncretic prayer:

To you the Almighty GodAllah, known in other climes as Ahura Mazda... Let Asha the Good prevail over Druj, the Slave of Evil. (Chronicles, p. 440)

By mashing Islamic ("Allah"), Zoroastrian ("Ahura Mazda," "Asha," "Druj"), and Christian ("Almighty God") terms, the prayer performs religious hybridity. But this is not respectful syncretism. it is manipulation. The compound "GodAllah" (no space) treats distinct theological concepts as interchangeable, reducing religious difference to marketing strategy. The linguistic inventiveness (Soyinka's neologisms like "Ekumenika Healing Ministry". a blend of "ecumenical" and "mania") exposes how postcolonial charlatans weaponize hybridity for exploitation. The Third Space here is not emancipatory but predatory: Papa Davina creates a discursive environment where no single religious tradition governs, allowing him to cherry-pick legitimating rhetoric from multiple sources without accountability to any.

Afterlives handles code-switching more subtly. The narrative reports Hamza's linguistic condition:

I learned to follow orders, but my dreams belonged to the old songs my mother sang (Afterlives, p. 84).

The text does not reproduce Swahili or German directly (Gurnah writes in English), but the reported contrast between "orders" (German military commands) and "old songs" (Swahili oral tradition) indexes bilingual consciousness.

 

Narrative Voice and Fractured Subjectivity

The novels’ narrative perspective (encompassing the point of view of who speaks, who sees, and whose consciousness the reader inhabits) is another environment where postcolonial identity is negotiated.

This Mournable Body vastly employs second-person narration. When Tambu witnesses Gertrude's assault:

Hands lift Gertrude from the combi's running board... The sight of your beautiful hostelmate fills you with an emptiness that hurts. You reach for a stone. It is in your hand. Your arm rises in slow motion (This Mournable Body, p. 21).

The fragmented syntax mirrors Tambu's paralysis. Short, declarative sentences accumulate without climax: "It is in your hand. Your arm rises." The present tense and slow-motion description stretch the moment temporally, yet nothing happens. the stone remains in hand, the arm remains rising. The narrative voice captures dissociation: Tambu experiences her body as separate, her agency as foreclosed. The second-person "you" enforces this distance. she watches herself watching violence, unable to intervene.

Afterlives structures trauma through non-linear temporality and fragmented perspective. The novel opens with villagers gathering bones:

They whispered stories of the dead, names disappearing in the wind. Each bone told of promise turned to ash (Afterlives, p. 16).

This scene recurs throughout the narrative, echoing in Hamza's nightmares and waking memories. The repetition enacts trauma's inassimilability. the event cannot be processed once and integrated into a coherent life narrative. Instead, it returns obsessively, fragmenting linear temporality. The metaphor "names disappearing in the wind" links language to loss: colonial violence not only kills bodies but erases the linguistic traces (names, stories) that would preserve memory. The narrative voice shifts between military communiqués, proverbial interludes, and character focalisation without clear transitions, mirroring how trauma disrupts narrative coherence.

The Country of Others uses third-person limited focalisation to divide public and private selves. The narrative is conveyed through individual characters, rendering their thoughts and perceptions, but shifts between focalisation points to reveal contradictions:

In public, he gave the impression that he had no problem with France after almost dying for its honour. But as soon as they were alone, Amine would shut himself away in silence and brood over his cowardice, his betrayal of his people (The Country of Others, p. 25).

The first sentence gives the reader an external perspective (what impression Amine projects), but the second sentence accesses his internal state ("brood over"). This shift from external to internal focalization exposes the gap between performance and experience. The narrative voice mediates between these positions without resolving their contradiction, staging ambivalence as formal structure.

The narrative structure of Soyinka's Chronicles  is nonlinear and episodic, weaving together the lives of a quartet of college friends and other characters across different timelines.

Much had changed, Menka now consciously admitted, since those days of student idealism, with all their eccentricities. Even his own select quartet of dreamers, who wore T-shirts combatively emblazoned with The Gong of Four across the image of a Benin royal gong with four conjoined heads. even they, he ruefully conceded, had undergone irreversible changes (Chronicles, p. 217)

Soyinka's fragmented approach mimics the social dysfunction of Nigeria, presenting seemingly disparate plot threads. like the human body parts trafficking, political corruption, and personal dramas. before ultimately revealing how they are interconnected by the nation's profound moral rot. Moreover, Soyinka's Chronicles handles memory through cataloguing historical scandals:

The Okija Shrine debacle, the assassination of Dele Giwa, the death of Bola Ige, and the rise of Boko Haram (Chronicles, p. 12).

The list accumulates without commentary, treating Nigerian history as a sequence of unresolved traumas. The narrative voice does not explain these references (readers familiar with Nigerian history recognize them; others encounter them as opaque proper names), which performs its own point: national memory consists of wounds that circulate in public discourse without healing or resolution.

Comparative pragmastylistic Profiles

When the paper compares the four novels systematically, regional and linguistic patterns emerge that reflect distinct colonial histories and postcolonial challenges (see Figure 1):

Feature	Afterlives	Country of Others	Mournable Body	Chronicles
Dominant speech acts	Commissives (vows, refusals)	Directives (commands, scolding)	Expressives (laments, accusations)	Declarations (pronouncements, satire)
Modality preference	Deontic (obligation)	Epistemic (uncertainty)	Dynamic (inability)	Ironic (mock-certainty)
Metaphor domains	Body/wounding	Home/alienation	Animal/unmaking	Theatre/spectacle
Code patterns	Swahili-German switching	French-Arabic diglossia	English-Shona references	Pidgin-Standard English
Narrative voice	Historical omniscient	Focalised third-person	Second-person internal	Satirical omniscient

Figure 1:  Comparative table showing the pragmastylistic profiles for each novel

Speech Act Distributions: Afterlives privileges commissives (vows, refusals) as resistance; The Country of Others foregrounds directives that fail, exposing gendered powerlessness; This Mournable Body emphasizes expressives (laments, self-accusations) reflecting internalised oppression; Chronicles deploys declarations ironically, with official pronouncements systematically undermined.

Modality Preferences: Afterlives uses deontic modality (obligation, duty) reflecting military discipline; The Country of Others shows epistemic splits (public certainty, private doubt); This Mournable Body employs dynamic modality (inability, incapacity); Chronicles uses mock-epistemic certainty (characters express confidence about manifest lies).

Metaphor Domains: Afterlives clusters around bodily wounding and flesh; The Country of Others focuses on spatial displacement and domestic enclosure; This Mournable Body draws on animal imagery and liquefaction; Chronicles uses grotesque hyperbole and theatrical spectacle.

Code Patterns: Afterlives embeds Swahili proverbial forms within English narration; The Country of Othersthematizes French-Arabic bilingualism without direct switching in translation; This Mournable Body uses untranslated Shona terms marking epistemological resistance; Chronicles switches overtly between standard English, Pidgin, and Yoruba terms, with code choice indexing truth versus lies.

Narrative Voice: Afterlives fragments temporally and in different persona voices; The Country of Others uses third-person limited with shifting focalisation; This Mournable Body employs sustained second-person address; while Chronicles maintains satirical omniscient narrator-style.

These patterns are not arbitrary but reflect material conditions. German military colonialism in East Africa produced different legacies than French settler colonialism in Morocco or British indirect rule in Zimbabwe. Gurnah writes from diasporic position (a Tanzanian author in Britain), which shapes his narrative strategies differently than Dangarembga (a Zimbabwean author navigating neoliberal structural adjustment) or Soyinka (a Nigerian Nobel laureate critiquing postcolonial corruption from insider position) or Slimani (a Franco-Moroccan author negotiating dual heritage).

Yet these regional differences operate within shared patterns. All four novels use speech acts to encode power, modality to reveal ambivalence, metaphor to embody trauma, code choice to index allegiance, and narrative voice to stage divided consciousness. The sociopragmatic examination  reveals both regional specificity and transnational commonality. postcolonial African identity is not monolithic, yet certain linguistic strategies for negotiating colonial legacies recur across vastly different contexts. What this suggests is that Bhabha's theoretical framework, when operationalised through sociopragmatic methodology, gains empirical precision while maintaining explanatory power in the texts.

6.  Conclusion

This study set out to investigate how contemporary African fiction linguistically enacts postcolonial identity through observable pragmatic strategies rather than merely representing it as thematic content. The analysis, through the systematic integration of Fairclough's critical discourse analysis with Bhabha's theorisation of hybridity and the Third Space, has shown that postcolonial identity is a common phenomenon that is dynamically negotiated through linguistic performance in the narratives.

In line with the research questions, the findings reveal systematic pragmastylistic constructions across the four novels. Speech act distributions encode power asymmetries: colonial authorities and postcolonial elites freely issue directives While subordinated subjects employ indirect strategies, negated commissives, or resistant silences. Modality patterns expose the ambivalence Bhabha theorises. characters simultaneously express high epistemic certainty about colonial frameworks and contradictory certainty about indigenous knowledge, linguistically performing divided consciousness. Metaphorical constructions frame identity through bodily wounding (Gurnah), spatial displacement (Slimani), animal imagery and liquefaction (Dangarembga), and grotesque spectacle (Soyinka), structuring how trauma is experienced and understood. Code-switching between colonial languages and indigenous varieties creates Third Spaces where neither linguistic system fully governs, requiring pragmatic improvisation. Narrative voicing strategies. temporal fragmentation, second-person alienation, shifting focalisation, satirical meta-commentary. formally enact the psychological splitting postcolonial subjects experience.

Regional variations emerged: East African fiction privileges commissive speech acts and deontic modality reflecting military colonial discipline; North African literature foregrounds failed directives and epistemic splits revealing gendered liminality; Southern African prose employs expressive speech acts and dynamic modality capturing neoliberal disempowerment; West African narrative deploys ironic declarations and mock-certainty exposing corruption. Yet these regional differences operate within shared linguistic strategies for negotiating colonial legacies, suggesting that while postcolonial identity is context-specific, certain pragmatic mechanisms recur transnationally.

The study contributes methodologically by operationalising postcolonial theory through systematic linguistic analysis, unveiling how Bhabha's concepts. hybridity, ambivalence, Third Space. describe empirically observable phenomena rather than abstract metaphors. This bridges postcolonial literary criticism and sociopragmatics, offering replicable analytical frameworks applicable to diverse literary data.

The implications extend beyond literary studies. If identity is linguistically constructed through speech acts, modalities, and metaphors, then interventions addressing postcolonial trauma, gender inequality, or political corruption must attend to discourse itself. not merely what people say but how language structures what can be thought and who can speak. Future research might apply these pragmastylistic methods to oral narratives, political discourse, or digital communication, investigating whether the patterns identified in literary fiction appear in everyday postcolonial speech. Additionally, expanding the corpus to include Lusophone and Francophone African fiction in original languages (rather than translation) would test whether these findings hold across linguistic boundaries or whether English-language analysis captures only partial patterns.

The kicker is this: language is never neutral. The speech acts, modal choices, narrative point of view and metaphor device carry embedded identity and power relations within their usage. By making these relations visible through systematic analysis, the readers gain tools not just for reading novels more carefully but for understanding how postcolonial subjects navigate impossible positions daily. speaking languages imposed by colonisers, inhabiting metaphors that frame them as wounded or broken, negotiating identities in Third Spaces where no available discourse feels adequate.

References

Abed Al-Ameer, Z. A., &Kateb, A. H. (2025). The process of othering in Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman: A postcolonial study. Journal of Critical Studies in Language and Literature, 6(3), 56–68. https://doi.org/10.46809/jcsll.v6i3.362

Agwu, P. A., Acha, J. O., &Ashabua, D. A. (2023). An evaluation of feminine identity and gender stereotypes in LeïlaSlimani'sThe Perfect Nanny. Journal of English Scholars' Association of Nigeria, 25(4), 1–11.

Ahmed, H. R., &Shekho, S. S. (2024). Nigerian nationalism and institutional corruption in Wole Soyinka's Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth. Twejer Journal, 7(3), 1316–1355. https://doi.org/10.31918/twejer.2473.48

Alamu, I., &Ololade, E. O. (2025). Orientalism revisited: A critique of Western discourses of non-Western development through the post-colonial, subaltern and Marxist frames. RADINKA Journal of Science and Systematic Literature Review, 3(1), 590–599. https://doi.org/10.56778/rjslr.v3i1.466

Anchimbe, E. A., & Janney, R. W. (2011). Postcolonial pragmatics: An introduction. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(6), 1451–1459. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2010.10.027

Anyokwu, C. (2025). Unravelling the Nigeria conundrum in Wole Soyinka's Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth. Ansu Journal of Language and Literary Studies, 5(1), 1–15.

Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Harvard University Press.

Bartels, A., Eckstein, L., Waller, N., &Wiemann, D. (2019). Postcolonial literatures in English: An introduction. J.B. Metzler. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-05598-9

Bekkaoui, H. (2023). Disorienting the native struggle for independence: A postcolonial reading of Leila Slimani'sThe Country of Others. International Journal of Language and Literary Studies, 5(4), 77–94. https://doi.org/10.36892/ijlls.v5i4.1469

Bhabha, H. K. (2004). The location of culture (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Bilali, M. J., Elahi, I., &Farid, S. (2025). Postcolonial identity and resistance in Pakistani English novels. Journal of Applied Linguistics and TESOL (JALT), 8(1), 1897–1910. https://doi.org/10.63878/zzgcat33

Boehmer, E. (2023). Colonial and postcolonial literature: Migrant metaphors. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199253715.001.0001

Culpeper, J. (2021). Sociopragmatics. In M. Haugh, D. Z. Kádár, & M. Terkourafi (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of sociopragmatics (pp. 15–29). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108954105.003

Dangarembga, T. (2020). This mournable body. Faber & Faber.

Dhobi, S. (2024). Critical approaches to postcolonialism. PatanPragya, 13(1), 105–114. https://doi.org/10.3126/pragya.v13i1.71187

Ebim, P. A. (2021). A critical discourse analysis of narrative processes in Chinua Achebe's Things fall apart. International Journal of Language, Literature and Culture, 1(2), 45–61. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4152627

Fairclough, N. (2023). Critical discourse analysis. The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis, 11–22. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003035244-3

Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203697078

Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth (C. Farrington, Trans.). Grove Press. (Original work published 1961)

Farooqi, H. K., Kayani, T., &Rizwan, M. U. (2025). Burden of the past: Postcolonial silence and intergenerational trauma in AbdulrazakGurnah'sAfterlives. Al-Aasar, 2(1), 474–485.

Fattah, A. A. (2016). Postcolonial identity in Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests and The Road. Scientific Journal of the Faculty of Arts – Assiut University, 19(58), 8–36. https://doi.org/10.21608/aakj.2016.165565

Fernandi, A. B., &Haryanti, R. P. (2021). Double colonization of Rhodesian women in TsitsiDangarembga'sNervous Conditions. Rainbow: Journal of Literature, Linguistics and Culture Studies, 10(2), 11–22. https://doi.org/10.15294/rainbow.v10i2.45103

Fludernik, M. (1993). The fictions of language and the languages of fiction: The linguistic representation of speech and consciousness. Routledge.

Fludernik, M., & Ryan, M.-L. (Eds.). (2019). Narrative factuality. De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278

García, O., & Wei, L. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education. Palgrave Macmillan.

Gurnah, A. (2020). Afterlives. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Hameed, S., Aziz, M. K., &Ilyas, A. (2025). Postcolonial readings of identity and resistance in Naemat Imam's novel The Black Coat. Dialogue Social Science Review (DSSR), 3(1), 372–379.

Haugh, M., Kádár, D. Z., &Terkourafi, M. (Eds.). (2021). The Cambridge handbook of sociopragmatics. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108954105

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.

Lascelles, A. (2024). 'The dancing women move forward': Embodied agency and Black feminist solidarity in TsitsiDangarembga'sThis Mournable Body. Feminist Formations, 36(3), 84–103. https://doi.org/10.1353/ff.2024.a950662

Leech, G. N., Short, M. (2007). Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. Berlin: Pearson Longman.

Maiwong, E. D. (2025). A discourse analysis of English lexis in African Commonwealth literature. British Journal of English Linguistics, 13(2), 25–42. https://doi.org/10.37745/bjel.2013/vol13n22542

Moore, O. T. (2005). A Fanonian perspective on double consciousness. Journal of Black Studies, 35(6), 751–762. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021934704263839

Niemi, M. J. (2021). Critical representation of neoliberal capitalism and uneven development in TsitsiDangarembga'sThis Mournable Body. Journal of Southern African Studies, 47(5), 869–888. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2021.1959118

Norlaili, M., &Istiani, I. (2024). The struggle in negotiating cultural identity in LeïlaSlimani'sThe Country of Others. Paradigm: Journal of Language and Literary Studies, 7(1), 45–59.

Odebunmi, A. (2008). Names in Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah. Marang: Journal of Language and Literature, 18, 49–68. https://doi.org/10.4314/marang.v18i1.39326

Palmer, F. R. (2001). Mood and modality (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Parsons, J. B., & Harding, K. J. (2011). Post-colonial theory and action research. Turkish Online Journal of Qualitative Inquiry, 2(2), 1–6.

Pokharel, B. P., &Thapa, M. (2025). Material realities and ideological paradigms in Afterlives: A Marxist reimagining. NPRC Journal of Multidisciplinary Research, 2(4), 149–159.

Rizqi, E. F., &Syamsuddin, S. (2025). Exploring racial and gender discrimination: A sociological study of LeïlaSlimani'sThe Country of Others. Lililacs Journal, 5(1), 29–40. https://doi.org/10.21009/lililacs.051.03

Salama, S. M. (2024). Perceived self-efficacy as a mechanism for post-traumatic recovery in Gurnah'sAfterlives: The case of Hamza. 3L: Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies, 30(2), 106–118. https://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2024-3002-08

Schwartz, S. J., Luyckx, K., &Vignoles, V. L. (Eds.). (2011). Handbook of identity theory and research. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7988-9

Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge University Press.

Slimani, L. (2021). The country of others (S. Taylor, Trans.). Penguin Books.

Soni, S., & Singh, V. P. (2025). Subverting colonial narratives: A reading of historiographic metafiction in AbdulrazakGurnah'sAfterlives. Agathos, 16(1), 213–228. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15163062

Soyinka, W. (2021). Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth. Bookcraft.
Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). University of Illinois Press.

Toth, H. G. (2025). Reading postcolonial literature: From professional to non-professional practice. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.21874081

Thomas, J. A. (2014). Meaning in Interaction. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315842011

Ubah, S. O., Adebua, B., &Oye-Oluwafemi, O. A. (2024). The interplay of poverty, hardship, and exploitation in postcolonial Nigeria in KaineAgary'sYellow Yellow. British Journal of Multidisciplinary and Advanced Studies, 5(5), 42–60. https://doi.org/10.37745/bjmas.2022.04186

Unuabonah, F. O. (2024). Investigating the pragmatic functions of Nigerian English-based proverbs: A corpus-driven method. Corpus Pragmatics, 9, 51–73. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41701-024-00178-x

Uwakweh, P. A. (2023). Unmaking agency: Intersectionality and narrative silencing in TsitsiDangarembga'sThis Mournable Body. Journal of the African Literature Association, 17(2), 281–297. https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2023.2204575

Xu, J. (2023). Identity construction in the post-colonial period: Hybridity and third space in AbdulrazakGurnah. Academic Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 6(19), 154–158. https://doi.org/10.25236/AJHSS.2023.061925

Zarrinjooee, B. (2012). The formation of a hybrid identity in TsitsiDangarembga'sNervous Conditions. African Journal of History and Culture, 4(3), 87–96. https://doi.org/10.5897/AJHC12.001

Zeriouh, L. (2025). An analytical reading of Afterlives by AbdulrazakGurnah: Colonization of the mind, resistance, and perpetuation of hegemony. Creative Flight, 6(2), 180.