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
DOI: www.doi.org/10.36349/sojolics.2025.v01i02.022
author/Egbah, A. I., & Egbo, O.
journal/Sokoto JOLICS 1(2) | November 2025 |
