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This study attempts to reassess the critical discourse on the Francophone African detective fiction in order to show how the dynamics of genres and discourse in the crime novel participates in a reflection on writing and the boundaries between so-called popular literature and the so-called 'literate'. It is about analysing the workaround strategies implemented by writers to lift the crime novel from the sidelines in which it has long been placed. Born in the nineteenth century with modernity, the African detective fiction is today one of the axes of development of African literature. It competes, by its dynamism and its originality, with the canonical novel. The resumption of thematic recurrences (immigration, social and political criticism) shows that it contributes to a broad representation of social semiosis. It now claims a discursive space of which the dominant field is obliged to recognize the relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black Bazaar is a real-life satire. Its narrator-author was called Fessologue, rendered 'Buttologist' in the English translation. He advanced polemical views about the lives of African immigrants in France. In the absence of an all persons fictitious disclaimer, since Fessologue hails like Mabanckou himself from the 'little Congo' and that many satirized characters are based on actual contemporary writers, this article analyses the 'migritude writers' through Black Bazaar, the identity novel. Drawing on Bhabha's (2003, 2012), the paper focuses on the potential of African narratives to properly talk of the subaltern history of francophone African writers and the evolution of their identities across the margins of Paris. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expansion of women's literature has heralded a new period within the literary history of North and Sub-Saharan Africa. The writing processes and the themes dealt with by these women authors, particularly since the 1980s, point to a significant change in the total literary output of the new literary generations of the continent. If women's fiction has clearly become a necessary point of reference, from both the production and the reception points of view, it seems appropriate that the important body of non-fictional writings (i.e. essays) that has appeared in recent years should be examined. This article analyses the essays of women authors as well as minority writings that show the basic axes along which the search for identity is constructed, a search marked by the female condition and its postcolonial background. These reflections on female itineraries will hopefully help define and describe the type of discourse which, far from rejecting claims of identity, tries to point out the pitfalls and obstacles it must negotiate today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]