Decolonizing The Self: African Identity in Comparative Literary Discourse

Abstract This paper takes a leap of the reconstitution of African identity through the lens of comparative literature, more specifically with decoloniality in focus. Through comparing the selected African works to their transnational literary counterparts, the research explores how selected African writers produce, undermine and recreate concepts of selfhood founded on colonial origin, mestizaje cultures and trans-nationality. Referring to postcolonial theory and the writings of Frantz Fanon, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and Homi Bhabha, the study emphasizes how literature is a place for the decolonization of the self and the space of the narrative. In spite of the increasing amount of postcolonial scholarship, the discipline remains heavily biased in comparative studies toward African identity in comparison to colonial powers instead of being in dialogue with non-Western literatures and epistemologies. Much of the existing work keeps African texts centered against Eurocentric frameworks, limiting the scope of intercultural literary analysis. The gap is met by this research by expanding the comparative field to include African works along with, say, Caribbean, Indigenous or South Asian literature and revealing shared struggles and particular articulations of identity. The results indicate that decolonizing oneself is not a one-time action but a daily process of negotiation through language, memory and cultural legacy. In the future, research may further enrich this comparative framework through incorporating interdisciplinarity of methodologies like digital humanities or oral tradition and examining how younger diasporic African writers are remaking identity politics within the transnational literary field. Keywords: Comparative literature, African identity, Literary, Postcolonial, Intercultural, Decolonizing