African Literature in the Digital Age: Social Media, Identity and Literary Expression in Francophone Africa

This paper examines how social media and digital technologies are transforming literary production, circulation, identity construction, and linguistic expression in contemporary Francophone Africa. It argues that the digital turn has created a hybrid literary ecology in which print culture, oral performance, African languages, French, audiovisual media, and networked communication interact. Drawing on postcolonial theory, cultural identity studies, and digital literary scholarship, the study investigates the changing relationship between writers and readers, the construction of transnational identities, linguistic hybridity, digital literary forms, feminist agency, political expression, and the coloniality of data. The paper contends that social media can reduce dependence on conventional publishing gatekeepers and expand access to literary publics, while simultaneously producing new forms of algorithmic, commercial, and technological gatekeeping. In Francophone Africa, digital writing therefore represents neither an unqualified liberation nor a simple continuation of colonial domination. Rather, it constitutes a contested cultural space in which writer’s appropriate digital technologies to negotiate language, identity, memory, belonging, and power. The study concludes that the future of Francophone African literature will be increasingly multimodal and transnational, requiring literary scholarship to address both the creative possibilities and structural inequalities of digital culture.

Keywords: Francophone Africa; African literature; social media; digital humanities; identity; literary expression; linguistic hybridity.