Du polar d’Afrique francophone et des stratégies pour contourner la marge instituée

Abstract

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.