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Digital African Literatures and the Coloniality of Data

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2022

James Yékú Open the ORCID record for James Yékú [Opens in a new window]
James Yékú*
Affiliation:
University of Kansas, Lawrence
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Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Digital iterations of African literary texts present scholarly opportunities to interrogate how literature produced and circulated on digital media becomes entangled with the capitalist politics of datafication. In the data paradigm described in the article, literary representations are subject to the workings of neoliberal capital and the constraints of algorithmic systems. Through a postcolonial approach that puts the digital humanities in conversation with African literary studies, the article transcends how digital technologies have evidently changed African literature and tackles the costs of digital literary cultures and networks from Africa. I examine data relations through an African literary culture, which, in the current moment, indisputably exhibits the attainment of new and complex elements including the integration of digital affordances in the production and critical reception of texts. How African literary expressions in a digital age circulate in market-driven digital platforms like Facebook and YouTube makes the subjects of data capitalism or the coloniality of data as important for African literature as the expanded literary networks enabled by the digital.

Keywords

datacolonialityAfrican literaturedigital humanitiessocial media
Type
Article
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , September 2022 , pp. 381 - 398
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

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9 One example of this is how internet memes—as quotidian expressions of everyday digital communication—draw from and regenerate an earlier cultural form such as Nollywood films. As Nollywood-derived memes on social media circulate as aesthetics of politicized speech in cultural and political commentaries, they rearticulate the remix culture of digital media. Please see: Yékú, James. 2022. Cultural Netizenship: Social Media, Popular Culture, and Performance in Nigeria (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP, 2022).

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