Description
Book SynopsisThe first book-length study on the relationship between African literature and new media. The digital space provides a new avenue to move literature beyond the restrictions of book publishing on the continent. Arguing that writers are putting their work on cyberspace because communities are emerging from this space, and because increasing numbers of Africans use the internet as part of their day-to-day engagement with their societies and the world, Shola Adenekan explores this transformative development in Nigeria and Kenya, both significant countries in African literature and two of the continent's largest digital technology hubs. Queer Kenyans and Nigerians find new avenues for their work online where print publishers are refusing to publish short stories and poems on same-sex desire. Binyavanga Wainaina's rise to critical acclaim arguably started on the literary blog Generator 21. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's literary celebrity partly relies on her prolific use of social media to tell the story of powerful Nigerian women. With further examples from the development of literature across the continent, this innovative book sheds new light on narratives about digital Africa. It will also be the first major work to provide a trajectory of class consciousness in Kenyan and Nigerian writing. Through this analysis, the book articulates the difference in attitudes towards queerness, sexuality, and hetero-normativity among successive generations of writers. Funded by the Knowledge Unlatched Select 2023 collection, this title is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons License: CC BY NC
Trade ReviewShola Adenekan breaks new ground with the first book-length study of digital creative expression in an African context with African Literature in the Digital Age: Class and Sexual Politics in New Writing from Nigeria and Kenya. [...] This book will be a staple not only for African digital literature courses, but for the parent African literature and digital humanities classes. This first monograph-length study of African digital literature should inspire those of us with scholarly interests in the field to expand upon the research done here to look at the nature of digital writing on the continent in competing and complementary ways. * Journal of the African Literature Association *
African Literature in the Digital Age matters as a field-defining work. It impels the reader to refuse the single story of Africa as a continent that is perpetually confronted with an increasing digital divide. Although the digital divide is real, and restates one of Adenekan's central arguments on class, this book excellently reveals many other stories and narratives. [...] The author has done the excellent work the rest of us must now build on. * Research in African Literatures *
It is often the purpose of pioneer texts to lay the foundation upon which others can build, and African Literature in the Digital Age achieves much in this regard. -- English Academy Review
With this scholarship, he gives shape and substance to African digital literature while deepening understandings of class and sexuality in Kenya and Nigeria. Moreover, Adenekan's deployment of the network as an interpretative framework will prove applicable to other contexts, allowing us to read other regions of African digital production through the affordances of his study. -- Journal of Postcolonial Writing
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Kenyan and Nigerian Writers in the Digital Age Network Thinking: Literary Networks in the Digital Age Class and Poetry in the Digital Age Class Consciousness in Online Fictions Digital Queer: The Queering of African Literature Middle-Class, Transnational, Queer and African 'Ashewo no be Job': The Figure of the Modern Girl in the Digital Age The Erotic in New Writing from Nigeria Social Media and the Aesthetics of the Quotidian Conclusion: Connecting the Dots
