Algorithmic Age of Personality

African Literature and Cancel Culture

Häftad, Engelska, 2025

1 118 kr

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Beskrivning

As the affordances of authorship and reading practices on social media become deeply mediated by algorithmic curation, they encourage closer attention to the author's personality as fundamental to literary production. The Algorithmic Age of Personality: African Literature and Cancel Culture challenges any lingering utopianism in the role of digital media in African cultural productions by exploring how algorithms engender a culture of outrage, conflict, and personality-driven and ego battles that distract from aesthetic and ethical evaluations of literary texts. In Yékú’s careful attention to how contemporary African literary practices are significantly marked by the extractivist and affective logics of social media algorithms, he articulates the current state of debating in the critical universe of African literature and connects this to the phenomenon of “cancel culture.” Rather than a Manichean understanding of cancel culture, Yékú illustrates how the politics of both conservative and liberal polarization shape what can and cannot be said in online commentaries on African literary forms. The outcome is a work that situates postcolonial classics by Chinua Achebe and Joseph Conrad in online debates on cancel culture and decolonization, while responding to social media discussions on Western literary prizes, ethnicity, and sexuality involving writers like Soyinka, Ngũgĩ, Wainaina, and Adichie.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2025-05-01
Mått:152 x 229 x 20 mm
Vikt:340 g
Format:Häftad
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:300
Förlag:Michigan State University Press
ISBN:9781611865332

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Mer om författaren

James Yékú, a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt fellowship, is an associate professor of African and African American studies at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Cultural Netizenship: Social Media, Popular Culture, and Performance in Nigeria and the poetry collection Where The Baedeker Leads: A Poetic Journey.

Recensioner i media

“In this nimble-footed book dealing with the problem of cancel culture and literary controversies on social media, James Yékú brings a serious, critical attention to debates liable to peter out in their dizzying evanescence. Treating topics ranging from online fan fiction, criticism inspired by ethnic politics, to the unstable fortunes of literary networks, Yékú constantly keeps literary issues on the front burner, sharpening those topics with the cutting edge of digital tools that constantly enable and disable them.”—Akin Adeṣọkan, author of Everything Is Sampled: Digital and Print Mediations in African Arts and Letters

Innehållsförteckning

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter One. Achebe, Adichie, and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in a Cancel Culture Age Chapter two. Literary Networks of Conflict and the Politics of the Digital Litmag Chapter three. Achebe’s There Was a Country and the Ethnopolitics of Bọ́lẹ̀kájà Readers Chapter 4. The Caine Prize Wàhálà and the Algorithmic Rọ̀fọ̀rọ́fọ̀ of Literary Networks Chapter 5. Thighs Fell Apart, Online Fan Fiction and Literary Friendships Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index