James Yékú - Böcker

How does social media activism in Nigeria intersect with online popular forms—from GIFs to memes to videos—and become shaped by the repressive postcolonial state that propels resistance to dominant articulations of power? James Yékú proposes the concept of "cultural netizenship"—internet citizenship and its aesthetico-cultural dimensions—as a way of being on the social web and articulating counter-hegemonic self-presentations through viral popular images. Yékú explores the cultural politics of protest selfies, Nollywood-derived memes and GIFs, hashtags, and political cartoons as visual texts for postcolonial studies, and he examines how digital subjects in Nigeria, a nation with one of the most vibrant digital spheres in Africa, deconstruct state power through performed popular culture on social media. As a rubric for the new digital genres of popular and visual expressions on social media, cultural netizenship indexes the digital everyday through the affordances of the participatory web.A fascinating look at the intersection of social media and popular culture performance, Cultural Netizenship reveals the logic of remediation that is central to both the internet's remix culture and the generative materialism of African popular arts.

How does social media activism in Nigeria intersect with online popular forms—from GIFs to memes to videos—and become shaped by the repressive postcolonial state that propels resistance to dominant articulations of power? James Yékú proposes the concept of "cultural netizenship"—internet citizenship and its aesthetico-cultural dimensions—as a way of being on the social web and articulating counter-hegemonic self-presentations through viral popular images. Yékú explores the cultural politics of protest selfies, Nollywood-derived memes and GIFs, hashtags, and political cartoons as visual texts for postcolonial studies, and he examines how digital subjects in Nigeria, a nation with one of the most vibrant digital spheres in Africa, deconstruct state power through performed popular culture on social media. As a rubric for the new digital genres of popular and visual expressions on social media, cultural netizenship indexes the digital everyday through the affordances of the participatory web.A fascinating look at the intersection of social media and popular culture performance, Cultural Netizenship reveals the logic of remediation that is central to both the internet's remix culture and the generative materialism of African popular arts.

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.

Analyzing the innovative and popular uses of digital media technologies across many African countries, African Digital Cultures reveals how digitization, through its inherent computational and epistemological logics, is deeply embedded in the daily lives of millions of people, producing new structures of feeling and new possibilities for political participation, cultural expression, and creative agency.The book grapples with the affective elements of mediatized social relations and consciousness, as platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook, and TikTok increasingly inform the construction of diverse kinds of publics - from the religious and political to the sexual and the literary. Focusing on the creative and disruptive uses of social media platforms, financial technologies, and digital infrastructures, this collection brings together scholars whose work challenges the notion of Africa as a place of technological lack, underscoring the rich histories and contributions of the continent to global digital media. This interdisciplinary volume offers an essential and decolonizing understanding of digital media cultures and histories from an African perspective.