African Literature in the Digital Age: Class and Sexual Politics in New Writing from Nigeria and Kenya

by Shola Adenekan

Overview

The 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 thestory 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781847012388
Publisher:	BOYDELL & BREWER INC
Publication date:	03/19/2021
Series:	ISSN , #9
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

SHOLA ADENEKAN is an associate professor of African literature at Ghent University, Belgium, and also the publisher of Thenewblackmagazine.com.

Table of Contents

Introduction: 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

Editorial Reviews

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

Shola 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

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

a refreshing analysis of the interface of digital circulation of African writing and emergent social identities, including urban middle-class sensibilities and non-heteronormative sexual desires. ... an indispensable book in contemporary Africanist cultural studies.

Northwestern University Evan M. Mwangi

This important book recognizes the ways in which the digital age enables new writerly possibilities and an era of openness, while making legible the agency of new literary voices and sensibilities. ... Adenekan's African Literature in the Digital Age matters as a field-defining work.

Research in African Literatures - James Yékú

Shola Adenekan brings his considerable critical and forensic skills to bear in analyzing how online spaces have exploded the boundaries of what we think of as African literature in Kenya and Nigeria - from the erotic to the quotidian. Beyond celebrating the new work's formal innovation and its burgeoning audiences, Adenekan raises crucial questions about its class dimensions: Who has access to the internet? What market forces inspire and disseminate the new online literary bounty? Provocative, counterintuitive, but ultimately generous in its assessments, this ambitious study raises as many questions as it answers.

Amherst College Rhonda Cobham-Sander

an important intervention ... interesting not only to scholars of African literature but also to those thinking more broadly about global writing throughout cyberspace.

Lindsey Green-Simms

There are several reasons why African Literature in the Digital Age is a welcome addition to African literary scholarship. As the publisher of an online magazine, Adenekan is uniquely positioned to chronicle and theorise these developments he writes about, both as an insider and as an academic. His knowledge comes through in the range of materials he engages with. His analytic lens subverts the tyranny of the novelistic form in African literary studies, embracing texts ranging from poetry to short fiction, visual arts, and audiovisual forms. ... 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 - Femi Eromosele