Autorentext

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, which received an honorable mention for the 2023 African Literature Association Best Book Award for creative writing. Yékú was also awarded the 2022 Pius Adesanmi Early Career Research Excellence Award of the Canadian Association of African Studies. He has held major academic fellowships such as a 2022 Center for Advanced Internet Studies fellowship in Bochum and a 2023 Cultural Entrepreneurship and Digital Transformation in Africa and Asia international guest fellowship at the University of Mainz, both in Germany. Yékú currently leads African digital humanities initiatives at the University of Kansas and is the co-organizer of the annual African Digital Humanities Symposium.

Klappentext

Yékú demonstrates how the politics of both conservative and liberal polarization imbricates to shape what can or cannot be said in online commentaries on African literary forms. This book challenges utopian framings of the digital by exploring how algorithms engender a culture of outrage, conflict, and personality-driven battles that distract from aesthetic considerations of literary texts.