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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 October 2022
Digital iterations of African literary texts present scholarly opportunities to interrogate how literature produced and circulated on digital media becomes entangled with the capitalist politics of datafication. In the data paradigm described in the article, literary representations are subject to the workings of neoliberal capital and the constraints of algorithmic systems. Through a postcolonial approach that puts the digital humanities in conversation with African literary studies, the article transcends how digital technologies have evidently changed African literature and tackles the costs of digital literary cultures and networks from Africa. I examine data relations through an African literary culture, which, in the current moment, indisputably exhibits the attainment of new and complex elements including the integration of digital affordances in the production and critical reception of texts. How African literary expressions in a digital age circulate in market-driven digital platforms like Facebook and YouTube makes the subjects of data capitalism or the coloniality of data as important for African literature as the expanded literary networks enabled by the digital.
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4 I am primarily focused here on the digital labor of online cultural producers, although there are other dimensions of digital labor that are not immediately explicit. One example that comes to mind is the backend work of programmers and coders, or even the digital labor that goes into creating digital tools for DH projects serving as new knowledge ecologies.
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9 One example of this is how internet memes—as quotidian expressions of everyday digital communication—draw from and regenerate an earlier cultural form such as Nollywood films. As Nollywood-derived memes on social media circulate as aesthetics of politicized speech in cultural and political commentaries, they rearticulate the remix culture of digital media. Please see: Yékú, James. 2022. Cultural Netizenship: Social Media, Popular Culture, and Performance in Nigeria (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP, 2022).
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18 For instance, Nigerian computer scientist Tunde Adegbola started his African Languages Technology Initiative (Alt-i) in 2002 and did some pioneering work on natural language processing and machine learning. This kind of digital labor is often absent in the genealogies of the DH.
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