The Algorithmic Age of Personality: African Literature and Cancel Culture

by James Yékú

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628955460
Publisher:	Michigan State University Press
Publication date:	05/01/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	300
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

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


“Focusing on the vexingly polarizing worlds of algorithmic culture and its mediated subjectivities and sociality, James Yékú insists we take a step back to articulate an understanding of African literature that defies the constraining logics of platform culture. In The Algorithmic Age of Personality: African Literature and Cancel Culture, Yékú indignantly berates a social media culture of outrage and censorship that is driven by profit-based algorithms and invites us to reread African cultural productions through the lens of online literary feuds, controversies, and scandals. This is a book that will be relevant for many years to come, and it will not be canceled.”
—Adeshina Afolayan, professor of African philosophy at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria


“In bracing, informed prose, Yékú navigates the online maelstrom that has battered consumers and producers of African literature in the digital age, without ever losing sight of the algorithms that manufacture the turbulence of ‘cancel culture’ or the myriad forms of human agency that contest, exploit, or acquiesce to its power. An original tour de force.” - Rhonda Cobham-Sander, professor of English and Black studies, Amherst College


“With bold analysis and compelling insights, James Yékú examines literary controversies in African literature from the predigital era to contemporary digital iterations. The field is richer with Yékú's novel attention to the algorithmic entanglements of African literary and digital cultures.” —Cajetan Iheka, professor of English, Yale University


“This clever, provocative book will stimulate considerable debate for its attention to the ways algorithms help to shape outrage and controversy in Nigerian online literary culture. James Yékú argues that ‘algorithmic conditions’ fuel conflicts and polemics among online literary critics, helping to produce a ‘culture of outrage’ that is highly influential while also, until now, being largely overlooked by professional scholars.” —Stephanie Newell, George M. Bodman Professor of English, Yale University, and author of Newsprint Literature and Local Literary Creativity in West Africa, 1900s-1960s and Histories of Dirt: Media and Urban Life in Colonial and Postcolonial Lagos

From the Publisher