African Literature in the Digital Age

Class and Sexual Politics in New Writing from Nigeria and Kenya

by Shola Adenekan

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Contents
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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.

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

SHOLA ADENEKAN is an Assistant Professor of Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and also the publisher of Thenewblackmagazine.com. He was previously a Researcher and Tutor in African Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bremen, Germany, and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bayreuth, Germany.

"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