The Algorithmic Age of Personality: African Literature and Cancel Culture

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.

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.