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.

The first book-length study on the relationship between African literature and new media.

Thanks to ever-greater digital connectivity, interest in oral traditions has grown beyond that of researcher and research subject to include a widening pool of global users. When new publics consume, manipulate and connect with field recordings and digital cultural archives, their involvement raises important practical and ethical questions. This volume explores the political repercussions of studying marginalised languages; the role of online tools in ensuring responsible access to sensitive cultural materials; and ways of ensuring that when digital documents are created, they are not fossilised as a consequence of being archived. Fieldwork reports by linguists and anthropologists in three continents provide concrete examples of overcoming barriers -- ethical, practical and conceptual -- in digital documentation projects. Oral Literature In The Digital Age is an essential guide and handbook for ethnographers, field linguists, community activists, curators, archivists, librarians, and all who connect with indigenous communities in order to document and preserve oral traditions.

Rediscover the diversity of modern African literatures with this authoritative resource edited by a leader in the field How have African literatures unfolded in their rich diversity in our modern era of decolonization, nationalisms, and extensive transnational movement of peoples? How have African writers engaged urgent questions regarding race, nation, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality? And how do African literary genres interrelate with traditional oral forms or audio-visual and digital media? A Companion to African Literatures addresses these issues and many more. Consisting of essays by distinguished scholars and emerging leaders in the field, this book offers rigorous, deeply engaging discussions of African literatures on the continent and in diaspora. It covers the four main geographical regions (East and Central Africa, North Africa, Southern Africa, and West Africa), presenting ample material to learn from and think with. A Companion To African Literatures is divided into five parts. The first four cover different regions of the continent, while the fifth part considers conceptual issues and newer directions of inquiry. Chapters focus on literatures in European languages officially used in Africa -- English, French, and Portuguese -- as well as homegrown African languages: Afrikaans, Amharic, Arabic, Swahili, and Yoruba. With its lineup of lucid and authoritative analyses, readers will find in A Companion to African Literatures a distinctive, rewarding academic resource. Perfect for undergraduate and graduate students in literary studies programs with an African focus, A Companion to African Literatures will also earn a place in the libraries of teachers, researchers, and professors who wish to strengthen their background in the study of African literatures.

Ruth Finnegan's Oral Literature in Africa was first published in 1970, and since then has been widely praised as one of the most important books in its field. Based on years of fieldwork, the study traces the history of storytelling across the continent of Africa. This revised edition makes Finnegan's ground-breaking research available to the next generation of scholars. It includes a new introduction, additional images and an updated bibliography, as well as its original chapters on poetry, prose, "drum language" and drama, and an overview of the social, linguistic and historical background of oral literature in Africa. This book is the first volume in the World Oral Literature Series, an ongoing collaboration between OBP and World Oral Literature Project. A free online archive of recordings and photographs that Finnegan made during her fieldwork in the late 1960s is hosted by the World Oral Literature Project (http: //www.oralliterature.org/collections/rfinnegan001.html) and can also be accessed from publisher's website.

Orientations -- Prologue: an introduction to the personal, methodological, and spatiotemporal scales of the project -- The eyes of the world: themes of movement, visualization, and (dis)embodiment in Congolese digital minerals extraction (an introduction) -- Mining worlds. War stories: seeing the world through war ; The magic chain: interdimensional movement in the supply chain for the "Black Minerals" ; Mining futures in the ruins -- The eyes of the world on Bisie and the game of tags ; Bisie during the time of movement ; Insects of the forest ; The battle of Bisie ; Closure ; Game of tags: auditing the digital minerals supply chain ; Conclusion: chains, holes, and wormholes.

The role of archives and libraries in our digital age is one of the most pressing concerns of humanists, scholars, and citizens worldwide. This collection brings together specialists from academia, public libraries, governmental agencies, and non-profit archives to pursue common questions about value across the institutional boundaries that typically separate us.

The era of digital communication provides endless opportunities for the collection and analysis of social data in novel ways. It also presents new and unanticipated challenges, as researchers are often inventing elements of their methodologies on the fly or studying a phenomenon or media platform for the first time. Research Exposed offers in-depth, behind-the-scenes accounts of doing empirical social science in this new paradigm. Through firsthand descriptions of innovative research projects, it shares lessons learned from over a dozen scholars’ cutting-edge work. These candid accounts describe what can go wrong when pioneering new genres of research and how such difficulties can be overcome, giving both big-picture reflection and actionable advice. The chapters discuss a variety of methods, ranging from the completely novel to the use of more traditional approaches in the digital context, and cover research questions relevant to a range of disciplines, including sociology, political science, communication, information studies, and anthropology. By focusing attention on the concrete details seldom discussed in final project write-ups or traditional research guides, Research Exposed helps equip junior and senior scholars alike with essential information that is all too often left with no outlet for sharing. It offers important insights into how empirical social science research can be both innovative and rigorous when dealing with the opportunities and challenges presented by digital media.

Can techniques traditionally thought to be outside the scope of literature, including word processing, databasing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, inspire the reinvention of writing? The Internet and the digital environment present writers with new challenges and opportunities to reconceive creativity, authorship, and their relationship to language. Confronted with an unprecedented amount of texts and language, writers have the opportunity to move beyond the creation of new texts and manage, parse, appropriate, and reconstruct those that already exist. In addition to explaining his concept of uncreative writing, which is also the name of his popular course at the University of Pennsylvania, Goldsmith reads the work of writers who have taken up this challenge. Examining a wide range of texts and techniques, including the use of Google searches to create poetry, the appropriation of courtroom testimony, and the possibility of robo-poetics, Goldsmith joins this recent work to practices that date back to the early twentieth century. Writers and artists such as Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Andy Warhol embodied an ethos in which the construction or conception of a text was just as important as the resultant text itself. By extending this tradition into the digital realm, uncreative writing offers new ways of thinking about identity and the making of meaning.

Bringing together strands of public discourse about valuing personal achievement at the expense of social values and the impacts of global capitalism, mass media, and digital culture on the lives of children, this book challenges the potential of science and business to solve the world’s problems without a complementary emphasis on social values. The selection of literary works discussed illustrates the power of literature and human arts to instill such values and foster change. The book offers a valuable foundation for the field of literacy education by providing knowledge about the importance of language and literature that educators can use in their own teaching and advocacy work.