Paper short abstract:

Using selected local digital film spaces such as VIUSASA, this article examines how the digital media culture has not only (re)shaped film distribution and consumption patterns but also created a unique film aesthetic in Kenya.

Paper long abstract:

This article examines how digital media culture has not only impacted film aesthetics, but also (re)shaped the distribution and consumption patterns of film in Kenya. Using selected local digital film spaces such as VIUSASA, the paper explores two epistemological questions concerning the digital sphere and film aesthetics in Kenya. First, how do films produced, released to digital media for exhibition and consumption than the traditional release channels engender a monumental paradigm shift in film production and consumption in Kenya? Secondly, how does the digital sphere spur, mediate and reconfigure a unique film aesthetic delineated within the Kenyan context? The paper argues that the digital media culture in film aesthetics is intertwined with that of inevitability and becoming. It also shows that the intersectional shifts in film aesthetics arising from the everyday digital sphere and cultural media goes beyond the liberational idea of, ‘if you can imagine it, you can create it’ to the idea of, ‘that if it is not your norm, it does not mean that it does not exist’. Ultimately, this article contends that digital media stands out as an inescapable path towards the future of film aesthetics in Kenya.

Paper short abstract:

Many young people in Kenya are currently engaged in creative digital production. However, online attention economy exhibits inherent uncertainties. Therefore, this paper proposes to explore precarity dynamics within the digital ecologies where content creators exercise their innovative skills.

Paper long abstract:

Within the context of contemporary electronic public spaces of social media, it is plausible to posit that attention has established itself as a valuable commodity. Previous research has acknowledged the financial benefits accruing from attention within the digital capitalist economy. In the face of fiscal constraints in the mainstream employment sectors in Kenya, a significant segment of the youth population has resorted to immaterial labour in the creative digital marketplace. However, the online attention economy is fraught with inherent uncertainties and vulnerabilities. For instance, the evanescent nature of attention frequently exposes online content creators to unforeseen financial insecurities. Therefore, this paper proposes to explore precarity dynamics within the digital ecologies where content creators exercise their innovative skills. It seeks to make sense of how the regimes of visibility and consumption interplay with technological affordances to frame the users’ experiences within the ecology of precarity. To realize these, the paper adopts a nuanced understanding of the notion of precarity in a manner that goes beyond remunerative vulnerabilities to encompass other shades of uncertainty such as loss of social capital. Against the backdrop of all these challenges, it would be rewarding to comprehend how digital artists resiliently make do nevertheless. It is hoped that the findings of this paper will locate the vibrant creative entrepreneurial practices in Kenya within broader debates on the future of popular digital arts in Africa.

Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the satirical digital cultural production in the Egyptian blogosphere appearing since the 2011 uprising with the aim of assessing the role satire as an affective mode of writing plays in writing back to mainstream religious discourse, and its impact on creating new knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

The past few decades in Egypt witnessed a considerable expansion of internet use, which was initially accompanied with an expansion of the margins of freedom of expression in the digital realm. With the outbreak of the January 2011 revolution and the few years of political unrest that followed it, the fluidity of the situation contributed to the continuation of outpouring of cultural and intellectual production in the digital realm (Iskandar 2014) at the hands of (mostly youthful) people who found in the relative accessibility of the internet a viable space for presenting their alternative views. One aspect reflecting this trajectory of revision is the area of religious discourse where digital voices undertook a revision of mainstream discourse, through various forms of re-reading. These interventions came in the form of what Baker and Blaagaard (2016) designate as ‘citizen media’, where loosely affiliated citizens produce cultural practices and artefacts without reliance on institutional sponsorship.

My presentation examines examples of this digital production, with particular emphasis on satire as an effective mode of writing back. The use of satire exposes areas of incongruity inherent to this discourse and provides the satirist with a spectrum of subtlety on which to place their critique (Elliott 2004). Moreover, most of this digital production came in various shapes of multimodality- a quality that renders the digital content better capable of dissemination and continuity (Pappacharissi 2014). I will assess the popularity, influence, and reach of this kind of production, and its potential for revolutionizing religious discourse.

Paper short abstract:

In this talk, I compare the publishing and curation structures of two children’s literature apps—FunDza.mobi and African Storybook—to examine how these platform structures reflect ideas about literacy development while establishing new formal norms for children’s literature.

Paper long abstract:

As creative energies have increasingly concentrated in digital spaces, privately-owned social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have gradually begun to appear as a new literary commons. Social media’s affordances, together with its accessibility, have increased the visibility of certain literary forms: participatory norms renewed interest in performance poetry and epistolary forms. But one of the most durable impacts of social media publication is its influence on reading practices at a generational level. In this talk, I draw together work in platform studies with formal analysis of social media literatures to evaluate the impact of platform structures and curation algorithms on afrophone literature from South Africa. Specifically, I compare the publishing and curation structures of two children’s literature apps—FunDza.mobi and African Storybook—to examine how these platform structures reflect ideas about literacy development while establishing new formal norms for children’s literature. Most studies of FunDza and ASb have emphasized their role in fostering literacy and reading cultures, but the structure of individual apps determine what forms of discourse are even made legible. The popularity of these apps, as well as their widely acknowledged success as literacy initiatives, may thus affect literary norms in Afrophone languages for generations. In this talk, I investigate the curational and publishing structures of FunDza.mobi and African Storybook to ask: what formal norms do these apps promote? How do they compare to those of feed-oriented apps like Facebook and Twitter? Analyzing story form alongside platform highlights the interaction between genre innovations and formal constraints on social media.

Paper short abstract:

This paper refocuses attention on the many ways Africa(ns) have been making inroads in propagating their pop culture through social media, and how such creations are affecting/influencing others across the globe.

Paper long abstract:

With the proliferation of digital media especially in Africa, previously localized cultural productions have become increasingly globalized. Those who ordinarily may not have come across African music, comedy, films, and social media self-presentations and re-enactments of everyday life, are now not only consuming but also replicating these lifestyles. The successes of now more centralized genres such as Nollywood and Afrobeat, as well as the soft power influences of several dance and singing challenges across different social media platforms heralded by South Africa’s Jerusalema song, among others; have put African popular art, music, and literature at the centre of social media cross-cultural encounters today. Consequently, with these forms of digital cross-border movements, the continent has become one of the emergent cultural and entertainment hubs of the today’s world. While academic and mainstream media foci centre on the incidences of socio-economic hardship, conflicts, mass migration, and other realistic and contrived phenomena, the giant strides made in cultural production and dissemination through social media have remained understudied. For this purpose, this paper refocuses attention on the many ways Africa(ns) have been making inroads in propagating their pop culture through social media, and how such creations are affecting/influencing others across the globe. The paper discusses the myriad ways digital media enables Africa(ns) to cross into other cultures and how others engage with African cultural productions.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation argues that technological innovations, driven largely by consumption behaviour and market trends, have aligned with the political objective of decoloniality in significantly indigenising Nigerian media arts and literary practice.

Paper long abstract:

As technology becomes increasingly crucial to entertainment content creation and consumption, the challenge for writers in Nigeria has been how to align the needs of their ‘traditional’ but increasingly declining audience with the tastes of a new and expanding demographic of ‘click’ consumers used to new media forms of expression. Responding to the situation would mean that literary forms would undergo significant reconstitutions. I have noted considerable instances of Nigerian content creators subjecting literary forms to exacting processes of content revaluation, resizing and critical aesthetic reconfiguration in order to retrofit them into the micro visual and oral consumption modes appropriate to the volume vitiating spaces of social media networks.

Based on the observation, I argue in this presentation that the digital imperative entailed in such reconstitution walks in lockstep with the political objectives of decoloniality or indigenising the arts. Consequently, print forms with realist mainstays and narrative epistemologies are now being repurposed as hybrids in various portable forms for wider distribution. My presentation will show how these artistic reconstitutions work out in actual current practice of Nigerian poets and novelists. I focus on how their performances and narratives recuperate oral, visual and folkloric materials and reformat them to coexist with resources of ‘standard’ literary culture in order to attract and retain multiple audiences.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we will position hype-man performances as a form that evolved from traditional praise singing and is fuelled by both the neo-liberal economic moment and the socio-cultural capital of digital media. The griot, bard, or praise-singer in traditional African societies serves specific purposes; they normalize a certain African epistemic reality that privileges the deeds of great men and royalty. In the transfer of a provincialized European modernity to the African landscape, capitalism and its handmaiden – digital technology – came to mediate an indigenous system that prizes certain features and communal contributions. This mediation led to the commodification and consumption of cultural productions, one of which is the traditional praise performance. With the social acceptance and valorization of capital accumulation, praise-singers turned towards these new capitalists and inscribed a certain cultural logic into their now commodified art - hypeman performance. Typically performed in clubs and parties but popularized and distributed widely through digital media, these hypemen performances have become so popular in Nigeria that other performers have been influenced by their style. Following the transformation of the oral praise-singer into a modern hypeman through the economic logic of colonial capitalism, the hypeman, cannibalizing the poetics and performance of praise-singers, responds to the realities of capitalist modernity and youth hustler masculinity in the content and form of their performances. To understand these transformations and the development of the hypeman poetics, we examine some performances that are available on TikTok and Instagram. These performances on social media are actual performances by hypemen that are available on the internet, concretizing the economic value of the form: not only do they hype in clubs for economic capital, but they also derive cultural capital by posting them online. We ultimately argue that in this era of neoliberal globalization that accompanies Nigeria’s failing postcolonial state, traditional literary and performance forms are being transformed into the economic and digital logic of the present era.

Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to discuss the potential of social media to create global visibility for African popular music, which has hitherto remained on the margins, by drawing on the role of networked practices on TikTok on the global spread of Afrobeats music.

Paper long abstract:

During the Covid lockdowns TikTok became the social media platform people turned to for their entertainment, and it has remained an influential popular culture space where people of all ages flock to, to participate in cultural production. At the heart of TikTok practices is sound; this is encouraged by the platform and is manifested in very creative ways by platform users. As a platform that promotes imitation and privileges sound (Zulli &Zulli, 2020), TikTok provides a transnational mediascape (Appadurai, 1996) where people from all parts of the world converge to participate in the creation, sharing, and remixing of sound inspired content. Thus, creating possible global visibility for music forms that are used in content production. This epitomises social media’s potential to provide access to cultural forms from marginal cultures and marginal locations. One of such music forms that is engendering engagement on the platform is Afrobeats.

This paper maps the global spread of Afrobeats, as a popular music form originating from Africa, on TikTok. It interrogates how the platform’s organisation, and the networked practices thereon, promote the flow of Afrobeats within the global mediascape. Drawing from research using digital methods and digital ethnographic exploration, it seeks to map the geographic reach of Afrobeats through TikTok, and identify the networked practices, as well as explore the role of Africans, both home and abroad, involved in this global flow.

Paper short abstract:

This study investigates new trends in the usage of local musical resources with a global vision for the production of Yoruba folk-pop music. Through qualitative deductive method, theories of Intercultural Musicianship and Glocalisation towards the glocal musicianship performance aesthetics model.

Paper long abstract:

Having experienced European contact through the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, and

religious missionaries, the Yoruba folk music suffered setback in terms of appreciation, acceptance and patronage. However, in recent times, there is a conscious revival, renaissance, reinvention and

transformation of the folk music culture from a glocal perspective in the face of prevailing globalisation,

the quest for global peace, and home-grown solutions to the 21st century global challenges.

Against this

backdrop, this study investigates glocal trends in contemporary productions of Yoruba folk-pop music. That is, new trends in the usage of local musical

resources with a global vision for the production of Yoruba folk music. Through qualitative deductive method and oral interview tool, this study shall deduce glocal approach of three musicians categorised

under the folk-pop music, namely: Segun Akinlolu (Beautiful Nubia), Bisade Ologunde (Lagbaja) and Shola Allyson. Purposively selected songs and music videos from selected albums (LPs) will be from

different studio albums of these three musicians. Being a study with glocalisation as its theoretical underpinning, music videos were purposively streamed via the official social media channels and

platforms of the artistes. Klopper‟s theory of Intercultural Musicianship and Robertsons theory of

Glocalisation underpin this study, with the aim of proposing the “glocal musicianship” performance aesthetics model for Yoruba folk music in a globalised society.

The study envisions that glocal approach

to the production of Yoruba folk music in an already westernised, civilised, urbanised and industrialised

society will place the Yoruba folk music on a global pedestal of music appreciation.

Paper short abstract:

By analysing some of the debates that have surrounded Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s online statements, this paper seeks to establish how these exchanges may be helpful in understanding Adichie’s work in particular, and the role of the African writer in the digital age in general.

Paper long abstract:

In an article published on the website The Conversation in July 2021, South African scholar Aretha Phiri discussed the online controversy involving Nigerian writers Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Akwaeke Emezi around transgender issues. In the title of her piece, Phiri wisely urged her readers to “ignore the noise, pay attention to the conversation.” Following Phiri’s advice, this paper seeks to perform a scholarly analysis of the debates that have surrounded Adichie’s online writing and ideas (defined either as statements issued on digital platforms such as social media, or as comments rendered viral through online circulation). Rather than engaging in further controversy, the paper seeks to (1) understand how these writings and exchanges have shaped Adichie’s image as a feminist writer, and what role the internet has played in this process, (2) analyse Adichie’s own reflections about social media, most notably her 2021 online essay “It is Obscene: A True Reflection in Three Parts,” and (3) examine how the above analysis may be helpful in understanding Adichie’s fictional work, particularly her short story “Zikora” (2020). Building on Adichie’s case, the paper then attempts to provide a broader reflection on the role of the African writer in the digital age.