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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.