Africa at Noon: The Archival Possibilities of Social Media with James Yeku

Date/Time: March 1st 2023, @12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Speaker: James Yeku, University of Kansas

Hosted by: Matthew Brown

Talk Description:

In Africa, social media is well established as a digital sphere for the production and circulation of new genres and textual forms, along with its documented capacity, though contestable to foster different kinds of public spheres and counterpublics. But what happens when creative digital subjects with a sense of history and archival preservation use social media disobediently, or as an instantiation of what is sometimes framed as minimal computing in digital humanities research? That is the major question I address in this talk as I discuss the archival possibilities of social media platforms and how platform culture enables an ontologically extractive regime of data relations.

Bio:

James Yékú is an Assistant Professor of African and African American studies at the University of Kansas, where he leads the African digital humanities program. He is the author of Cultural Netizenship: Social Media, Popular Culture, and Performance in Nigeria (Indiana University Press), and a book of poetry, Where the Baedeker Leads (Mawenzi House, Toronto). His current digital projects include Digital Nollywood, an Omeka-based collection of vintage film posters from Nigeria.

Publications:

Links:

Twitter: @james_yeku