Introduction to the Guest Issue (original) (raw)

Where does Digital Africa begin-in a story by a Kenyan writer emailed to a South African editor that won a prestigious British award; with the savvy business model of a male Pedi blogger whose online avatar is a naïve Zulu girl; in those emails from deposed African dictators or their bereft widows, pleading for our sympathy and financial resources, which so deftly manipulate literary stereotypes about Africa and Africans? 1 Can we locate a decisive break between digital and analog forms in African literary production, divining its harbingers in Nollywood's technological innovations or in much earlier modes of improvisation (Mbembe)? Or should we be focusing on the alacrity with which African end users repurpose computer algorithms (Ekwealor; Crofts)? How does cyberspace interactivity undermine the distinctions we take for granted between the time of reading and the time of the text's construction? How does the Internet's imagined placelessness disrupt or reify what we canonize as African writing? African writers have been sharing their work online with audiences on the continent and beyond since the late twentieth century. Nonetheless, when in 2017 Rhonda Cobham-Sander, in collaboration with Shola Adenekan, Stephanie Bosch Santana, and Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang convened a group of literary critics and practitioners at Amherst College in Massachusetts, USA, to consider what we had termed Digital Africa, we still thought of our interests as disparate or, at best, eclectic. Dami Ajayi, editor of the Nigerian online journal Saraba, Moses Kilolo of Nairobi's Jalada, and Bhakti Shringarpure, editor-in-chief of Warscapes, were among the symposium's participants, as was Kwame Dawes, who was planning to launch an African digital poetry portal. The conveners also had been in conversation with Ainehi Edoro, the US-based Nigerian editor of Brittle Paper, and Alexis Teyie, then a member of the Enkare editorial collective in Nairobi, both of whom had hoped to join us. Marisa Parham, director of the Five Colleges Digital humanities program at the time, and now director of the African American Digital Humanities initiative (AADHUM) at the University of Maryland shared her work with the group, as did Akin Adesokan, a founding member of the New Media and Literary Initiatives in Africa (NeMLiA), and Jennifer Bajorek, who extended our conversation to include the visual arts. Ato Quayson and Biodun Jeyifo delivered keynote addresses that connected digital developments to other considerations in the field of African literary studies. Essays on African online publications, many by contributors to the symposium, had started turning up in scholarly journals (