It makes us think about not just what digital visibility means for African literature and its public, but also how African writers and the continent they represent - in their work - are affected by the conditions of the twenty-first century. Our special session provides a substantive study to investigate the state of digital literature and culture in this present time, as well as the future of digital Africa. The zeitgeist of our time revolves around the digital; from oral stories that are powered by digital technologies including AI technologies, to communities of writers, artists, and actors, as well as their publics that populate various digital media platforms. Our panel recognizes how the fast pace of digital innovations impacts the literary marketplace, as well as how art is created and consumed. We are equally interested in how digital visibility allows queer stories to be told in all their fullness, including the spectacular and the quotidian. Digital visibility likewise allows for self-fashioning by writers across different platforms. The effects of digital technologies are also being felt in Africa’s geopolitics, with the war in the Congo, in which the mining of cobalt - the material that is the foundation of computer chips - is at the core of this war. Such developments are captured in the human stories being told online and in fictional narratives in literature and film.
All the panellists have published extensively on online African literature. We have two monographs on the subject between us, and we have co-edited two special volumes on the subject; we are currently working on another co-edited volume for Bloomsbury. We plan to use this special session to test out new ideas and to receive feedback from colleagues.
Each panellist will present for 15 minutes, and at the end, we will have 15 minutes of unstructured discussion with questions from the audience.