Africa and the Debates in the Digital Humanities

James Yeku, Assistant Professor of African and African-American Studies, University of Kansas
November 20, 2020
12:00-2:00pm

This talk explores the increasing visibility of Digital Humanities practices and scholarship that center on African cultural forms as the major objects of analyses. As the field of DH more generally continues to exhibit dynamic negotiations with its increasingly multiple identities, meanings and methods, an African digital humanities subfield emerges to invigorate this tension through projects and perspectives that not only focus on the postcolonial digital cultural record from the continent, but also makes legible ongoing digital projects in countries which grapple with the constraints imposed by the absence of digital infrastructure. Besides examining the DH landscape in Africa, I will use my own digital projects on Nollywood film posters to demonstrate how Africa-based cultural heritage offers enormous possibilities for African digital humanities to expand DH debates more generally, consolidating decolonial turns in digital humanities conversations. My overarching goal is to foreground what Africa brings to the digital humanities and what DH methods and approaches afford traditional humanistic enquiry in African studies.

James Yeku received his PhD in English from the University of Saskatchewan in 2018, joining the University of Kansas a year later as an assistant professor of African digital humanities in the Department of African and African American Studies and the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities. James studies the digital expressions of the literatures and cultures of Africa and the African diaspora and focuses on the African articulations of the digital cultural record.  His interdisciplinary research explores areas such as cultural studies, social media in Africa, as well as online visual culture in Nigeria. James’s journal article “Akpos Don Come Again: Nigerian Cyberpop Hero as Trickster” won the 2017 Abioseh Porter Best Essay Award of the African Literature Association. In addition to several book chapters, James has published his work in the Journal of African Cultural Studies, Research in African Literatures, and Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. James is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of African Cultural Studies and was a research assistant for Allison Muri’s The Grub Street Project , a digital project that visualizes the literary and cultural history of London. His current project Digital Nollywood is a web-based archive of Nollywood film posters that reconstructs the history of the video film in Nigeria.

If you need any additional accommodations to participate in the Forum, please contact Carmen Caswell (caswellc@uchicago.edu).