Introduction to the Guest Issue

Abstract

African writers have been sharing their work online with audiences on the continent and beyond since the late twentieth century. In the autumn of 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. The result of this meeting are the articles in this guest-edited issues that robustly capture the many facets of Digital Africa. Some of the questions asked by contributors include, how can we locate a decisive break between digital and analog forms in African literary productions? Or should we be focusing on the alacrity with which African end users repurpose computer algorithms? 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?