African electronic literature

Join us for a fast paced, fascinating romp through some of Africa's electronic literature. Digitally born from so many different countries and languages, African elit spans interactive video games(pc, mobile and web), Twitterature, interactive poetry, hypertext fiction etc. Yohanna Waliya Jospeh, at the University of Calabar in Nigeria, is a digital poet, distant writer, novelist, playwright, winner of the Janusz Korczak Prize for Global South 2020, Electronic Literature Organization Research Fellow and UNESCO Janusz Korczak Fellow. He'll lead us on a whirlwind tour of his new African elit database, and we will discuss:How can we recognize hypertexts in African discourse and bring them to scholars' and readers' attention?What are the barriers for elit in African nations and how can we overcome these?

What would the next steps be in integrating the African elit database into other elit databases

(Salon invitation)

This dissertation speaks to a massive dearth of research in African electronic literature (African e-lit), a discipline that boasts a growing number of works but little scholarship. With African literature incorporating digital technology into its creative process, and with electronic literary criticism focusing on areas outside its predominantly western cannon, African e-lit positions itself as an important area of scholarly endeavor. After considering the implications of placing African e-lit as the direction in which both African literature and electronic literature take, this dissertation looks at three different genres of African e-lit in the context of oral literature. There are analyses of examples of concrete poetry, conceptual poetry, and mobile video games, all from Ghana. Ultimately, the aim of this project is to ascertain the ways in which oral tradition influences the nature, form, and shape of African electronic literature.