Description
Interweaving ethnographic observation and extensive literary analysis, Sacks demonstrates that, as more artists in Africa reach wider audiences through online publication, poetic form has shifted to reflect social media's aesthetic norms of urgency, immediacy, and populism. These changes have, in turn, challenged elite processes of valuation, forcing literary institutions like prizes, festivals, and curricula to accommodate the digital turn.
About the Author
Susanna L. Sacks is assistant professor of comparative literature at Howard University.
Reviews
While this work will certainly appeal to scholars of African literature, it has broader appeal to those in new media and digital studies interested in how writers marshal new media platforms as part of their writing process (and how writing is appropriated by social media users). Both the argument and the specific concepts that Sacks articulates will be invaluable for advancing how we study digital forms of literature." - Roopika Risam, author of New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy
"Networked Poetics is a provocative, engagingly written book, rich in instructive divagations, and superbly situated in the overlapping literatures on digital media, African poetry, and literary and cultural studies more broadly. A major strength of the book is its archive of illustrative materials that eloquently make the point that the social web and digital cultures more generally configure African poetry at social, formal, and institutional levels." - James YEkU, author of Cultural Netizenship: Social Media, Popular Culture, and Performance in Nigeria
Book Information
ISBN 9781625347671
Author Susanna L. Sacks
Format Paperback
Page Count 248
Imprint University of Massachusetts Press
Publisher University of Massachusetts Press