What does a literary sociology of the algorithm look like? In The Algorithmic Age of Personality, I examine this question, investigating how social media platforms, along with their algorithmic design and politics, shape how African literary works are discussed. As algorithms affect and structure literary interpretation, a culture of outrage and personal attacks, rather than any nuanced critique of texts, emerges as a major mode of reader reception. Simply put, this book addresses the problem of cancel culture and literary controversies in social media commentary discourses on African literary and cultural texts.
Social media commentary discourses on African literary works reveal how algorithmic politics play significant roles in online literary controversies and cancel culture campaigns involving writers such as Chimamanda Adichie. Hence, a full understanding of how African literature takes shape in a digital era requires an appreciation of how algorithms not only compute and shape the social worlds and meanings of literary texts but also create and maintain a culture of outrage and controversy online. Highlighting how an algorithmic age of personality connects to a pre-digital culture of literary disputes and censorship in African literature, I demonstrate that African literary criticism does not sufficiently interrogate the design and algorithmic politics of social media and blogging, despite their prominence as tools of digital storytelling and cultural production on the continent.
The role of digital media in the aesthetic expansion of African literature may be well-established, but how do African literary discourses circulate on digital media platforms that are algorithmically designed to monetize affective interactions? In tackling this question, my work is motivated by the fact of digital culture as proximate to extractive data relations, an area that scholars often overlook in discussions of African literature and social media platforms. Platform aesthetics and the literary networks and publics into which they assimilate African literature are as important as the culture of outrage, controversies, and scandals that conduce us to revisit previous debates on the politics of censorship, speech, as well as ethnic and sexual politics in postcolonial African literary criticism.
The Algorithmic Age of Personality
African Literature and Cancel Culture
“In bracing, informed prose, Yékú navigates the online maelstrom that has battered consumers and producers of African literature in the digital age, without ever losing sight of the algorithms that manufacture the turbulence of ‘cancel culture’ or the myriad forms of human agency that contest, exploit, or acquiesce to its power. An original tour de force.”
Cajetan Iheka, professor of English, Yale University
—Rhonda Cobham-Sander, professor of English and Black studies,
Amherst College
“With bold analysis and compelling insights, James Yékú examines literary controversies in African literature from the predigital era to contemporary digital iterations. The field is richer with Yékú’s novel attention to the algorithmic entanglements of African literary and digital cultures.”
The Algorithmic Age of Personality, out in May 2025 from MSU Press.
If you are interested in reading a chapter from my earlier book, Cultural Netizenship, you may find some pages here. Attached is the 6th chapter, which discusses social media skits, the economics of content creation, children’s online cultural productions, and the politics of virality in Nigeria.
James Yékú 