Project

African E-Lit: Oral Tradition and Genre-Making in Ghanaian Digital Creative Expression

Program

African Humanities Program Postdoctoral Fellowships

Department

Department of English

Abstract

This project explores the nature of different genres of African electronic literature in order to position oral tradition as integral to the evolution of Afican digital aesthetics. By examining concrete poetry, conceptual poetry, mobile video games, and flash fiction from Ghana, this project also looks at the importance of digital technology to African creative expression. There is therefore an analysis of the interplay between oral tradition and digital technology in the context of genre-making. While African literary scholarship has extensively investigated oral literature and print literature as categories of African literature, almost nothing exists on African electronic literature. This priject thus speaks to a massive dearth in African literary scholarship. By limiting the scope of work to examples of electronic literature from Ghana, there is the added layer of viewing Ghanaian electronic literature as a paradigm for African digital textuality.