Abstract
James Yeku’s (2022) book, Cultural Netizenship: Social Media, Popular Culture, and Performance in Nigeria, proposes a scholarship of African digital culture studies that is anchored in the everydayness and cultural performances on 21st century social media. Yeku’s study of social media examines these everydayness and cultural performances as explanatory principles and methodology that foreground the African experiences and engagements on various social media platforms within a digital humanity that is worthy of scholarship. His works on media study espouse visual culture as a field and visual archive as method as he relies on the use of memes, GIFs, artistic images, cartoons, short videos, and selfies as objects of analysis.
He coins the term, “cultural netizenship,” to describe social media users whose self-performance, in its various forms, is interpellated via the deployment of cultural instrumentalities and the affordances of the social media platforms occupied. Yeku’s brilliance is revealed in his interspersal engagement with postcolonial theories, media and cultural studies, and their reification in the visual practicality of cultural productions on social media. Yeku advocates for a study of the “cultural netizen’s encounters with power in Nigeria and to examine the digital iterations of the processes of social and cultural change actually taking place in the country” (p. 11). He invokes, as a form of homage, the works and theories of African cultural theorists, philosophers, and scholars such as Achille Mbembe, Olufemi Taiwo, Tejumola Olaniyan, Obadare Ebenezer, Sola Olorunyomi, Adeleke Adeeko, Wale Adebanwi, and Nanjala Nyabola, among others. He also draws on Richard Schechner’s theory of performance, Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981) carnivalesque, and Erving Goffman’s (1959) social drama. While Yeku’s reverence to these scholars is useful for critical and analytical engagement of his works and arguments, his approach to the study of postcolonial Nigeria is methodologically different. To cite an example, his reference to Achille Mbembe’s (2001) critically acclaimed book, On the Postcolony acknowledges Mbembe’s incredible analysis of the postcolony as a place of “subjection and domination,” but Yeku’s divergence from Mbembe’s diagnosis of the postcolony is revealed in his delineation of the digital subjects who, through their cultural performances, perpetually contest the subjections and dominations in the postcolony.
Cultural Netizenship begins with an introduction that gives an overview of the book and summarizes the themes and concepts that are prevalent in the book, including the idea of a digital subject; actors and agency; the deconstruction of power by antistatic and non-elite voices; and imbrication of politics and state hegemony within cultural performances. According to Yeku, social media provides di-hierarchized digital subjects whose critique of postcolonial Nigeria is achievable through cultural performances. There are six chapters following the introduction and an epilogue.
In Chapter 1, “Afropolitan Antiheroes and the Performative Politics of Internet Scambaiting,” James Yeku oscillates between critical race theory, Afropolitanism, and online scam in engaging the complexities of postcolonial Nigerian digital subjects. He interrogates the logic and problematic of Afropolitan identity in a transnational or global digital space. He refers to the Nigerian online scammer as an antihero who provides arsenals of gendered and racist stereotypes scambaiters. While Yeku condemns the criminal acts of the few online scammers, he also criticizes the racist idea of “scambaiting violates Black body” and the masculinities that undergird the machinations of the digital vigilante groups/websites.
Chapter 2, “The Memeification of Nollywood,” builds upon media studies scholar Arvind Rajagopal’s (2011) argument in “Note on Postcolonial Visual Culture” that technology does not eviscerate old cultural media forms, but instead births a renewal of these forms. Nollywood is Nigeria’s film industry. Yeku argues that virtual cultural forms such as memes, GIFs, short videos, and stickers create an “intermedia flow” between the old and the new. On one hand, the memeification of this old media form has disrupted the hegemony and gatekeeping in Nollywood, giving the audience the agency and authorship to participate in the production and co-production of digital contents. On the other hand, the old Nollywood becomes recalibrated into digital forms that provide an immediacy of production and consumption.
Chapter 3, “Self-Spectatoriality and the Performance of Political Selves,” examines the implication of self-performance as a political statement. Yeku defines self-spectatoriality as “the awareness of a virtual gaze for which social media users perform using symbolic forms, such as the spectacle of the image or the liking of content” (p. 106). Yeku interrogates how the body, self-aware of its own spectatoriality, is deployed in protest against the instrumentality of power. He uses the #BringBackOurGirls social movement as a case study. In April 2014, about 276 school girls were kidnapped in Chibok, Nigeria, by the Islamic terrorist group known as Boko Haram. Yeku argues that although the digital subject can perform multiple identities for the virtual gaze, the selfie as an example, becomes a performance of the self.
Chapter 4, “Visualizing Resistance and Performing With the Visual,” is a discursive analysis of the works of Mike Asukwu, a Nigerian cartoonist who uses cartoon as a satirical device to criticize corrupt politicians, the elite, and ruling class in Nigeria. Yeku examines the intertextuality of Asukwu’s cartoons as polyvocal performance between the producer and the consumers as co-producers on social media. Yeku’s raison d’etre in this chapter is the performance of politics through art as cultural production and as a tool of critique. While Asukwu provides the material for critique, Yeku’s interest lies in the engagement that ensues and how Asukwu, through his works, provides an artistic expression for political performance. Chapter 5, “Social Media Humor and Carnivalesque Aesthetics,” is rooted in Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnivalesque. Yeku has an expansive body of works on humor in Nigeria and his scholarship on the subject matter transcends the peripherality of humor as means of entertainment. In this chapter, as with his other works on humor, Yeku unpacks the carnivalesque that situates political discourse within the subtext of humor. Humor therefore becomes a performance against state hegemony, oppression, and violence.
Chapter 6, “Virality and Instagram Comedy in a State of Pandemic,” looks at the pathological-mediatic similarity between virality and the corruption of Nigerian government officials. Yeku charts three different contexts of virality to portray the postcolonial Nigerian state as a “vicious site of contagion and illness” (p. 198): the viral transmission of contents online, the virality of viruses on the continent such as Ebola and Corona, and the virality of Nigerian governmentality in the form of illness and contagion. The portrayal of Nigeria as “sick” and a place where “viruses are in power” presupposes the spread of illness across the country. In his analysis of select contents on social media, Yeku argues that popular culture is the best depiction of the malaise and disease that has spread into Nigerian politics, politicians, and government officials. James Yeku’s epilogue is a plea for action, an intervention that is vested in African Digital Humanities. Yeku believes strongly in creating an African digital infrastructure that is not aimed at supplanting the sensibilities and performances of African social media users, but rather galvanized toward preserving and strengthening existing African stories, realities, and postcolonial experiences.
Taken together, James Yeku makes a compelling argument that speaks to the unending debate among African writers and scholars on “What constitutes African Literature?” and whether social media contents count as texts “worthy” of literary analysis. Rather than contribute to the inanity of this debate, Yeku animates his stance by using visual cultural texts (selfies, short videos, cartoons, GIFS, and memes) as his objects of analysis and to demonstrate the sociopolitical use (if that must be a legitimizing factor for what counts as literary text) of social media and its attendant cultural performances in Africa. He understands the logic of coloniality and the coloniality of power that are inherent in the various social media platforms and infrastructure, which is the reason for his advocacy for African digital humanities—a digital infrastructure created by Africans for Africans. But he is also making a claim for the scholarship of African epistemology, explanatory principles, methodology, and postcolonial identity via the study of cultural performances and productions on social media.
