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The Instagram content of Nigerian digital creator Olalekan Olaleye illustrates how cultural netizenship stresses the centrality of platformization to the articulation of new genres of African popular representations. This article develops the argument by examining how platform aesthetics shape the trajectories and performative acts of cultural producers, something Olaleye's Nigerian context also modulates. By lingering on the digital and aesthetic labors of the cultural netizen, the article pinpoints the interactions between creative adaptations and social media texts. Olaleye's Instagram content demonstrates the way digital platforms have become integral to the production and circulation of popular forms and genres and the artistic responses everyday digital subjects make to institutions of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mudi Yahaya’s film Nina Fischer-Stephan’s Respectful Gaze (2022) is a reconstruction of Nigerian history presented through a meta-representational forcefield of images. The film is a documentary work that explores the resurgent vitality of the German photographer’s archive from the early 1960s. In the Nigerian context, this film explores how forms of historical mediality are conditioned by a multiplicity of aesthetic and creative modes that strengthen the power of moving images to document historical memory. Drawing on social media archives such as the Nigerian Nostalgia Project, a Facebook account where Fischer-Stephan’s historical photographs circulate, I examine the ways in which the film engages the critic in reading a film derived from photographic texts that have been mediated in multiple ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author analyzes the political comedy film "Your Excellency," directed by Funke Akindele, which demonstrates the contradictions of U.S. presidential politics. Topics discussed include the imbrication of the political and cultural life with digital technologies in Nigeria, the role of social media in providing a channel for the media to engage with former U.S. President Donald Trump, and the representation of Trump in the film.

Digital iterations of African literary texts present scholarly opportunities to interrogate how literature produced and circulated on digital media becomes entangled with the capitalist politics of datafication. In the data paradigm described in the article, literary representations are subject to the workings of neoliberal capital and the constraints of algorithmic systems. Through a postcolonial approach that puts the digital humanities in conversation with African literary studies, the article transcends how digital technologies have evidently changed African literature and tackles the costs of digital literary cultures and networks from Africa. I examine data relations through an African literary culture, which, in the current moment, indisputably exhibits the attainment of new and complex elements including the integration of digital affordances in the production and critical reception of texts. How African literary expressions in a digital age circulate in market-driven digital platforms like Facebook and YouTube makes the subjects of data capitalism or the coloniality of data as important for African literature as the expanded literary networks enabled by the digital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New Nollywood's representation of the social life of Lagos is enacted through Ówàḿbẹ̀ as a cinematic strategy that underscores the contradictions inherent in the politics of pleasure and materialism. A performative display of wealth expressed through the social drama of partying, as well as wild and ostentatious social gatherings emerge to underline this politics of pleasure in the Bling Lagosians, Chief Daddy and The Wedding Party. While these films can be read as iterations of a Nigerian party culture that merely underpins the superficiality and pretensions of an elite class in the country, another interpretive approach is to encounter these films and their fixation on Ówàḿbẹ̀ as paradoxically bringing into existence the importance of kinship and family values, which are often antithetical to the exhibitionist showboating of Lagos party cultures. Demonstrating that ostentation with its associated aesthetics is often the backdrop against which the recovery and discovery of true family is realised, this article makes the argument that this re/discovery, rather than the simulacrum that is often entangled with Ówàḿbẹ̀, is a major means by which Nollywood contests the stereotypical trope of crises in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Online scambaiting problematises the identity of the 419 scammer whose virtual labours connect significantly to the digital dimensions of Afropolitanism. When examined through the photographic practices demanded of 419 scammers in several Internet communities, scambaiting, a form of Internet vigilantism that is targeted at online scammers to avert scam, produces epistemic violence which evacuates the black male body of human dignity. Although scambaiting is potentially an ethical project, it embeds a system of oppression that generates Afropolitan masculinities, caricatured performances of the bodies of 419 scammers exhibited online as objects of shame. As a philosophical and aesthetic response to translocality and mobility, Afropolitanism stresses the cultural experiences and agency of ordinary Africans who assert a global sense of awareness. As both the Afropolitan subject and the 419 scammer are entangled in the assertion of agency, the globalism of both is shown to converge at the intersection of the digital. Building on Lisa Nakamura's essay on dogshaming, I argue that the sexual exploitation of black bodies on scambaiting websites gestures at technology's complicity in interpellating digital subjects and circulating social injustices. Unlike Nakamura, I foreground the performative aspects of scambaiting and connect these to Afropolitanism's intrinsic digitality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]