ALA Lecture Series – February 25, 2023

Authors Speak: New Books on African Popular Culture

Grace Musila & James Yékú

Starting at 11:00 AM EST/ London, 4:00 PM/ Lagos, 5:00 PM/ Johannesburg, 6:00 PM/ Nairobi, 7:00 PM

Join us on the ALA YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@AfricanLiteratureAssociation

Grace Musila teaches African literature at the University of the Witwatersrand. She is the author of A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour: Kenya, Britain and the Julie Ward Murder (2015); editor of Wangari Maathai’s Registers of Freedom (2020). | As editor of Routledge Handbook of African Popular Culture, Musila brings together scholars from different disciplines to reflect on African popular cultural imaginaries. Drawing on such forms as newspaper columns, televised English Premier League football, speculative arts, romance fiction, the contributors explore the possibilities and ambiguities unleashed by the production, circulation, consumption, remediation and critique of these forms. 

James Yékú is an assistant professor of African and African American Studies at the University of Kansas where he leads various initiatives in African digital humanities. He is the author of Where the Baedeker Leads, a collection of poems. |  In Cultural Netizenship, Yékú explores the cultural politics of protest selfies, Nollywood-derived memes and GIFs, hashtags, and political cartoons as visual texts for postcolonial studies and reveals the logic of remediation that is central to both the internet's remix culture and the generative materialism of African popular arts.

For more information:

Professor Akinwumi Adesokan adesokan@indiana.edu

Professor Gaurav Desai desaig@umich.edu

Professor Matthew H. Brown web@africanlit.org