James Yékú
Biographic Data
| ID | 101492 |
|---|---|
| NAME | James Yékú |
| GIVEN NAMES | James |
| FAMILY NAME | Yékú |
| SIGNATURE | YÉKÚ J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Kansas |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9342-1255 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 32 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
African Digital Cultures: Platforms, Publics, and Infrastructures
A Memorial Visit; Remembering; Afrofuturist Sankofa; A digital memorial
Encountering Mudi Yahaya's Nina Fischer-Stephan's Respectful Gaze in Lagos
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 stren…
Cultural netizenship as platformization of popular culture in Nigeria
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 aestheti…
MakeNigeriaGreatAgain: Donald Trump in Nollywood’s Social Media
Cultural Netizenship: Social Media, Popular Culture, and Performance in Nigeria
Digital African Literatures and the Coloniality of Data
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 conv…
Youth and Popular Culture in Africa: Media, Music, and Politics
In Praise of Ostentation: Social Class in Lagos and the Aesthetics of Nollywood's Ówàḿbẹ̀ Genres
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 f…
From Google Doodles to Facebook: Nostalgia and Visual Reconstructions of the Past in Nigeria
In June 2019, Google announced plans to connect Africa to Europe through an undersea internet cable project named Equiano. As a techno-commercial platform, Google's gesture warrants scrutiny and propels this essay's analyses of the political connections of Internet spaces that also enable a visual turn in the scholarship of African history. Using the Google search engine and Facebook, Yékú and Ojebode stress the embeddedness of digital technologi…
Tricksters and female warriors: Womanist interweavings from Oríta to Wakanda
Túndé Kèlání's The Narrow Path (2006) may be read as prefiguring the emancipatory, womanist project of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018). Hence, a broad understanding of the black struggle in Black Panther as encompassing an African presence propels this article's womanist reading of Túndé Kèlání’s The Narrow Path, from the Nigerian film industry, alongside Coogler’s film. The article uses images of the trickster deity, Èṣù, and the warrior wom…
Anti-Afropolitan ethics and the performative politics of online scambaiting
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 sca…
Túndé Kèlání, Global Cinema and Philosophical Engagements
The articles in this special issue invite an understanding of Tunde Kelani as a global filmmaker, whose cinematic oeuvre engages with many places, audiences as well as media technologies. A major f
Joke-Performance in Africa: Mode, Media and Meaning
Thighs Fell Apart: Online fan fiction, and African writing in a digital age
This essay foregrounds Web's 2.0 recuperation of agency for the modern fan-reader of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart through a critical dilation of Kiru Taye's 'Thighs Fell Apart', an online short story that details a fan-reader's 'renarration' of Okonkwo's possibly voluptuous life. Taye's fanfic on Achebe's work is available on the blog page, Brittle Paper, an online platform whose portrayal of Achebe's classic hero demonstrates how the struct…
Akposdoncome again: Nigerian cyberpop hero as trickster
New media technologies in many African countries require new scholarly engagements with new forms and sites of cultural representations, as well as the political ideologies embedded in and challenged by them. This essay examines the remediation of the function of the trickster hero of oral tradition in new media technologies, and how such reconfigurations catalyse new directions for the understanding of popular culture in Nigeria. The article ana…
Akposdoncome again: Nigerian cyberpop hero as trickster
New media technologies in many African countries require new scholarly engagements with new forms and sites of cultural representations, as well as the political ideologies embedded in and challenged by them. This essay examines the remediation of the function of the trickster hero of oral tradition in new media technologies, and how such reconfigurations catalyse new directions for the understanding of popular culture in Nigeria. The article ana…
Thighs Fell Apart: Online fan fiction, and African writing in a digital age
This essay foregrounds Web's 2.0 recuperation of agency for the modern fan-reader of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart through a critical dilation of Kiru Taye's 'Thighs Fell Apart', an online short story that details a fan-reader's 'renarration' of Okonkwo's possibly voluptuous life. Taye's fanfic on Achebe's work is available on the blog page, Brittle Paper, an online platform whose portrayal of Achebe's classic hero demonstrates how the struct…
Digital African Literatures and the Coloniality of Data
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 conv…
From Google Doodles to Facebook: Nostalgia and Visual Reconstructions of the Past in Nigeria
In June 2019, Google announced plans to connect Africa to Europe through an undersea internet cable project named Equiano. As a techno-commercial platform, Google's gesture warrants scrutiny and propels this essay's analyses of the political connections of Internet spaces that also enable a visual turn in the scholarship of African history. Using the Google search engine and Facebook, Yékú and Ojebode stress the embeddedness of digital technologi…
Encountering Mudi Yahaya's Nina Fischer-Stephan's Respectful Gaze in Lagos
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 stren…
Cultural netizenship as platformization of popular culture in Nigeria
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 aestheti…
MakeNigeriaGreatAgain: Donald Trump in Nollywood’s Social Media
Anti-Afropolitan ethics and the performative politics of online scambaiting
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 sca…
Túndé Kèlání, Global Cinema and Philosophical Engagements
The articles in this special issue invite an understanding of Tunde Kelani as a global filmmaker, whose cinematic oeuvre engages with many places, audiences as well as media technologies. A major f
Akposdoncome again: Nigerian cyberpop hero as trickster
New media technologies in many African countries require new scholarly engagements with new forms and sites of cultural representations, as well as the political ideologies embedded in and challenged by them. This essay examines the remediation of the function of the trickster hero of oral tradition in new media technologies, and how such reconfigurations catalyse new directions for the understanding of popular culture in Nigeria. The article ana…
Thighs Fell Apart: Online fan fiction, and African writing in a digital age
This essay foregrounds Web's 2.0 recuperation of agency for the modern fan-reader of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart through a critical dilation of Kiru Taye's 'Thighs Fell Apart', an online short story that details a fan-reader's 'renarration' of Okonkwo's possibly voluptuous life. Taye's fanfic on Achebe's work is available on the blog page, Brittle Paper, an online platform whose portrayal of Achebe's classic hero demonstrates how the struct…
Joke-Performance in Africa: Mode, Media and Meaning
Tricksters and female warriors: Womanist interweavings from Oríta to Wakanda
Túndé Kèlání's The Narrow Path (2006) may be read as prefiguring the emancipatory, womanist project of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018). Hence, a broad understanding of the black struggle in Black Panther as encompassing an African presence propels this article's womanist reading of Túndé Kèlání’s The Narrow Path, from the Nigerian film industry, alongside Coogler’s film. The article uses images of the trickster deity, Èṣù, and the warrior wom…
Anti-Afropolitan ethics and the performative politics of online scambaiting
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 sca…
Túndé Kèlání, Global Cinema and Philosophical Engagements
The articles in this special issue invite an understanding of Tunde Kelani as a global filmmaker, whose cinematic oeuvre engages with many places, audiences as well as media technologies. A major f
Youth and Popular Culture in Africa: Media, Music, and Politics
In Praise of Ostentation: Social Class in Lagos and the Aesthetics of Nollywood's Ówàḿbẹ̀ Genres
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 f…
From Google Doodles to Facebook: Nostalgia and Visual Reconstructions of the Past in Nigeria
In June 2019, Google announced plans to connect Africa to Europe through an undersea internet cable project named Equiano. As a techno-commercial platform, Google's gesture warrants scrutiny and propels this essay's analyses of the political connections of Internet spaces that also enable a visual turn in the scholarship of African history. Using the Google search engine and Facebook, Yékú and Ojebode stress the embeddedness of digital technologi…
Cultural Netizenship: Social Media, Popular Culture, and Performance in Nigeria
Digital African Literatures and the Coloniality of Data
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 conv…
MakeNigeriaGreatAgain: Donald Trump in Nollywood’s Social Media
Cultural netizenship as platformization of popular culture in Nigeria
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 aestheti…
A Memorial Visit; Remembering; Afrofuturist Sankofa; A digital memorial
Encountering Mudi Yahaya's Nina Fischer-Stephan's Respectful Gaze in Lagos
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 stren…
African Digital Cultures: Platforms, Publics, and Infrastructures
Sociology (10 works) · Art (8 works) · African history and culture studies (7 works) · Media studies (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Digital Games and Media (5 works) · Literature (5 works) · Gender Studies (4 works) · History (4 works)