1st Edition
African Digital Cultures Platforms, Publics, and Infrastructures
List of Contributors
African Digital Cultures: Introduction
James Yékú and Leah Junck
Part 1: Infrastructures
Chapter 1: “Big Auntie Like Me”: The Humor of the Digital Divide
Adwoa A. Opoku-Agyemang
Chapter 2: Youth as Digital Infrastructure: Radical Openings, Internet Shutdowns, and Forward Momentums
Clovis Bergere
Chapter 3: Digital Citizens of an Analog State: Infrastructure and Epistemic Closures in Nigeria
James Yékú
Chapter 4: Counting Water for an African future? Smart Water Billing in South Africa
Ina Dietzsch and Amber Abrams
Part 2: Platforms
Chapter 5: Technologies of Capture: From the Slave Ship to Instagram
Ejiofor Ugwu
Chapter 6: Podcasts and Emerging Listenerships in Kenya
Dina Ligaga
Chapter 7: Undisciplining the Digital: Multimodal Poetry as Decolonial Method in Koleka Putuma’s Hullo Bu-bye Koko Come In (2021)
Susanna Sacks
Chapter 8: Locating African Cultural Agency in the Global Digital Economy: The Case of Music Platform Insider Activists
Jaana Serres
Chapter 9: Debating the Ethics of Ownership and Appropriation in Global Digital Afrobeats Culture
Bakar Abdul-Rashid Jeduah & Tom Simmert
Chapter 10: Sharevangelism: Religion, Technology, and Platform Relations
Adunni Adelakun
Part 3: Publics
Chapter 11: “I Don’t Take Card”: What Uber Drivers and Users in Ghana Can Teach Us about Localizing Foreign Technology.”
Elias Adanu and Stephen Dadugblor
Chapter 12: Digital Citizenship in Nigeria: Claims Making, Civic Engagement and Social Justice Activism on X
Ochega Etu- Ataguba
Chapter 13: Voices of the Ordinary People in the Digital Era: Rebuttals to A President’s Facebook Eulogy
Selina Linda Mudavanhu
Chapter 14: Media Identities and Risks: Mobile Money and the Dilemmas of Digital Exposure in Urban Cameroon
Primus M. Tazanu
Index
Biography
James Yékú teaches African literature and postcolonial digital humanities at the University of Kansas. His work sits at the intersection of African cultural production and digital humanities, and he is the author of Cultural Netizenship: Social Media, Popular Culture, and Performance in Nigeria (Indiana University Press, 2022) and The Algorithmic Age of Personality: African Literature and Cancel Culture (Michigan State University Press, 2025).
Leah Junck is a senior researcher and digital anthropologist at the Global Center on AI Governance in South Africa. Her work explores how computational technologies shape human relationships, future imaginaries, and the interplay between personal tech experiences, structural frameworks, and public discourse.
