Author spotlights ‘Algorithmic Age of Personality’ in African literature


LAWRENCE — While previously extolling the way social media empowers Nigerians’ response to their corrupt political leaders, scholar James Yékú now decries the way it supercharges cancel culture, shutting down debate on important social and literary topics.

The author of two poetry collections and an associate professor of African & African-American studies at the University of Kansas, Yékú has a new book out titled “The Algorithmic Age of Personality: African Literature and Cancel Culture” (Michigan State University Press).

Yékú examines the existence and effect of cancel culture in the frameworks of three main topical issues in African literature: transgender identity and acceptance, ethnic tensions, and the competition for Western awards and prestige. The Lagos native looks primarily at his home country but draws comparisons around the world.

Yékú details the controversy among scholars and fans over the 2017 (and subsequent) comments on transgender identity by author Chimamanda Adichie, comparing it to circumstantially similar cries in the Global North for the cancellation of “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling.

Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie speaks at the Congreso Futuro 2020 in Santiago, Chile. Credit: Carlos Figueroa, via Wikimedia Commons

The contretemps stems from Adichie’s response to a British TV journalist, who asked whether a trans woman is “any less of a real woman.” Adichie replied that, by virtue of having grown up as male, “Trans women are trans women” and that “gender is not biology, gender is sociology.”

Yékú said that, despite the controversy and ensuing fallout, it was hardly justification for canceling an important feminist writer from the canon of modern African literature.

“The book began when someone asked me a question about the possibility of canceling Adichie from my classroom space,” Yékú said. “I remember saying I would be very reluctant to do that, despite some of the controversies around this particular writer at that time.”

Yékú writes that current social-media beefs echo those from Nigeria’s analog past, particularly Chinua Achebe’s postcolonialist critique of the novella “Heart of Darkness” by Poland-born author Joseph Conrad.

Yékú asks: “What should you remove from a text whose history is one of racism or sexism? What should you do with a text that seeks to articulate a particular set of objectives — in the case of Conrad, an anti-colonial one — but ended up becoming a very racist text?

“Should you cancel Conrad, or should you teach him? My approach is to teach Conrad, and hopefully — with very critical students who are interested in exploring the messiness of the human past — grapple with all the complexities of that particular novella and leave the personal politics outside of the classroom. After all, the person is different from the idea.”

Yékú spends much of the book detailing the ways in which algorithms employed by big social-media companies like the former Twitter (now X.com) tend to reduce serious issues to personality clashes.

“The algorithmic age of personality is my way of describing the social media outrage culture we have today,” Yékú said, “one in which you have these vicious personal attacks, rather than debates and dialogues around important ideas in a culture; one in which the profit-based algorithms that shape the current digital moment play a huge role.”

Mon, 07/07/2025

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Rick Hellman

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Rick Hellman

KU News Service

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