Ambivalent Encounters and Other Essays

Auteur

James Ye?ku? received a PhD in English from the University of Saskatchewan in 2018 and joined the University of Kansas a year later as an assistant professor in the Department of African and African American Studies where he lead African digital humanities initiatives. He also works closely with KU's Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities and the Kansas African Studies Center. His research focuses on the digital expressions of the literatures and cultures of Africa and the African diaspora, with emphasis on the African articulations of the digital cultural record. He is a Nigerian-Canadian author of other books.

Texte du rabat

In Ambivalent Encounters and Other Essays, James Ye?ku? speaks powerfully from his personal experiences as a writer and academic living outside a homeland he sometimes recaptures through his poetry and scholarship. His encounters in several cities around the world, and in different cultural and media contexts offer an entry into the ways in which we produce collective meanings from the private notes we write to ourselves. Poignant yet exciting, the essays in the collection move in different and unruly directions: while some mourn both the diaspora-imposed loss of books that immigrant scholars often face, and the devastating disappearance of an uncle who travelled to Europe through the Sahara, other pieces reflect on a persistently stereotypic image of Africa, soccer and racial politics, and Nigerian social media cultures.