Unsupervised: Shedding Light on South African Digital Poetry
Proposal Type
Individual Talk
Location
Narratives & Worlds
Start Date
July 2026
End Date
July 2026
Abstract
Contemporary scholarship has been increasingly recognising the need to document the growing corpus of African literature being produced and distributed via social media and other online platforms. In African Literature and the Future, Stephen Ogundipe speaks to this phenomenon declaring that:
"In the search for a viable path for the future of African literature, a well-crafted vision of the future and effective strategies to engender transformation are imperative. This raises the practical application of the digital space, the internet and related innovative technology as new paradigms of knowledge to African literary engagement. But the absence of a critical standard remains a bane of this development."
To address this critical imperative and propose a selection of works that could pertain to these developments in the future of African literature, I collected a dataset to find examples of literary trends and provide key recent examples of significant works. This project was informed by Franco Moretti's scholarship on distant reading. The dataset documents different forms of digital poetry written by younger South African authors from the Born Free Generation who came of age after the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994. The main purpose of this talk is to present my findings and the theoretical and methodological framework that informed them and discuss the prevalence of such works. The talk concludes by briefly proposing some possible means of expanding this research.
Unsupervised: Shedding Light on South African Digital Poetry
Narratives & Worlds
Contemporary scholarship has been increasingly recognising the need to document the growing corpus of African literature being produced and distributed via social media and other online platforms. In African Literature and the Future, Stephen Ogundipe speaks to this phenomenon declaring that:
"In the search for a viable path for the future of African literature, a well-crafted vision of the future and effective strategies to engender transformation are imperative. This raises the practical application of the digital space, the internet and related innovative technology as new paradigms of knowledge to African literary engagement. But the absence of a critical standard remains a bane of this development."
To address this critical imperative and propose a selection of works that could pertain to these developments in the future of African literature, I collected a dataset to find examples of literary trends and provide key recent examples of significant works. This project was informed by Franco Moretti's scholarship on distant reading. The dataset documents different forms of digital poetry written by younger South African authors from the Born Free Generation who came of age after the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994. The main purpose of this talk is to present my findings and the theoretical and methodological framework that informed them and discuss the prevalence of such works. The talk concludes by briefly proposing some possible means of expanding this research.
Bio
Jasmine Mattey is a PhD candidate in Digital Culture at the University of Bergen based at the Center for Digital Narrative. She holds a BA degree in English Literature from Bath Spa University and a MA degree in Literary Studies from Uppsala University.
Jasmine is currently writing an article-based PhD dissertation entitled "'Dear Africa/You have many Narratives' Emerging forms of e-literature beyond the South African Novel." As part of this research she continues to explore, document, and assess digital works by South African writers and creatives.