African verbal arts online

Abstract

This chapter explores African diasporas’ use of verbal arts on the Internet ̶with specific reference to the verbal arts and “dimensions of orality” on African diasporic or “migrant” websites managed from the Netherlands. While anthropological, literary and art studies have shown that imaginative expression plays a pivotal role in identity construction, verbal as well as visual genres and music on African diasporic websites have received scant attention in studies of the Internet and migration. By engaging the social dynamics of migrant imagination “in and off” the Internet, the paper addresses the transformation of African verbal arts and identity imagination in and by new media. Central to the chapter’s approach is the relationship between orality and other media. It has become clear that new media amplify the possibilities for dispersed groups to connect and exchange discourses and cultural production beyond national boundaries. The chapter offers insights not only about the adjustments of oral literatures to “the imperatives of urban life” (Okpewho, African Oral Literature 363), but also about the interaction of online and local (“offline”) communities via diasporic websites in their local/national/transnational contexts.