“Yahoo-yahoos and Twitter kweens”: Internet technologies in contemporary Nigerian fiction

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the representation of Internet technologies in two recent Nigerian comic novels, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s (2009) I Do Not Come to You by Chance and A. Igoni Barrett’s (2015) Blackass. Departing from founding mythologies of the Internet as a space of global assimilation and extending beyond extant postcolonial concerns with technological exclusion or malfunction, the article demonstrates how Internet technologies facilitate forms of global subjectification that amplify rather than diminish national consciousness. Reading Nwaubani’s representations of “419” email fraud alongside Barrett’s experimental approach to Twitter form, the article shows how both novels critically reflect upon the globalizing potentials and limitations of Internet technologies from the perspective of a “post-development” Nigeria. It argues that these novels depict characters dialectically engaging with national and global contexts – mobilizing national stereotypes to address global audiences – yet, in turn, redeploying global capital (financial and cultural) to achieve more localized forms of status.