Toward the end of Networked Poetics: The Digital Turn in Southern African Poetry, Susanna L. Sacks observes that South African poet Koleka Putuma’s Collective Amnesia, published in 2017 after her video-poem “Water” had gone viral, “takes an ambivalent stance on digital media, celebrating the connections it enables even as it questions the commodification of those connections” (175). This dual move of celebrating and questioning characterizes Sacks’s book, too. The appearance of Putuma’s print collection is an exception in a monograph that spotlights the interface between live performance and social media. Sacks offers two key concepts, “networked poetics” and “algorithmic aesthetics,” to elucidate how digital logics now shape the composition of poetry both online and offline, as well as determine what counts as success. The spread of poetry through social media, she argues, has “brought a new, populist form of gatekeeping to the fore—one that predicates cultural value on virality” (153). At the same time as Networked Poetics applauds the artistry, energy, and truth-telling of youth-led poetry communities across southern Africa, it probes these communities’ dependence on digital platforms designed—and monetized—by companies like Google and Meta.

Sacks is part of a formidable cohort of literary scholars working in African digital humanities; among those she cites are Shola Adenekan, Nikitta Adjirakor, Meg Arenberg, Stephanie Bosch Santana, and James Yékú, whose term “cultural netizenship” names form of belonging routed through digital spaces rather than the state. Networked Poetics tracks such cultural netizenship in poetry from three southern African countries: Malawi, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. Focusing on the 2010s, the book is based on ethnographic participant-observation, including numerous interviews with arts organizers and poets dating back to 2016, and “comparative netnography” (19). Deeply versed in the study of southern African cultures and politics, Sacks situates twenty-first-century poetry in lineages of praise and protest poetry, and she understands digital platforms to be filling a gap created by the historic underdevelopment of African publishing institutions. Her notable innovation is to draw together media studies, particularly critiques of algorithmic biases, with deft literary and rhetorical analysis of poems to explicate how the digital turn is playing out in regionally specific publics.

In a feat of organization, Sacks has marshalled evidence from complicated cultural, political, and media environments into a cogent structure. The chapters track “popular sites of poetic reception” (18): youth protest movements (Chapter 1), social media platforms (Chapter 2), slam competitions and spoken word performances (Chapter 3), international arts festivals (Chapter 4), and the friction between universities and popular cultural institutions (Chapter 5). The first three chapters feature case studies from each of the three countries. Chapter 1, for instance, reads the hashtagged protest chants of #FeesMustFall in South Africa, #ThisFlag in Zimbabwe, and the Fallist-inspired university crisis in Malawi as “a new kind of ‘tactical poetry’” (26). The fourth chapter discusses Poetry Africa in Durban, South Africa, and two Malawian festivals, Lake of Stars held next to Lake Malawi and the Tumaini Festival held in Dzaleka Refugee Camp, while the fifth chapter examines the reception of Koleka Putuma across South African cultural spaces; both chapters also incorporate Zimbabwean poets, such as Wadzanai Chirirui (aka Black Pearl), who physically move and digitally circulate across regional borders.

Given that English dominates the internet, Networked Poetics focuses on anglophone poets but also aims to point beyond such “digital anglonormativity” (17). In Chapter 2, for example, Sacks compares two Malawi-based WhatsApp poetry groups: the Living Room Poetry Club, founded by Q Malewezi and featuring mostly poetry in English, with Sapitwa Poetry, founded by Robert Chiwamba with more prominence for poetry in Chichewa. The title of that chapter is “Commenting in Community,” and throughout the book, Sacks emphasizes collectivity and community as a corrective to views of poetry as merely personal expression or private indulgence. Her description of a Facebook group like 100 Thousand Poets for Peace-Zimbabwe, whose “group members share a commitment to dissident art,” raises the potential paradox, though, of shared dissidence (77). Does the arc of poetry always bend toward collectivity? Is there a role in southern African poetry for dissident art that neither builds communities nor promotes individual brands? The paradox that Sacks instead highlights, one made especially visible by slam poetry, is “that corporate-controlled digital media platforms structure a liberatory form enacted in local spaces” (97).

Are the lines being recited in performance and shared on social media indeed poetry? Older, university-affiliated writers tend to be skeptical. Some younger writers, like Robert Chiwamba, claim the mantle of alakatuli (poet in Chichewa), while others, like Mbongeni Nomkonwana, who co-founded the Lingua Franca Spoken Word Movement in Cape Town, shrug off the academic connotations of the label poet for that of spoken word artist (113–114). Discussing festival performances in Chapter 4, Putuma’s multimodal poems in Chapter 5, and African American poet Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem in a Coda, Sacks retains the term poetry, in a nod to its cultural capital within and beyond the university, yet redefines it as participatory, popular, and public. Poetry, in this celebratory vision, is no longer an elite form limited to schoolbooks but a means of connecting people on the ground and online.