In The Algorithmic Age of Personality: African Literature and Cancel Culture, James Yékú argues that contemporary African literature must be read within a digital environment in which algorithmic systems increasingly shape literary reception. While these systems privilege visibility and controversy, they also foreground authorial personality as a central site of literary value. For Yékú, the “algorithmic age of personality” names a literary environment in which digital platforms organize reception around writers’ public identities, moral positions, and social media performances, often making extra-literary controversies central to how literary works are discussed and valued (xxvi). Drawing on moments such as the attempted cancellation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Yékú links contemporary literary culture to earlier histories of public literary disputes while attending to the specific conditions produced by platform capitalism. A central move in the book is Yékú’s rereading of Chinua Achebe’s critique of Joseph Conrad through the language of contemporary cancel culture. While he does not equate Achebe’s intervention with digital cancellation, he argues that Achebe’s challenge to Conrad’s place in the literary canon anticipates contemporary debates about whether ethically compromised authors and texts should continue to occupy privileged cultural positions. This parallel allows Yékú to situate cancel culture within longer histories of contestation over value and canon formation.

Across the book’s wide-ranging chapters, three important dynamics emerge within the field of African literature in the digital age. One is the outsize and often complicated influence of digital literary magazines in conferring visibility and legitimacy. Through the examples of Enkare Review and Brittle Paper, Yékú shows how literary production in the digital age is imbricated with the authority of editors and the volatility of online publics, in which disputes over editorial decisions can quickly become personalized and escalate into calls for cancellation (36). Ironically, controversies surrounding digital literary magazines often become the catalyst for the creation of new platforms.

The second dynamic is related to the first. Over the last three decades, the digital mediation of African literature has expanded its evaluative field beyond conventional academic and literary institutions. This shift has created space for what might be described as an influencer class of critics who exploit the reach and immediacy of digital media to circulate commentary designed to provoke reaction and shape literary discourse. Yékú uses Ikhide Ikheloa as a representative member of this insurgent class to demonstrate how algorithmic environments elevate personality into a powerful force in determining literary visibility and authority. Yékú, however, appears ambivalent about the place of figures like Ikheloa in African literary culture. While he acknowledges Ikheloa’s “digital labor” as central to the development of African literature “as an elastic field,” he also implies that the authority exercised by such influencer-critics sits uneasily alongside forms of literary judgment grounded in the slower processes of evaluation and peer engagement that have traditionally underwritten literary knowledge (37). Yékú’s treatment of figures such as Ikheloa reflects a broader methodological disposition that characterizes the book. Rather than aligning himself fully with either side of the debates he examines, he repeatedly occupies a position between competing claims. This tendency is also noticeable in his discussions of the controversies surrounding Adichie’s comments on trans identities, decolonization debates, and Achebe’s critique of Conrad, where he seeks to preserve the value of critique without endorsing the logic of exclusion that sometimes accompanies it.

The third dynamic concerns the expansion and democratization of literary publics. Here lies what is arguably Yékú’s strongest contribution where he analyzes how digital platforms have transformed the relationship between texts and readers. He demonstrates how online engagements produce new reading communities whose interpretive practices extend texts in “rhizomatic directions” (72), generating meanings that exceed authorial intent and formal criticism. Through a discussion of Kiru Taye’s fan fiction, Thighs Fell Apart, based on Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Yékú argues that digital platforms enable readers to participate actively in literary production by extending and reimagining canonical texts. Readers are thus no longer confined to interpretation as they increasingly become producers of literary meaning. These expanded publics also participate in debates surrounding literary prizes, where questions of recognition expose enduring tensions within decolonial discourse. Yékú’s discussion of recurring calls for Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o to receive the Nobel Prize illustrates how aspirations to challenge Western authority often coexist with continued investment in Western systems of validation. For Yékú, digital platforms intensify these debates by transforming them into ongoing public contests over recognition and authority.

These noted dynamics allow Yékú to move beyond accounts of digital media as merely a technological backdrop and toward an understanding of platforms as active participants in the production of literary value. Thus, the book’s greatest strength lies in its ability to bring African literary studies into sustained conversation with platform studies and digital culture scholarship. While at times, the book’s effort to maintain a position between competing claims can produce moments of analytical hesitation, this caution, however, enables Yékú to avoid reductive judgments. Overall, Yékú offers a nuanced account of how digital platforms have transformed literary authority, readership, and criticism in contemporary Africa.