Multimodality, Performance and Technopoetics in Johanna Waliya’s Bilingual African Digital Poetry

Abstract

The new media and ICT have dismantled the generic classification of literature, thereby shifting its traditional boundaries, innovating its artistic production and empowering its readership. Among the subgenres of literature, poetry has received the greatest technological innovations that have given rise to digital poetry which is fused with the convergence of text, image and sound, and hybridized with kinetic, interactive and hypertextual possibilities, making poetic expressions artificially intelligent. Literary critics have explored the development, dynamics and aesthetics of Western electronic poetry and its various forms without much attention paid to budding African digital poetry. This Chapter, therefore, examines the aesthetics of multimodality, performance and technopoetics in Johanna Waliya’s African digital poetry, a technology-enhanced artwork that is resourcefully rendered in French and English, two major languages spoken in Africa. Regrettably this e-poetry has not been subjected to any known literary critical appraisal, although admittedly it is relatively new. This study is greatly descriptive, though it relies superficially on theories of multimodality, visual culture and semiotics for brief analysis. Waliya’s digital collection has nine poems. His poiesis presents a symbolic distinctiveness of each e-poem in performativity, dimensionality, temporality and interpretability as colors, graphics, letters, and images network and blend “into a nuanced language of digital poetic expression” in a digital environment. This analysis will facilitate the construction of the typology of Waliya’s digital poems, include an investigation into the technological process of digital creation, and demonstrate an insight into the thematic orientations of digital texts.