Viral Verses: Poetic Movements and Social Media in Southeastern Africa

Sacks, Susanna L

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-6262-8r34

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Viral Verses: Poetic Movements and Social Media in Southeastern Africa

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Viral Verses investigates the influence of social media publication on the relationship between poetry and community formation in southeastern Africa. As more artists in the global South reach wider audiences through online publication, poetic form has shifted to reflect social media’s aesthetic norms, embracing urgency, contemporaneity, and populism. Digital media expands the rhetorical communities produced in poetry performance through self-publishing platforms and large-scale messaging applications. This influence is especially tangible in southeastern Africa, where poetry has functioned historically to define community boundaries and grant political legitimacy. Combining ethnographic observations of poetry events and communities with formal analysis of individual performances and their relationship to shifting media paradigms, Viral Verses demonstrates that the logics of new media, which privilege connection, urgency, and populism, have shifted offline poetry production and community formation in Malawi, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. To date, most research on digital publishing by African authors has focused on its democratizing potential for print forms, where a growing audience can speak back to content producers. By examining the tension between discursive possibility and surveillant ambivalence that emerges from social media platforms, this project highlights the dual role of performance norms and media affordances in shaping contemporary aesthetic networks. The first chapter tracks the movement of poetic discourse between social media platforms, political rallies, and poetry performances in order to explore the hypothesis that social media is a democratizing force. The second chapter evaluates the influence of specific social media platforms, including WhatsApp, Facebook, and YouTube, on the formation of contemporary aesthetic networks. The third chapter traces the rise of spoken word and poetry slams through southeastern Africa to demonstrate how social media platforms have transformed literary form. The fourth chapter analyzes poetry performances at international arts festivals to illustrate how poetry’s historical connection to nationalism emerges in the wake of digital cosmopolitanism. Finally, the conclusion asks how the rise of digital media publication has influence the distribution of cultural capital, analyzing Koleka Putuma’s Collective Amnesia to illustrate the influence of popular forms on contemporary canon formation. Analyzing poetic discourse as it moves between social media and live performance, Viral Verses highlights the interpenetration of online and in-person social spaces to demonstrate the power and mutability of form in producing aesthetic communities, even as shifting media affordances constrain literary production.

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