As the affordances of authorship and reading practices on social media become deeply mediated by algorithmic curation, they encourage closer attention to the author's personality as fundamental to literary production. The Algorithmic Age of Personality: African Literature and Cancel Culture challenges any lingering utopianism in the role of digital media in African cultural productions by exploring how algorithms engender a culture of outrage, conflict, and personality-driven and ego battles that distract from aesthetic and ethical evaluations of literary texts. In Yékú’s careful attention to how contemporary African literary practices are significantly marked by the extractivist and affective logics of social media algorithms, he articulates the current state of debating in the critical universe of African literature and connects this to the phenomenon of “cancel culture.” Rather than a Manichean understanding of cancel culture, Yékú illustrates how the politics of both conservative and liberal polarization shape what can and cannot be said in online commentaries on African literary forms. The outcome is a work that situates postcolonial classics by Chinua Achebe and Joseph Conrad in online debates on cancel culture and decolonization, while responding to social media discussions on Western literary prizes, ethnicity, and sexuality involving writers like Soyinka, Ngũgĩ, Wainaina, and Adichie.

Eric Fassin examines the trend of State anti-intellectualism in France using the nation as a case study to demonstrate that this tendency is not limited to ostensibly illiberal regimes. He argues that today’s world requires an examination of this phenomenon beyond Cold War geopolitical divisions and highlights a global shift towards authoritarian neoliberalism. His book is a plea for the political urgency of intellectual work in a global moment of political anti-intellectualism.
The book covers the period from President Sarkozy to Prime Minister Valls and includes both firsthand and public cases of attacks against academics, not only in France, but also in Brazil, Hungary, Russia, Turkey, and the United States, with examples of State racism and the argument of the State against antiracism. The book also considers issues of censorship and cancel culture, concluding with Fassin’s firsthand account of attacks on him from the far-right.