Middlebrow 2.0 and the Digital Affect : Online Reading Communities of the New Nigerian Novel (Postcolonialism Across the Disciplines)

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. Middlebrow 2.0 and the Digital Affect investigates the material conditions of producing, distributing and consuming the postcolonial in the Internet era. Bridging the gap between postcolonial and middlebrow studies, the digital humanities and the history of emotions, it employs corpus linguistics software to scrutinise more than 15,000 online responses to 20 new Nigerian novels, unearthing the patterns of affect that characterise the contemporary digital milieu of literary transmission. Building on materialist, social constructionist and linguistic approaches to community and emotion, the study illustrates how Amazon, Goodreads and YouTube capitalise on socially oriented cross-border reading practices by creating empathic communities of ethnically diverse yet socially balanced readers who use social media to fashion themselves as emotionally receptive members of a globalising middle-class formation. Offering a reproducible method for exploring new forms of postcolonial reader engagement that strengthens the postcolonial analysis of inclusion and exclusion, the book shows that the digital mediation of postcolonial literatures functions to appropriate various markers of identity and difference to the standards of bourgeois literary culture. The results highlight that the digital literary economy proves inclusive of the postcolonial Other, but only with full reserve to middle-class norms and values.