Investigating Postcolonial Affective Online Communities: A Computational Analysis of Reader Reviews for Contemporary Nigerian Fiction

Abstract:This article approaches postcolonial affect through the combined perspectives of postcolonial and affect studies, audience research, and the digital humanities. It examines more than ten thousand online responses to recent Nigerian diasporic novels with various computer-based methods that bring to the fore the ideologies of emotion informing contemporary postcolonial reading practices. Using a theoretical and methodological framework covering socio-historical, materialist, and linguistic conceptions of community and emotion, this article demonstrates how platforms such as Amazon, Goodreads, and YouTube market postcolonial literary consumption by creating affective online communities of locally and ethnically diversified readers, allowing them to adjust their affective lexicon to the socioeconomic demands of the digital age. The results show that the online distribution and discussion of contemporary Nigerian fiction sideline national, ethnic, and cultural differences in favour of shared middle-class aspirations. Finally, this article illustrates that computational research designs do not exclude but rather invigorate the study of postcolonial issues such as domination, subordination, and exclusion.