Revenge of the Spoken Word?: Writing, Performance, and New Media in Urban West Africa

This paper examines the impact of digital media on the relationship between writing, performance, and textuality from the perspective of literate verbal artists in Mali. It considers why some highly educated verbal artists in urban Africa self-identify as writers despite the oralizing properties of new media, and despite the fact that their own works circulate entirely through performance. The motivating factors are identified as a desire to present themselves as composers rather than as performers of texts, and to differentiate their work from that of minimally educated performers of texts associated with traditional orality.