“Innovative work by [an] emerging scholar…”

~Editors of Modernism/Modernity Print +

Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu is Assistant Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research and teaching focus on African and Black diasporic literatures and cultures, with particular interests in poetry and poetics, digital and public humanities, new media, and technology. She received her PhD from Cornell University's Department of Literatures in English.

Her first book, African Poetry, Black Transnationalism, and the Making of Literary Worlds (under contract with Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Studies in World Literature), studies how what we now know of as African poetry was made through transnational networks of media, institutions, and social bonds rather than within isolated national traditions. Moving across little magazines, radio broadcasts, art galleries, writers' conferences, roadside infrastructure, friendships, and literary prizes, the book recasts African poetic sensibilities not as the purity of a sealed tradition but as something poets built through transnational exchange. African poets kept Africa at the center of their work while drawing Caribbean, African American, and Afro-Asian writers in as collaborators in defining African modernity. Sustained readings of Kofi Awoonor, John Pepper Clark, Rebeka Njau, and Safia Elhillo, among others, offer a relational literary history of African and Black diasporic poetry from the mid-twentieth century to the present.

Her second book project, Viral Verse: African and Diasporic Poetry in the Digital Age, traces how African and Black diasporic poets have engaged the web from the early 2000s to the present. Against the promise of the internet as an open, even, and borderless space, the book shows how unevenly the web has been built, governed, and owned, and how poets have worked within and against those asymmetries. Ranging across born-digital art, videopoetry, social media poetics, online literary festivals, and digital archives, it follows poets from the early web through the platform era and the pandemic's turn to online community. Throughout, Viral Verse treats questions of access, ownership, and digital sovereignty as poetic questions. Those questions return with new force in the age of generative AI. As AI systems train on and imitate their work, poets are also taking up these tools on their own terms: experimenting with them, repurposing them, and writing back to them. In doing so, they continue a longer history of claiming digital technologies for Black creative life.

Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Comparative Literature Studies, Journal of the African Literature Association, Research in African Literatures, Amerikastudien, Modernism/modernity Print Plus, The Black Scholar, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and Reviews in DH. She also contributed a chapter on African poetry in the diaspora to African Literature in Transition (Cambridge University Press). Her work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the African Poetry Book Fund (through a re-grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), the Center for Race and Ethnicity, and Cornell University's Olin Library.

Adwetewa-Badu served for several years on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association. Across her service, she is committed to graduate education, support for diverse career paths, and the inclusion of international scholars in the profession.

She is the founder and director of the Global Poetics Project, an experimental archive, co-working space, and production studio that uses digital storytelling, mapping, and network modeling to study poetry. A frequent public speaker, she communicates complex ideas to specialist and general audiences alike. She also builds partnerships between academic research and organizations beyond the university, including nonprofits and tech startups.