Oral Performance, Print Mediation, and Digital Transformation: A History of Yoruba Literary Forms from Oriki to Social Media

This dissertation constructs an original literary and cultural history of Yoruba literary forms across the transition from oral performance to print mediation and into the digital era, tracing the transformation of specific genres including oriki praise poetry, rara oral song, ewi recitation, and folktale across these successive media contexts. The history of literature in the Yoruba language represents one of Africa's richest and most documented literary traditions, yet the transformations wrought by literacy and digitisation on specifically Yoruba literary forms have not been traced in a comprehensive, theoretically informed literary history. The dissertation employs an interdisciplinary methodology integrating literary history, oral tradition theory, media studies, and Yoruba studies scholarship. Archival research in the Yoruba Literature Archive at the University of Ibadan and oral history interviews with 30 Yoruba oral artists and print authors provide primary source material alongside a corpus of published Yoruba texts and digital content collected from social media platforms and audio streaming services. The theoretical framework draws on media ecology, remediation theory, and the sociology of literary forms to examine how genre characteristics are preserved, transformed, and newly created as Yoruba literary forms move between oral, print, and digital environments. Original contributions include the first comprehensive media-ecological history of Yoruba literary forms, a theory of Yoruba literary digitisation that distinguishes between remediation and new genre emergence, and close analyses of contemporary digital Yoruba literary practice including WhatsApp and YouTube oriki performance. Keywords: Yoruba literature, oral tradition, print mediation, digital transformation, literary history.