Dr Daniel Chukwuemeka

Leverhulme Fellow

School: Humanities and Social Sciences

I am a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Research Fellow in English Literature at Northumbria University, Newcastle. I hold a Ph.D. in English (with a focus on African Literature and Popular Culture), funded by a prestigious scholarship awarded jointly by the University of Bristol, United Kingdom and Macquarie University, Australia. My research interests include African and African Diasporic Literature, Global Black Studies, Critical Race Theory, Economic Humanities, and Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies.

I am interested in the interdisciplinary study of the intersections of literature, culture, history, race, and economic practices. In my current research, I read contemporary African diasporic novels set in the United States along with media records and cultural texts to examine how racial capitalism commodifies Blackness through narrative frames and discursive expectations that govern how Black value is priced in the racialized marketplace. Expected to lead to my second monograph titled, The Ugly Immigrant: Blackness and Racial Capitalism in Afrodiasporic Narratives, the project examines what happens when African Americans and African (im)migrants are forced to navigate economic systems that both extract value from racial difference and, on the same basis, deny full economic inclusion.

My forthcoming debut monograph, African Hustler Narratives: E-fraud Economy and Postmillennial Capitalism (University of Michigan Press), develops a radical theorization of the hustler figure as central to a critique of colonial capitalism and its persistent logic of exclusion engendered by neocolonial economic policies, including neoliberal structural adjustments, intensified by the rise of digital capitalism in the postmillennial moment. This research has also been adapted into a documentary film, African Robinhood: The Making of a Prodigal Scammer, reflecting my commitment to public-facing scholarship.

Before joining Northumbria, I have taught English, literature, and cultural studies in Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and Australia, including appointments at Godfrey Okoye University, the University of Nigeria, Bournemouth University, the University of Bristol, and Macquarie University. My teaching interests include Colonial and Postcolonial African literature, Global Anglophone Literature, African American and Caribbean Literature, Rhetoric and Composition, Critical Issues (Literary Theories, Genres, Movements, Periods), as well as studies in Popular Culture and Mass Media.

Prior to obtaining my PhD, I worked as a language editor for the Oxford English Dictionaries in Germany and held a Mitacs Globalink–funded research visit at Carleton University, Canada.

My work has appeared in leading journals and edited collections, and I am the editor of the special issue, “Narratives of Capital: Representations of Economic Thought in Contemporary African Literature” (Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2025).

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Research Themes and Scholarly Interests

Postcolonial and Global Black Literatures; African and African Diasporic Literatures; Migration Studies; Literature and Economics; Race/Ethnicity; Gender/Sexuality; Space/Memory; Film and Media Studies

Key Publications

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
Coming of Age in a Hustler Economy: E-fraud Narratives and the Postcolonial African Bildungsroman, Chukwuemeka, D. 1 Jan 2026, The Postcolonial Bildungsroman and the Character of Place, Lincoln, United States, University of Nebraska Press
The Sound of Silent Memories: Negotiating Cultural Memory through Urban Noise in Teju Cole’s Open City, Chukwuemeka, D. 2020, Vernon Press, Vernon Press
Hustler Masculinity in the Nigerian E-fraud Novel, Chukwuemeka, D. 1 Jun 2022, In: Research in African Literatures
E-fraud economy as an emergent perspective towards the corpus of African hustler narratives, Chukwuemeka, D. 17 Mar 2021, In: Journal of the African Literature Association