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 jointly awarded PhD in English Literature (with a focus on African Literature, Media, and Culture) from the University of Bristol and Macquarie University, completed under a fully funded cotutelle supervision arrangement. My doctoral and postdoctoral research focuses on postcolonial African and African diasporic literatures and global Black studies, with particular attention to discourses of race, gender, space, migration, economic exclusion, and the cultural logics of global capitalism.

I am interested in the intersciplinary study of the intersections of literature, culture, history, race, and economics, broadly defined. In my current research, I read contemporary African diasporic novels set in the United States along with media records and cultural texts to examine what happens when racial capitalism operates by turning Blackness into a commodifiable form across cultural, economic, and literary markets. Expected to lead to my second monograph titled, The Ugly Immigrant: Blackness and Racial Capitalism in Afrodiasporic Narratives, the project examines how Black people, particularly African Americans and African (im)migrants, 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 within neocolonial economic policies and practices, 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 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 circle around African, African American and Caribbean Literature, Rhetoric and Composition, Critical Issues (Literary Theories, Genres, Movements, Periods), as well as 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