Literary Insurgency: Generation Z Digital Vernaculars and the Remaking of Political Culture in Kenya

Abstract

Kenya's 2024–2025 Gen Z-led protests against the Finance Bill demonstrated that contemporary political mobilisation is inseparable from literary form. Slogans, hashtags, memes, and spoken-word performances did not merely accompany the movement; they constituted its primary mode of political reasoning. Yet African literary scholarship has been slow to treat this digitally mediated corpus as literature proper, and political-communication scholarship has been slow to treat it as anything other than messaging. This article addresses that gap by asking how literary devices operating within Kenyan Gen Z digital protest discourse construct political meaning, mobilise collective identity, and reconfigure civic participation. Drawing on postcolonial theory, Butlerian performativity, Bhabha's theory of hybridity, and African theories of language and power associated with Ng?g? wa Thiong'o, Achille Mbembe, and Karin Barber, the study conducts a qualitative discourse analysis of publicly circulated protest texts collected between May 2024 and July 2025, spanning slogans, hashtags, chants, placards, memes, and spoken-word excerpts. Close reading identifies seven recurring devices: metaphor, satire, irony, symbolism, repetition, code-switching, and intertextuality. Moreover, the study traces how each performs distinct political work, from converting fiscal policy into embodied grievance to constructing a leaderless, ethnicity-transcending collective subject. The findings show that literary language operates as infrastructure for what the study terms constitutional civic pedagogy: a mode of address that teaches sovereignty through form rather than argument. The article's original contribution is a replicable framework for reading digital political ephemera as literature, extending African literary studies beyond canonical genres while offering political-communication scholars a vocabulary for the aesthetic dimensions of protest. Practically, the findings suggest that civic educators, journalists, and policymakers seeking to understand youth political consciousness must attend to literary form, not only to stated demands.