1st Edition
Popular Media, Democracy and Development in Africa
Popular Media, Democracy and Development in Africa examines the role that popular media could play to encourage political debate, provide information for development, or critique the very definitions of ‘democracy’ and ‘development’. Drawing on diverse case studies from various regions of the African continent, essays employ a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to ask critical questions about the potential of popular media to contribute to democratic culture, provide sites of resistance, or, conversely, act as agents for the spread of Americanized entertainment culture to the detriment of local traditions. A wide variety of media formats and platforms are discussed, ranging from radio and television to the Internet, mobile phones, street posters, film and music.
As part of the Routledge series Internationalizing Media Studies, the book responds to the important challenge of broadening perspectives on media studies by bringing together a range of expert analyses of media in the African continent that will be of interest to students and scholars of media in Africa and further afield.
Notes on Contributors Introduction Part I: The popular media sphere: Theoretical interventions Chapter 1 De-westernizing media theory to make room for African experience Francis Nyamnjoh Chapter 2 Revisiting cultural imperialism and its critics Eric Louw Chapter 3 At the crossroads of the formal and popular: convergence culture and new publics in Zimbabwe Wendy Willems Chapter 4 Theorising development and democracy through popular community media Victor Ayedun-Aluma Chapter 5 Talk radio, democracy and citizenship in (South) Africa Tanja Bosch Part II: Popular media, politics and power: engaging with democracy and development Chapter 6 Popular Music as Journalism in Africa: Issues and Contexts Winston Mano Chapter 7 Street News: The Role of Posters in Democratic Participation in Ghana Audrey Gadzekpo Chapter 8 ‘If You Rattle A Snake, Be Prepared To Be Bitten’: Popular Culture, Politics And The Kenyan News Media George Ogola Chapter 9 Post-apartheid South African Social Movements on Film Sean Jacobs Part III: Audiences, agency and media in everyday life Chapter 10 The Amazing Race in Burkina Faso H. Leslie Steeves Chapter 11 (South) African Articulations of the Ordinary, or, How Popular Print Commodities (Re)Organize Our Lives Sonja Narunsky-Laden Chapter 12 Popular TV Programmes and Audiences in Kinshasa Marie-Soleil Frere Chapter 13 New technologies as tools of empowerment: African youth and public sphere participation Levi Obijiofor Part IV: Identity and community between the local and the global Chapter 14 Transnational flows and local identities in Muslim Northern Nigerian Films: From Dead Poets Society through Mohabbatein to So… Abdalla Uba Adamu Chapter 15 Local Stories, Global Discussions. Websites, politics and identity in African contexts Inge Brinkman, Siri Lamoureaux, Daniela Merolla and Mirjam de Bruijn Chapter 16 Survival of ‘radio culture’ in a converged networked new media environment Okoth Fred Mudhai Chapter 17 Policing popular media in Africa Monica Chibita Index
Biography
Herman Wasserman is Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University, South Africa and Honorary Senior Lecturer in Journalism Studies, University of Sheffield, UK. He is editor of the journal Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies and has published widely on media in Southern Africa. Recent publications include Tabloid Journalism in South Africa: True Story! (2010) and Media Ethics Beyond Borders (co-edited, 2010).
