African Media Space And Globalization

This book surveys the African media industry, examining various sections of the media at the elite level. Drawing on contributors from diverse regions and media and communication disciplines, the book provides definitive analyses of the switch from analogue to digital broadcasting in select African countries. This timely and relevant collection of essays covers trending topics in communication and media studies, as scholars globally continue to examine the impact of digital technology on media practice, training, and education. The contributors offer rich perspectives on crucial issues, blending practice and scholarship as former media practitioners and academics come together to fill a major gap in media practice and education in Africa. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of globalization and African media.

This book surveys the African media industry, examining various sections of the media at the elite level. Drawing on contributors from diverse regions and media and communication disciplines, the book provides definitive analyses of the switch from analogue to digital broadcasting in select African countries. This timely and relevant collection of essays covers trending topics in communication and media studies, as scholars globally continue to examine the impact of digital technology on media practice, training, and education. The contributors offer rich perspectives on crucial issues, blending practice and scholarship as former media practitioners and academics come together to fill a major gap in media practice and education in Africa. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of globalization and African media.

In this book, media professionals and scholars of media studies examine how the Nigerian media industry has changed in the era of globalization and digitization. They provide history on the Nigerian media industry and examine changes in media law, journalism, broadcasting, sports media, and digital news.

This book considers the promises and challenges of globalization for Africa. Why have African states been perennially unable to diversify their economies and move beyond export of primary produce, even as Southeast Asia has made a tremendous leap into manufacturing? What institutional impediments are in play in African states? What reforms would mitigate the negative effects of globalization and distribute its benefits more equitably? Covering critical themes such as political leadership, security challenges, the creative sector, and community life, essays in this volume argue that the starting point for Africa’s meaningful engagement with the rest of the world must be to look inward, examine Africa’s institutions, and work towards reforms that promote inclusiveness and stability.

In Media in Postapartheid South Africa, author Sean Jacobs turns to media politics and the consumption of media as a way to understand recent political developments in South Africa and their relations with the African continent and the world. Jacobs looks at how mass media define the physical and human geography of the society and what it means for comprehending changing notions of citizenship in postapartheid South Africa. Jacobs claims that the media have unprecedented control over the distribution of public goods, rights claims, and South Africa's integration into the global political economy in ways that were impossible under the state-controlled media that dominated the apartheid years. Jacobs takes a probing look at television commercials and the representation of South Africans, reality television shows and South African continental expansion, soap operas and postapartheid identity politics, and the internet as a space for reassertions and reconfigurations of identity. As South Africa becomes more integrated into the global economy, Jacobs argues that local media have more weight in shaping how consumers view these products in unexpected and consequential ways.

A study of mass media in twenty-first-century South Africa offering “revelations about the nature of citizenship and public engagement in our media saturated age” (Daniel R. Magaziner, author of The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa , 1968–1977). In Media in Postapartheid South Africa, Sean Jacobs turns to media politics and the consumption of media as a way to understand recent political developments in South Africa and their relations with the African continent and the world. Jacobs looks at how mass media define the physical and human geography of the society and what it means for comprehending changing notions of citizenship in postapartheid South Africa. Jacobs claims that the media have unprecedented control over the distribution of public goods, rights claims, and South Africa’s integration into the global political economy in ways that were impossible under the state-controlled media that dominated the apartheid years. Jacobs takes a probing look at television commercials and the representation of South Africans, reality television shows and South African continental expansion, soap operas and postapartheid identity politics, and the internet as a space for reassertions and reconfigurations of identity. As South Africa becomes more integrated into the global economy, Jacobs argues that local media have more weight in shaping how consumers view these products in unexpected and consequential ways.

This book develops a nuanced decolonial critique that calls for the decolonization of media and communication studies in Africa and the Global South. Last Moyo argues that the academic project in African Media Studies and other non-Western regions continues to be shaped by Western modernity’s histories of imperialism, colonialism, and the ideologies of Eurocentrism and neoliberalism. While Africa and the Global South dismantled the physical empire of colonialism after independence, the metaphysical empire of epistemic and academic colonialism is still intact and entrenched in the postcolonial university’s academic programmes like media and communication studies. To address these problems, Moyo argues for the development of a Southern theory that is not only premised on the decolonization imperative, but also informed by the cultures, geographies, and histories of the Global South. The author recasts media studies within a radical cultural and epistemic turn that locates future projects of theory building within a decolonial multiculturalism that is informed by trans-cultural and trans- epistemic dialogue between Southern and Northern epistemologies.

This handbook comprises fresh and incisive research focusing on African media, culture and communication. The chapters from a cross-section of scholars dissect the forces shaping the field within a changing African context. It adds critical corpora of African scholarship and theory that places the everyday worlds, needs and uses of Africans first. The book goes beyond critiques of the marginality of African approaches in media and communication studies to offer scholars the theoretical and empirical toolkit needed to start building critical corpora of African scholarship and theory that places the everyday worlds, needs and uses of Africans first. Decoloniality demands new epistemological interventions in African media, culture and communication, and this book is an important interlocutor in this space. In a globally interconnected world, changing patterns of authority and power pose new challenges to the ways in which media institutions are constituted and managed, as well as how communication and media policy is negotiated and the manner in which citizens engage with increasing media opportunities. The handbook focuses on the interrelationships of the local and the global and the concomitant consequences for media practice, education and citizen engagement in today’s Africa. Altogether, the book foregrounds convivial epistemologies relevant for locating African media and communication in the pluriverse. This handbook is an essential read for critical media, communications, cultural studies and journalism scholars.