"This book addresses the issues raised by digital platforms in the Global South, with an emphasis on the cultural stakes involved. It brings together an interdisciplinary team of researchers - including political economists, socio-economists, geographers, media sociologists or anthropologists - who
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each explore these issues through an insightful case study at a local, national, regional or international scale. While studying the strategies of some of the main US-based Big Tech platforms or video streaming platforms towards the Global South, the chapters also consider the often-neglected active role local or regional actors play in the expansion of those Western digital players, and highlight the existence of a constellation of local or regional platforms that have emerged in Africa, Asia, Latin America or the Middle East. In addition to analysing the complex relationships of competition, collaboration or dependence between these diverse actors, this volume examines the ways in which the rise of these digital platforms has generated new forms of cultural entrepreneurship and participated in the reconfiguring of the conditions in which cultural contents are produced and circulated in the Global South." (Publisher description)
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"On the basis of the results of an ongoing research project on the activities of the Chinese media company StarTimes in Nigeria and Côte d' Ivoire, this paper analyses the fluid and fragmentary dimension of the engagements between Chinese media and African publics, while equally emphasizing the pow
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er dynamics that underlie them. Focusing on a variety of ethnographic sources, it argues for an approach to the study of Chinese media expansion in Africa able to take into account, simultaneously, the macro-political and macro-economic factors which condition the nature of China–Africa media interactions, the political intentions behind them (as, for example, the Chinese soft power policies and their translation into specific media contents), and the micro dimension of the practices and uses of the media made by the actors (producers and consumers of media) in the field." (Abstract)
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"Der US-amerikanische Streamingdienst kauft sich in Afrikas wichtigste Filmindustrie ein. Ob das anspruchsvollen afrikanischen Filmemachern mehr Geld und mehr Zuschauer bringt, ist jedoch fraglich." (Einleitung)
"Latin American telenovelas began to be widely broadcast on African screens between the late 1970s and early 1980s, and today are among the most popular entertainment products on the continent. The content, aesthetic and narrative format of telenovelas have become a model for many African video film
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producers, who have incorporated some of telenovelas’ defining elements in their productions in order to attract local audiences. This special issue analyses the impact of telenovelas’ circulation in Africa by focusing on the ‘uses’ African audiences and media producers make of them. Why do telenovelas travel so well around sub-Saharan Africa? How do African audiences make sense of them? And what impact do these media products have on local media entrepreneurs and on the aesthetics and narrative aspects of the contents they produce? In this introduction we provide some background and data about the history and the political economy of telenovelas’ circulation in Africa, and answer the questions raised above by connecting the finding of the essays included in the special issue to ongoing debates on the global circulation of melodrama, on the transformation of African screen media, and on the performative dimension of African audiences’ engagement with foreign media forms." (Abstract)
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"Anthropologists began to study media relatively late in the history of the discipline. Research on media - in particular, mass media - tended to be associated wiht he societies most anthropologists came from, and thus with the self rather than the other, and except for a few rare exceptions, it was
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not until the late 1980s that anthropologists began to turn systematic attention to media as a social practice. This was true even for older media, such as songs, dance and theater, since those topics were associated with the other late research focus of urban anthropology." (Introduction)
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"Ce dossier se concentre sur ces transformations plus récentes afin d’analyser leur impact sur l’économie et la politique de la production et de la distribution audiovisuelle en Afrique, tout en mettant en question les cadres théoriques et méthodologiques que nous adoptons en tant que cherch
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eurs pour les étudier. Dans cette optique, le Nigeria reste un cas d’étude incontournable à même d’influencer le débat sur les transformations du secteur audiovisuel à l’échelle continentale. Pour cette raison, une section de ce numéro est entièrement dédiée aux transformations récentes de l’industrie audiovisuelle de ce pays et à une réflexion critique sur les approches utilisées pour les analyser, grâce aux contributions de trois chercheurs qui ont fortement marqué les études sur ces phénomènes au cours des dernières années : Jonathan Haynes, Akin Adesokan et Moradewun Adejunmobi. Cette réflexion critique prolonge un débat que les textes du dossier (par Anouk Batard, Abdalla Uba Adamu, Julie Dénommée et Brian Larkin) permettent à la fois d’encadrer et de dépasser, grâce à des propositions théoriques et méthodologiques innovantes, ainsi que par la richesse des données empiriques analysées." (Page 12)
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"Bringing theory and practice together, 'African Cinema and Human Rights' argues that moving images have a significant role to play in advancing the causes of justice and fairness. The contributors to this volume identify three key ways in which film can achieve these goals: documenting human rights
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abuses and thereby supporting the claims of victims and goals of truth and reconciliation within larger communities; legitimating, and consequently solidifying, an expanded scope for human rights; and promoting the realization of social and economic rights. Including the voices of African scholars, scholar-filmmakers, African directors Jean-Marie Teno and Gaston Kaboré, and researchers whose work focuses on transnational cinema, this volume explores overall perspectives, and differences of perspective, pertaining to Africa, human rights, and human rights filmmaking alongside specific case studies of individual films and areas of human rights violations." (Publisher description)
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