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 definitions of "democracy" and "development". Drawing on case studies from various regions of the African continent, the essays in this publication employ a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to ask 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 "Americanised entertainment culture" to the detriment of local traditions. The book covers a variety of media formats and platforms ranging from radio and television to the internet, mobile phones, street posters, film, and music.

According to the publication, "Grounded in empirical work by experienced scholars who are acknowledged experts in their fields, this contemporary and topical book provides an insight into some of the challenges faced throughout the African continent, such as HIV and AIDS, poverty and inequality, and political participation. Examples are grounded in a critical engagement with theory, moving beyond descriptive studies and therefore contributing to the intellectual project of internationalizing media studies."

Popular Media, Democracy and Development in Africa seeks to provide students and scholars with a critical perspective on issues relating to popular media, democracy, and citizenship outside the global North. 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 analyses of media in the African continent of interest to students and scholars of media in Africa and further afield.

The book contains the following chapters: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)