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Title Media/Fetish: A Postcolonial Archeology of New Media and Africa
Full text https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8k25k43s
Date 2019
Author(s) Blaylock, Jennifer Anne
Contributor(s) Doane, Mary Ann
Abstract Media/Fetish analyzes the history of media technologies in anglophone West Africa with a special emphasis on Ghana from the early twentieth century to the present. Each chapter examines representations of a different media technology'gramophones, cinema, television, and mobile phones'at the time when they were new. Through an engagement with African studies, critical race theory, and postcolonial studies, Media/Fetish addresses a recurring deficiency in the history and theory of new media. By reorienting the emphasis from historical moments of invention, which tacitly privilege Euro-American ontologies of new media, to the analysis of the meanings of media technologies once they are adopted and adapted, Media/Fetish shows how the world is structured by new media use in Accra as much as it is by new media design in Silicon Valley. I argue that media have, in part, been made 'new' by their discursive relationship to racialized development narratives. Be it the colonial civilizing mission to bring Western knowledge to Africans through mobile cinema or the promise of black uplift through the formation of Ghana's national television, race has been crucial to global theories of new media.
Subject(s) Film studies; African studies; Decolonial; Fetish; Ghana; New Media; Postcolonial; Technology
Language en
Publisher eScholarship, University of California
Type of publication etd
Format application/pdf
Rights public
Identifier qt8k25k43s
Repository Berkeley - University of California
Added to C-A: 2023-11-29;10:21:34