Media and Identity in Africa

• Njogu, Kimani
• Indiana University Press; 2009
• Paperback: 333 pages
• 9780253222015

What is the role of the media in Africa? How do they work? How do they interact with global media? How do they reflect and express local culture? Incorporating both African and international perspectives, Media and Identity in Africa demonstrates how media outlets are used to perpetuate, question, or modify the unequal power relations between Africa and the rest of the world. Discussions about the construction of old and new social entities which are defined by class, gender, ethnicity, political and economic differences, wealth, poverty, cultural behavior, language, and religion dominate these new assessments of communications media in Africa. This volume addresses the tensions between the global and the local that have inspired creative control and use of traditional and modern forms of media. Kimani Njogu is Director of Twaweza Communications and former Associate Professor of African Languages at Kenyatta University, Kenya. John Middleton (1921–2009) was Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Religious Studies at Yale University.