Abstract
This talk looks at African screen media history, and analyzes the impact of technological innovation on the (un)making of informational sovereignty over the past forty years – from the introduction of the videotape at the end of the 1970s to the introduction of the internet and digital television in the 2000s. To do this, the talk focuses in particular on a specific category of actors who are at the heart of these processes, the screen media producers, in one of the sub-Saharan African countries at the avant-garde of these dynamics, Nigeria – a country whose screen media industry has become, over the past three decades, the largest in the continent, attracting global academic and corporate interest. Combining first-hand ethnographic data to the analysis of the research results of other scholars who have investigated the emergence and growth of Nollywood over the past decades, I follow these media producers and their relationship to technologies and the State, over a period of forty years, to closely analyze the impact of technological innovation on their profession, as well as on their way of interacting with the institutions and the big international media companies which have penetrated the continent in recent years. This socio-historical approach aims at revisiting the (by now, well-known) history of the Nigerian screen media industry in light of the issue of sovereignty, with the objective of using the parable of Nollywood as a prism to rethink the interaction between media technology innovation and State control in Africa today.
About the Speaker
Alessandro Jedlowski is a media anthropologist and the coordinator of the “Chaire Diasporas Africaines” of the Bordeaux Institute of Political Sciences (Sciences Po Bordeaux). His researches focus mainly on African media and creative industries and on the analysis of the networks of cultural and economic circulation that connect them to non-Western countries like India, China and Brazil. His most recent publications include the special issue of the French journal Politique Africaine (no. 154, 2019/1) “L’audiovisuel africain et le capitalisme global”, and the books Regimes of Responsibility in Africa : Genealogies, Rationalities and Conflict (coedited with Benjamin Rubbers, Berghahn, 2019) and Mobility between Africa, Asia and Latin America: Economic Networks and Cultural Interactions (coedited with Ute Röschenthaler, Zed Books, 2017).