Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (review)

Brian Larkin's Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria marks an important intervention in the field of Film and Media Studies because it de-emphasizes a longstanding focus on the unity of cinematic articulation and enunciation in favor of examining the effects of cinema on infrastructure and reception in a well-defined cultural context. Larkin examines colonial and postcolonial media in the northern region of Nigeria, known as Kano State, which serves as a privileged site for examining the context and effects associated with colonial film, radio, and contemporary Nigerian video-film. Cinema, in particular, has served as a source of wonder and debate in the lived reality of postcolonial modernity, and Larkin is especially keen on addressing its effects in the variable current of the lived Nigerian urban experience.

As Larkin explains, Signal and Noise focuses on "the experience of going to the cinema as greater than the films themselves" in an effort to "unpack the cultural logics of media technologies and their unintended consequences, which create the particular experience of urban life in colonial and postcolonial Nigeria."¹ As you might have guessed, Larkin is an anthropologist, but he works very much within an interdisciplinary strand of Media Studies. Larkin has spent long periods of time in the Hausa-speaking and Muslim Kano State.

Larkin foregrounds the relevance of the discourse of urban modernity to early cinema, following Miriam Hansen's lead,² while also evoking the broader discourse of alternative modernities, which has been an important theme in African Studies over the past few years.³ Instead of merely proposing a neutralized sense of cultural difference as a rallying cry against the failed effects of modernization, Larkin provides us with an important semiotic analysis of media history and a fieldwork-grounded grasp of the experiential that goes to the very heart of debates about the relationship between film and media representations. Signal and Noise focuses on the capacity of media technologies to carry messages (or signals as he calls them) and on the technical interference and breakdown that clouds and even prevents that signal's transmission.

Larkin's study of media effects includes a brief history of the British Colonial Film Unit that was inspired by William Seller's use of film as a form of adapted education in rural Nigeria. He deftly analyzes the debates between British academics, administrators, and politicians about understanding the so-called "African mind," which enables him to produce a nuanced reading of the colonial context. Furthermore, the colonial modernity dimension of Larkin's work is conversant with well-informed scholarship that connects the effects of British colonial media to the colonial and postcolonial context, as in the work of James Burns, Priya Jaikumar, and Rosaleen Smyth. Most recently, this area of scholarship in Film Studies has benefited from the increased availability of the films themselves.⁴

Signal and Noise begins with an incisive discussion of "indirect rule" in the Nigerian context, under British rule, and then focuses on the ascension of what Larkin calls the "colonial sublime." This concept functions as an underlying bridge throughout the volume; the author uses it to point to the manner in which the rule of colonial difference, pace Chatterjee, not only explains the contradictory nature of indirect rule in its will to simultaneously preserve and transform, but also serves as the basis for projecting the power of modernity. In the three chapters that follow, a history of colonial media infrastructure is explained through the history of radio (chapter 2), the magic of exhibition that included comedies (majigi) and an array of instructional colonial films (chapter 3), and the built space of cinema in which majigi is opposed to the exhibition of fiction films, often of Indian origin, and referred to as sinima (chapter 4). Larkin interweaves his discussion of these three different kinds of audiovisual experience with interviews with various participants and organizers of these events such...