Studying Media “from” the South: African Media Studies and Global Perspectives

By taking the 2014 Johannesburg edition of DISCOP, the largest film and television content market in Africa, as its ethnographic starting point, this essay critically discusses the position of Africa in contemporary film and media studies. It argues that, if the marginal position to which studies of African media have historically been relegated within film and media studies curricula and conferences around the world has never been justified or justifiable, today, in light of the transformations that have taken place in media sectors worldwide over the past two decades, this marginality seems even more striking and difficult to accept. In fact, paraphrasing the provocative argument that Jean and John Comaroff propose in their recent book Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America Is Evolving Toward Africa, it is possible to say that to look at media from the South is today a necessary move to interpret the way media production and dissemination are transforming worldwide. These very transformations tend to manifest themselves first, and with their sharpest and most immediate consequences, in the South, for, as the Comaroffs would have it, “contemporary world-historical processes are disrupting received geographies of core and periphery, relocating southward—and, of course, eastward as well—some of the most innovative and energetic modes of producing value.” This invites scholars to try to make sense of the world from these same vantage points—that is, it invites us to study media from the south as a way to make sense of wider transformations taking place the world over.