[Commlist] Call for Book Chapters: Creative Digital Cultures in Africa

Call for Book Chapters


Creative Digital Cultures in Africa


Edited by:

Prof Priscilla Boshoff (Rhodes University)

Dr Bimbo Fafowora (Rhodes University)

Dr Chikezie E. Uzuegbunam (Rhodes University)


Publisher: Emerald Publishing


Synopsis

African content creators have been quick to realise the affordances of 
the digital sphere. In the face of crippling digital divides, social 
inequalities, and political and economic instability, people across 
Africa have actively embraced the potential of social media, in 
particular, as a means to express themselves creatively to a range of 
ends. Yet, while social media platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, and 
Instagram command a global stage, not to mention the lion’s share of 
research, very little is known about how these platforms and the 
networked cultures they support are harnessed by African digital content 
creators within local contexts.


In some ways, this lack of research reflects the paucity of scholarly 
understanding of African popular “vernacular” creative culture and its 
relationship to the digital sphere. This may be due to scholarly 
concerns about pursuing critical topics that support a development 
agenda. For example, a key area of digital research in the African 
context examines the scope and implications of the digital “divide” or 
explores the relationship between the digital sphere and gender 
relations or democratic participation (Mano and Willems 2016). This 
proposal suggests that, while these topics are important and necessary, 
a “virtuous” approach to digital content tends to obscure the scope and 
nature of creative digital practice in Africa on the social media coalface.


This is not to say that critical foci are not important—they certainly 
are. But we suggest that by foregrounding creative digital practices, we 
might come closer to understanding by what means African content 
producers put social media to use for local ends. Situated at the 
“frontier” of African social experience, creatives of the marginalised 
majority world “contest taken-for-granted and often institutionalised 
bounded ideas engrained by social norms and binaries of thought and 
practices of identity and belonging” (Nyamnjoh and Brudvig 2017, 2 
<https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?modgYa>). Through their creative 
work, social media activities, and the kinds of content they produce, 
African creatives expand ‘what is out there’ for us to encounter and 
consider.


Popular culture, specifically its digital manifestations, is recognised 
as a primary means to articulate political resistance, social belonging, 
and cultural identity. The conditions of coloniality that pervade the 
social and political African landscape render this role particularly 
important. Far from simply copying the dominant genres of the social 
media world, African creatives adapt social media affordances to connect 
with and reinvigorate African ways of knowing and social belonging, such 
as community, family, and spirituality. The most “modern” of 
technologies thereby becomes a vehicle for the translation (or 
recuperation) of African forms of sociality that were supplanted by 
Western colonial social and political formations (for example, the 
“public sphere” or “civil society”). Yet, tied to globalised digital 
networks, African creatives are necessarily co-opted into dominant 
platforms and their associated genres. This tension between local 
meaning and global participation can be seen as a generative force that 
demands more sustained scholarly attention.


We call on digital media scholars and others from allied fields to 
submit 300-word proposals that deal with the following questions and themes:


  *

    What are the contexts in which and for which African creatives
    produce social media content?


  *

    What is the scope of African digital creative practice? What kinds
    of content are deemed interesting or necessary?


  *

    How do African creative choices show us what is “at stake” in local
    contexts?


  *

    In what ways does the creative digital work of African content
    producers foster or otherwise promote African ways of knowing and 
being?


  *

    How do new modes of creative practice construct new forms of social
    and cultural identity?


  *

    In what ways does African creative content stretch or reimagine
    contemporary digital genres, and with what cultural, social, and
    political consequences?


  *

    In what ways do African creatives work within and around the formal
    constraints of global social media platforms?


  *

    How do African creatives work with, against, or around digital
    infrastructural, geographical/spatial, and social inequalities and
    marginalisation—and to what effect?


  *

    What strategies are used by African creatives to foster communities
    of practice or affiliation in/for local and online contexts?


  *

    What measures do African creatives adopt to overcome algorithmic
    invisibility/marginalisation?


  *

    How do African creatives respond to or otherwise manage attempts to
    censor, silence, or shame them and their creative work?


  *

    How do African content producers protect their creative content?


  *

    How do African content producers leverage their creative work for
    their own or others’ benefit?


  *

    Young people, social media influencers, and creative work in African
    contexts


  *

    Digital labour, exploitation, and creative work in Africa


  *

    Platformisation, creative work, and its potentials and challenges in
    Africa


  *

    Platform monetisation and creative work in African contexts


  *

    Nollywood and emerging interfaces with content creators and skitmakers.


Submission: Please email your abstracts to the editors at: 
(creativedigitalcultures /at/ ru.ac.za) <mailto:(creativedigitalcultures /at/ ru.ac.za)>


Timeline:

Abstracts deadline: 22 November 2024

Communication of outcome: 30 November 2024

Full paper due: 31 March 2025


Note: no payment from the authors will be required.



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