[Commlist] Call for chapters: Creative Digital Cultures in Africa

Call for Book Chapters


Creative Digital Cultures in Africa


To be edited by:

Prof Priscilla Boshoff (Rhodes University)

Dr Bimbo Fafowora (Rhodes University)

Dr Chikezie E. Uzuegbunam (Rhodes University)


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).
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 to submit 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)


Timeline:

Abstracts deadline: 31 October 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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