ABOUT THIS BOOK

Media, Culture, and Decolonization: Re-righting the Subaltern Histories of Ghana invites us to look at media and culture from a decolonial perspective. Through Dagbaŋ epistemologies and knowledge systems, this book examines media by highlighting how African languages, cultures, and traditions can shift how we think of knowledge. It is an offering to anyone curious about the relationship between culture, language, and media. By focusing on African language media in Ghana such as film, television, and radio, the book emphasizes the importance of espousing a decolonial politic and praxis in the process of co-creating knowledge with Indigenous communities. It connects the struggles of global majority countries and demonstrates the ways in which (neo)colonialism and imperialism impede the work toward liberatory futures. This book demonstrates the potential that African language media hold as tools of cultural and epistemological decolonization.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

WUNPINI FATIMATA MOHAMMED is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. She is coeditor of African Women in Digital Spaces: Redefining Social Movements on the Continent and in the Diaspora.

REVIEWS

"This book is part of an unstoppable tidal shift in the center of knowledge production's gravity from Eurocentrism. Mohammed convincingly illustrates that the world takes on intricate hues and shapes when processed from the lens of indigeneity—a powerful tool to transform Africa(ns)."

— Sylvia Tamale, author of Decolonization and Afro-Feminism

"Drawing from lived experience in Northern Ghana, collectively coproduced knowledge, attention to the materiality of language, and a radical feminist subaltern analysis, Mohammed offers a bold intervention in how we should theorize mediated culture in the global capitalist and colonial present."

— Paula Chakravartty, James Weldon Johnson Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University

"In this truly foundational contribution to scholarship on decolonizing African media studies, Mohammed combines innovative methodological approaches into excavating local agencies in African media productions grounded in indigenous epistemologies within the emerged digital mediascape. Her focus on Indigenous language media practices in Northern Ghana, an area often ignored by researchers, enables her to bring to media scholarship a historical view of subaltern media practices to theorize the political economy of media practice and consumption within the local, the national, and the global. I strongly recommend this book to all cultural studies and postcolonial media scholars."

— Amin Alhassan, Director-General of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Decolonizing African Media Studies
1          Bilchiinsi Philosophy, Media and Global Indigenous Epistemologies
2          Technology, Literacy and Media Development in Northern Ghana
3          Subalterns, Griots and Media
4          African Cinemas, Globalization and Resistance
5          Movie Distribution, Urban Architecture and the Newsification of Movies
6          Television for Social Change
Conclusion: Resisting Cultural Imperialism
Acknowledgments
The Chapter Proverbs and Their Translations
References
Filmography
Index