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Cryptopolitics: Exposure, Concealment, and Digital Media

Victoria Bernal, Katrien Pype, Daivi Rodima-Taylor (eds.)

New York: Berghahn (2023), vii, 245 pp.

"Hidden information, double meanings, double-crossing, and the constant processes of encoding and decoding messages have always been important techniques in negotiating social and political power dynamics. Yet these tools, "cryptopolitics," are transformed when used within digital media. Focusing on ... more

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Disinformation in the Global South
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Herman Wasserman, Dani Madrid-Morales (eds.)

Guy Berger (foreword)

Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell (2022), xxv, 237 pp.

"In many parts of the Global South, coordinated political disinformation campaigns, rumor, and propaganda have long been a part of the social fabric, even before disinformation has become an area of scholarship in the Global North. The way disinformation manifests in this region, and responses to it ... more

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Media Practices and Changing African Socialities: Non-Media-Centric Perspectives

Jo Helle-Valle, Ardis Storm-Mathisen (eds.)

New York; Oxford: Berghahn (2020), 250 pp.

"Deriving from innovative new work by six researchers, this book questions what the new media's role is in contemporary Africa. The chapters are diverse - covering different areas of sociality in different countries - but they unite in their methodological and analytical foundation. The focus is on ... more

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Theorising Media and Conflict

Philipp Budka, Birgit Bräuchler (eds.)

New York; Oxford: Berghahn (2020), x, 339 pp.

"Theorising Media and Conflict is the result of a joint and interdisciplinary effort to set the theoretical and empirical agenda in theorising upon the complex relationship between media and conflict. By considering the theorisation work accomplished by the ‘Anthropology of Media’ series forerun ... more

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Anthropological Approaches to Media in Africa

Katrien Pype, Alessandro Jedlowski

In: A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa

Roy Richard Grinker; Stephen C. Lubkemann; Christopher B. Steiner; Euclides Gonçalves (eds.)

Wiley (2019), pp. 351-374

"Anthropologists began to study media relatively late in the history of the discipline. Research on media - in particular, mass media - tended to be associated with the societies most anthropologists came from, and thus with the self rather than the other, and except for a few rare exceptions, it wa ... more

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Religion, Media, and Marginality in Modern Africa

Felicitas Becker, Joel Cabrita, Marie Rodet (eds.)

Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press (2018), ix, 320 pp.

"Religion, Media, and Marginality in Modern Africa is one of the first volumes to put new media and old media into significant conversation with one another, and also offers a rare comparison between Christianity and Islam in Africa. The contributors find many previously unacknowledged correspondenc ... more

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The Palgrave Handbook of Media and Communication Research in Africa
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Bruce Mutsvairo (ed.)

Cham: Palgrave Macmillan (2018), xxix, 497 pp.

"This handbook attempts to fill the gap in empirical scholarship of media and communication research in Africa, from an Africanist perspective. The collection draws on expert knowledge of key media and communication scholars in Africa and the diaspora, offering a counter-narrative to existing Wester ... more

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Pratiques religieuses africaines et médias numériques: Prolonger la réflexion

Katrien Pype

Émulations: Revue de Sciences Sociales, issue 24 (2017), pp. 135-144

"Cette série de six articles, tous focalisés sur l’Afrique francophone, traite chacun à leur manière du thème principal de l’usage de l’Internet par des groupes religieux sur le continent africain. Cinq de ces contributions explorent l’usage religieux des médias numériques en Afrique ... more

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Everyday Media Culture in Africa: Audiences and Users

Wendy Willems, Winston Mano (eds.)

London: Routledge (2017), 260 pp.

"This volume examines the lived experiences of Africans and their interaction with different kinds of media: old and new, state and private, elite and popular, global and national, material and virtual. By offering a comparative, critical and largely qualitative account of audiences and users across ... a range of national contexts in different regions of Africa, the book examines media through the voices and perspectives of those engaging with it rather than reducing audiences and users to numbers and statistics, ready to be exploited as potential target markets or as political constituencies. The critical, qualitative research perspective adopted in this book enables us to gain a better understanding of how African viewers, listeners and users make sense of a range of media forms; what role these play in their everyday lives and what audience and user engagement can tell us about how citizens perceive the state, how they imagine themselves in the wider world and how they relate to each other. The book argues that the experiences of audiences and engagements of users with a range of media—newspapers, radio, television, magazines, internet, mobile phones, social media—are always grounded in particular contexts, worldviews and knowledge systems of life and wisdom: ‘It is akin to the tortoise. The tortoise never leaves its shell behind. It carries it wherever it goes’ (Chivaura 2006: 221). African media audiences and users carry their contexts and cultural repertoires in the same way a tortoise carries its shell. Thus far, the bulk of academic research on media and communication in Africa has addressed the policy and regulatory aspects as well as the relation between media institutions and the state (Willems 2014a). While studies on media, democratization and press freedom are invaluable, the ways in which ordinary people make sense of, and relate to, media in their everyday lives are largely left beyond consideration. As Barber (1997: 357) has pointed out, ‘[w]hat has not yet been sufficiently explored is the possibility that specific African audiences have distinctive, conventional modes and styles of making meaning, just as performers/speakers do. We need to ask how audiences do their work of interpretation’." (Page 4) more

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The Making of the Pentecostal Melodrama: Religion, Media and Gender in Kinshasa

Katrien Pype

New York: Berghahn, paperback ed. (2015), xvii, 331 pp.

"How religion, gender, and urban sociality are expressed in and mediated via television drama in Kinshasa is the focus of this ethnographic study. Influenced by Nigerian films and intimately related to the emergence of a charismatic Christian scene, these teleserials integrate melodrama, conversion ... more

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New Media and Religious Transformations in Africa

Rosalind I. J. Hackett, Benjamin F. Soares (eds.)

Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press (2015), xii, 316 pp.

"New Media and Religious Transformations in Africa casts a critical look at Africa's rapidly evolving religious media scene. Following political liberalization, media deregulation, and the proliferation of new media technologies, many African religious leaders and activists have appropriated such me ... more

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Médias, religion et mobilité en Afrique et dans la diaspora = Media, Religion and Mobility in Africa and the Diaspora

Katrien Pype, Anne Mélice, Steven Van Wolputte (eds.)

Social Compass, volume 61, issue 1 (2014), pp. 3-72

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Reciprocity and risk in the work and lives of Kinshasa's TV journalists

Katrien Pype

Journal of African Cultural Studies, volume 25, issue 1 (2013), pp. 57-71

"Just like in many other sub-Saharan African countries, Kinshasa's media world has opened up in the mid 1990s. Especially since 2002, local TV stations have been mushrooming. This has not only led to a proliferation of media productions, but it has also enlarged the terrain of local journalists, in ... more

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Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry

Matthias Krings, Onookome Okome (eds.)

Bloomington: Indiana University Press (2013), viii, 371 pp.

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Historical Routes Towards Religious Television Fiction in Post-Mobutu Kinshasa

Katrien Pype

Studies in World Christianity, volume 15, issue 2 (2009), pp. 131-148

"In this article I primarily focus upon locally produced television serials (also called maboke, théâtre populaire, or télédramatiques), which constitute one important genre that help to spread what some describe as the Pentecostalist ideology. The main theme of Kinshasa’s post-millennial tele ... dramas is the spiritual battle (Li. litumba ya molimo). They show how the Devil and his accomplices (demons and witches) operate in the material world and thus combat the Christian God. Witches, fools and pastors are the main protagonists of the teleserials. The programmes often conclude with confessions and deliverances. Such rituals are connected with understandings of evil and culturally accepted means of restoration and purification. The moral progression of the serials’ protagonists reflects a didactic purpose, showing the audience how to become a good Christian and how to hold strong in the spiritual battle (Pype 2008). Special effects are deliberately deployed to make manifest the hidden workings of occult practitioners and the miraculous effects of prayers, deliverance rituals and Christian expertise. With regard to the serials’ format, the insertion of Christian songs at the beginning and ending of the episodes, the dropping of Biblical verses into scenes and display of Bible verses in the corners of the screen during the broadcasts indicate the Christian character of Kinshasa’s teleserials. All these characteristics relate both to the instructive goal of the serials and to the intentions of the dramatic artists to create a mood among the audience to watch the programs as divine lessons. As most of Kinshasa’s evangelising artists state, they aim at bringing a spiritual awareness to the audience. They also hope to transmit spiritual knowledge via the interplay of the fictitious narrative, the power of the Word (activated through the multiple Bible verses that are pronounced) and the image (special effects such as visualisations of the occult). The main questions addressed here are how, why and when Kinshasa’s television serials have acquired this Pentecostalist character. I approach Kinshasa’s teleserials not at all as quasi-timeless symbolic documents but as cultural products that carry a history embedded in the significant political and cultural processes Kinois have witnessed." (Page 133) more

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‘We Need to Open Up the Country’: Development and the Christian Key Scenario in the Social Space of Kinshasa’s Teleserials

Katrien Pype

Journal of African Media Studies, volume 1, issue 1 (2009), pp. 101-116

"This article discusses discourses on development in the social space of Kinshasa’s post-Mobutu teleserials. The producers (dramatic artists and born-again Christian leaders; some are both) contend that their work will transform society, counter the social and political crisis and improve the nati ... more

Disinformation in the Global South Top Insights

The Palgrave Handbook of Media and Communication Research in Africa Top Insights

Disinformation in the Global South
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The Palgrave Handbook of Media and Communication Research in Africa
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