African Digital Cultures: Platforms, Performances, and Perspectives

Drawing from Kenya to South Africa, Namibia to Nigeria, Malawi to Zimbabwe, this edited collection explores how digital platforms (text, audio, image and video-oriented) have reconfigured cultural production, distribution, consumption, and monetization in Africa. The book foregrounds contemporary African perspectives on how ordinary people and social media influencers are implicated in the platformization of cultural production. It calls attention to the myriad ways in which digital Africans are using restricted access to the digital to produce, distribute, circulate, and monetize cultural content at the margins of surveillance capitalism. This volume highlights how Africans are harnessing the potential of the digital in preserving, showcasing, performing, monetizing and platforming their own cultures. The major highlight of this book is the innovative and creative ways in which the young and old Africans are using popular digital technologies for a wide range of cultural productions.