African Digital Cultures: Platforms, Publics, and Infrastructures

Analyzing the innovative and popular uses of digital media technologies across many African countries, African Digital Cultures reveals how digitization, through its inherent computational and epistemological logics, is deeply embedded in the daily lives of millions of people, producing new structures of feeling and new possibilities for political participation, cultural expression, and creative agency. This book grapples with the affective elements of mediatized social relations and consciousness, as platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook, and TikTok increasingly inform the construction of diverse kinds of publics—from the religious and political to the sexual and the literary. Focusing on the creative and disruptive uses of social media platforms, financial technologies, digital infrastructures, and artificial intelligence, this collection brings together scholars whose work challenges the notion of Africa as a place of technological lack, underscoring the rich histories and contributions of the continent to global digital media. This interdisciplinary volume offers an essential and decolonizing understanding of digital media cultures and histories from an African perspective.