Media Studies

Powerful Frequencies
Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola, 1931–2002
By Marissa J. Moorman

Radio technology and broadcasting played a central role in the formation of colonial Portuguese Southern Africa and the postcolonial nation-state, Angola. Moorman details how settlers, the colonial state, African nationalists, and the postcolonial state all used radio to project power, while the latter employed it to challenge empire.

Talkative Polity
Radio, Domination, and Citizenship in Uganda
By Florence Brisset-Foucault

Until they were banned in 2009, the radio debates called Ugandan People’s Parliaments gave common folk a forum to air their views. But how do people talk about politics in an authoritarian regime? The forms and parameters of such speech turn out to be more complex than a simple confrontation between an oppressive state and a liberal civil society.

Shakespeare the Illusionist
Magic, Dreams, and the Supernatural on Film
By Neil Forsyth

In Shakespeare the Illusionist, Neil Forsyth reviews the history of Shakespeare’s plays on film, assessing what filmmakers and TV directors have made of the spells, haunts, and apparitions— Puck and the fairies, ghosts and witches, or Prospero’s island—in his plays. A bold step forward in Shakespeare and film studies.

Religion, Media, and Marginality in Modern Africa
Edited by Felicitas Becker, Joel Cabrita, and Marie Rodet

In recent years, anthropologists, historians, and others have been drawn to study the profuse and creative usages of digital media by religious movements. At the same time, scholars of Christian Africa have long been concerned with the history of textual culture, the politics of Bible translation, and the status of the vernacular in Christianity.

Reel Pleasures
Cinema Audiences and Entrepreneurs in Twentieth-Century Urban Tanzania
By Laura Fair

Reel Pleasures brings the world of African moviehouses and the publics they engendered to life, revealing how local fans creatively reworked global media—from Indian melodrama to Italian westerns, kung fu, and blaxploitation films—to speak to local dreams and desires.

Passionate Revolutions
The Media and the Rise and Fall of the Marcos Regime
By Talitha Espiritu

Passionate Revolutions examines the role of political emotions and media in the rise and fall of the Marcos regime. Focusing on the sentimental stories and melodramatic cultural politics of the press and cinema, Espiritu discusses how aesthetics helped secure the dictator’s control and fuel the popular struggles that led to his overthrow.

Taking Liberties
Gender, Transgressive Patriotism, and Polish Drama, 1786–1989
By Halina Filipowicz

Moving beyond a traditional study of Polish dramatic literature, Taking Liberties is a masterful intellectual history of what may be called patriotism without borders: a nonnational form of loyalty compatible with the universal principles and practices of democracy and human rights.

Immigration, Diversity, and Broadcasting in the United States 1990—2001
By Vibert C. Cambridge

The last decade of the twentieth century brought a maturing of the new racial and ethnic communities in the United States and the emergence of diversity and multiculturalism as dominant fields of discourse in legal, educational, and cultural contexts.

Television, Nation, and Culture in Indonesia
By Philip Kitley

The culture of television in Indonesia began with its establishment in 1962 as a public broadcasting service. From that time, through the deregulation of television broadcasting in 1990 and the establishment of commercial channels, television can be understood, Philip Kitley argues, as a part of the New Order’s national culture project, designed to legitimate an idealized Indonesian national cultural identity.

The Power to Name
A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa
By Stephanie Newell

Between the 1880s and the 1940s, the region known as British West Africa became a dynamic zone of literary creativity and textual experimentation. African-owned newspapers offered local writers numerous opportunities to contribute material for publication, and editors repeatedly defined the press as a vehicle to host public debates rather than simply as an organ to disseminate news or editorial ideology.

African Video Movies and Global Desires
A Ghanaian History
By Carmela Garritano

African Video Movies and Global Desires is the first full-length scholarly study of Ghana’s commercial video industry, an industry that has produced thousands of movies over the last twenty years and has grown into an influential source of cultural production. Produced and consumed under circumstances of dire shortage and scarcity, African video movies narrate the desires and anxieties created by Africa’s incorporation into the global cultural economy.Drawing

Hollywood’s Africa after 1994
Edited by MaryEllen Higgins

Hollywood’s Africa after 1994 investigates Hollywood’s colonial film legacy in the postapartheid era, and contemplates what has changed in the West’s representations of Africa.

Cinematic Hamlet
The Films of Olivier, Zeffirelli, Branagh, and Almereyda
By Patrick J. Cook

Cinematic Hamlet contains the first scene-by-scene analysis of four outstanding film adaptations by Laurence Olivier, Franco Zeffirelli, Kenneth Branagh, and Michael Almereyda of Hamlet. Indispensable for anyone wishing to understand how these directors rework Shakespeare into the powerful medium of film.

Screening Morocco
Contemporary Film in a Changing Society
By Valérie K. Orlando

Since 1999 and the death of King Hassan II, Morocco has experienced adramatic social transformation. Encouraged by the more openly democraticclimate fostered by young King Mohammed VI, filmmakers have begunto explore the sociocultural and political debates of their country whilealso seeking to document the untold stories of a dark past.Screening Morocco: Contemporary Film in a ChangingSociety focuses on Moroccan films produced and distributedfrom 1999 to the present.Moroccan

Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-first Century
Art Films and the Nollywood Video Revolution
Edited by Mahir Şaul and Ralph A. Austen

African cinema in the 1960s originated mainly from Francophone countries. It resembled the art cinema of contemporary Europe and relied on support from the French film industry and the French state. But since the early 1990s, a new phenomenon has come to dominate the African cinema world: mass-marketed films shot on less expensive video cameras. These “Nollywood” films, so named because many originate in southern Nigeria, are a thriving industry dominating the world of African cinema.