5. An Exploration of African Digital Cosmopolitanism

Africa No Filter , 2022

With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, a sharp shift towards digital engagement was observed. Young people – through the newly growing TikTok platform and the more established Instagram – were able to make use of these digital spaces to create community and augment the reach of their messaging. Young African users were no less involved in this shift, with the emergence of globally viral African initiated hashtags and trends like #JerusalemaChallenge, #DontRushChallenge and #DontLeaveMeChallenge. By deploying a cosmopolitanism that orients young Africans as global citizens, simultaneously rooted in local and global contexts, these young Africans also challenged – consciously or unconsciously – reductive narratives about Africa and Africans as almost entirely living in non-urban settings beset by poverty, disease and unrest. Gathering data from TikTok and Instagram, this study analysed the role that different influencers and hashtags played in helping young Africans challenge Afropessimism and curate their own African digital cosmopolitan practices. Based on textual analysis, multiple videos on Instagram and TikTok were grouped into genres, sub-themes and main themes, then analysed to unpack what the data revealed about the African youth digital narrative.

Global Perspectives, 2020

This article interrogates new forms of digital cosmopolitanism(s) by introducing a critical postcolonial framework that allows an investigation of how digital connectivity operates in the everyday lives of migrants. We are talking today not of the disenfranchised but of the "connected migrant" (Diminescu 2008), a new citizen of the world, who is both rooted and routed, and whose global interactions are marked by the use of social networks. This allows physical distance to be bridged by digital proximity, creating new paradigms for the understanding of the affective turn online, which significantly changes the experience of migration and the idea of connectivity. Yet the ubiquity of digital connectivity does not mean an end to social inequalities; it can lead to new forms of isolation and radicalization for subaltern subjects. New forms of datafication, biometric assemblage, and algorithmic culture have intensified the ways in which bodies and identities can circulate across and beyond borders, heightening the speed of connectivity and circulation. Despite and because of these new technological innovations, many bodies remain stuck in space and kept on hold. The undesired effects of function creep, data leaks, and biometric sorting lead to discriminatory practices that put the notion of digital cosmopolitanism in jeopardy, reactivating old, long-standing forms of colonial practices and surveillance, but now in the form of data extraction and biometric categorizations. A postcolonial intervention into the notion of digital cosmopolitanisms is therefore needed in order to chart the reproductions of power asymmetries, by focusing, for example, not only on digital voices from below but also on the everydayness of cosmopolitanism and on the banal ways of engaging with digital connectivity and transnational belonging. This article is part of the Global Perspectives Communication and Media special issue on "Media, Migration, and Nationalism," guest-edited by Koen Leurs and Tomohisa Hirata.

2021

This paper provides an assessment of experiences and understanding of digital technologies from within an African place. It provides philosophical reflections upon the introduction and existence – appropriation – of digital technologies. Digital technologies are inherently linked to a colonialising power and, in general, unaligned with local, African ways of knowing. Imported technologies are set in modern, universalised doing and unsensitive to the importance of aligned being in African contexts. Sensitivities, it is argued, can be fostered by a decolonial turn, where focus shifts from the individual to the community.

28th May, 2024

Abstract: From Hegel’s (1822) description of Africa as a “… dark mantle of Night” and Kipling’s (1899) insistence on the savagery of Africans and the White Man’s Burden to civilize Africa, Western theory has inundated and orientated the African intellectual sphere such that Franz Fanon’s Black Skin White Mask still holds true. From modernism (here exemplified with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness), post modernism and now the much talk about the death of postmodernism and the rise of Digi modernism, Africa has been ignored, such that the Hegelian “nocturnalization” of Africa still holds true especially in the sphere of digital theory. Such discourse goes unnoticed due to the crumbs of technology making its way into Africa serv ing as the people’s opium in the face of digital orientalism, colonization and the third generation exploitation (data). What is the image of Africa in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness? How does this denigrated image appear in Western contemporary media and theo ries? What theory or concept can aptly present African reality in the digital age? The analyses in this study are realized through a review of critics of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and a review of theory with attention to Frederick Jameson, Jean Francois Lyotard and Alan Kirby. The analyses deconstruct the relevance of contemporary western theory on Africa as well as demonstrates the inapplicability of predigital African philosophies and theories to the dynamics of the digital age, towards establishing a case for Digi-Africanismas a concept that best presents the African reality in the digital era.

Critical African Stuides, 2017

This paper is an exploration of research around and on the presentation of the Post African Futures exhibition. The exhibition, held at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg in South Africa in 2015, acted to challenge the understanding of contemporary digital and communications technologies in relation to contemporary African cultures. Through this the paper explores scholarship around African positions and philosophies of technology, both the paucity of theoretical engagement in this area and the development of new approaches. In extension, two primary frameworks are explored. The first addresses the importance of unpacking regional cultures of technology. The second is the conceptual framing and locating of concerns around historical and contemporary cultures of technology in Africa under the notion ‘Post Africa Futures’, which puts particular emphasis on a relationship to the global information economy. Cet article est un examen de la recherche relative et sur la présentation de l’exposition sur les Futurs post-africains. L’exposition, qui a lieu à la Goodman Gallery, à Johannesburg en Afrique du Sud en 2015, se voulait de défier la compréhension que l’on a du numérique contemporain et des technologies de communication concernant les cultures contemporaines africaines. Cet article explore à travers ceci les connaissances relatives aux positions africaines et aux philosophies de la technologie, aussi bien l’insuffisance de l’engagement théorique dans ce domaine que le développement de nouvelles approches. Par extension, deux cadres principaux sont explorés. Le premier traite de l’importance de l’analyse des cultures technologiques régionales. Le second de l’encadrement conceptuel et du positionnement de préoccupations relatives aux cultures technologiques historiques et contemporaines en Afrique sous la notion d’ ‘Avenirs post-africains’, qui met un accent particulier sur la relation avec l’économie mondiale de l’information.

Communication, Culture and Critique, 2023

Although there is growing scholarship on intersectionality in African feminist movements, there are still gaps in scholarship on intersectionality on the continent when it comes to various identity categories. I examine intersectionality within the Ghanaian context using African feminisms as a backdrop. I argue that to drive African feminisms toward emancipatory praxes, it is imperative to center identity categories that are often erased from feminist conversations and to pay attention to organizing from these margins to amplify the erased narratives about marginalization. I theorize these silenced narratives drawing on my experiences as a Muslim Dagbana woman and my work in African and Ghanaian feminist digital spaces. Here, I focus on ethnicity as an identity category that is often overlooked within feminist discourses in national contexts in Africa. I point to organizing strategies that can facilitate the centering of identities and feminist issues that have historically been pushed to the margins.

Technoetic Arts, 2012

This article takes Afrofuturism as a model for addressing the concerns for digital and technology arts practice in Africa. The focus is on a mechanism for decentralization of a centralized western worldview. Cyberfeminist notions from Haraway's 'Cyborg Manifesto'; propositions for an African Science Fiction; and Bouriaud's 'Radicant' are additionally taken into account to reflect similar mechanism in addressing the mechanisms of decentralization. All these act as speculative methods, which are applied to thinking about the concerns that come with contemporary Globalization. The aim is to rethink these issues in globalisaton, particularly with regard to creative and cultural practice with communication technologies emanating from Africa. Unlike what it suggests, Afrofuturism has nothing to do with Africa, and everything to do with cyberculture in the West. Bring on Sun Ra; techno mashups of DJ Spooky and the African American in outer space.

African Identities, 2018

What is really at stake when talking about a ‘cosmopolitan Africa’? How does such a questioning articulate with the meta-narratives that, over history, have depicted this continent as en entity locked on itself and mainly characterized by stagnation rather than motion? Finally, how to engage with the political dimensions resorting to cosmopolitan aspirations and expressions in Africa, among everyday people rather than elites, and in contrast with the Eurocentric ‘abstract universalism’ that frequently impregnates narratives on cosmopolitanism? Drawing on 15 years of anthropological research among young Senegalese women who frequent daily the Dakar by Night, this paper aims at raising issues resorting to such grassroots cosmopolitics. In this view, I stress the need to focus on cosmopolitanism as a social practice that carries inherent critical if not political dimensions, in line with the harshness of local living conditions but also with the distortion of power balance at a global level, that is, describing a critical cosmopolitanism by contrast. In a same line, cosmopolitanism is introduced first as a posture, and more broadly as a specific field of experiences from which nobody is to be excluded a priori, irrespective of economical, social, political and symbolical power.

This paper examines the dominant portrayals of Africa through the analysis of 40 news posted in the two digital reference newspapers in Spain, www.elmundo.es and elpais.com, in early April 2012. The methodology is divided into three levels. One focuses on the press quality criteria; the second is aimed at global and local semantics of the text; and the third part covers the Pragmatic Formal and the Habermas’ interpretation of speech acts to understand relationships between mass media and its audience. These three movements allow us to approach to the image of the black continent in Internet discourse from a wide-angle. The results shows a clear diagnosis: Africa is not interesting. The lack of resources used to explain the African continent shows the resignation of the mass media to play their role as social actors for the construction of their own history. Africa remains enclosed in an imaginary place, which saves a semantic place and a residual space in the geographic mind of the ...

2008