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Mohammed, Wunpini Fatimata; Siguru Wahutu, j
doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcaf021pmid: N/A
Western media portrayals of Africa have often reduced this diverse, expansive continent to tropes about hunger, poverty, disease and war. The essays in this forum section challenge these colonial and imperial narratives about Africa. In this introduction, we present the framing of Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in Western media coverage as useful for understanding how Africa has historically been framed in news media reports. The essays cover issues such as the ecological implications of war and decolonial approaches to examining media narratives in the DRC. In Sudan, we see how the United Arab Emirates deploys soft power to entrench their colonial and extractive interests in the country. Through incisive and biting satire, we learn about how to write about Sudan. In communication and media studies, Africa has been presented as a continent mired in suffering and struggle that is in constant need of saving from the West.
doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcaf028pmid: N/A
The Rwanda-backed M23 Movement has escalated the war in eastern DRC. This article moves away from dominant—at times, problematic—interpretations of the conflict common in certain strands of Peace and Conflict Studies. Drawing on debates from the second wave of African political science, it formulates three critiques of prevailing explanations: a critique of deep-rooted causalities, a critique of African exceptionalism, and a critique of postcolonial sovereigntist framings. It calls for reconceptualizing the war through the lens of local agency, global imperial ambitions, and violence legitimized by lethal sovereigntist narratives.
doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcaf029pmid: N/A
Published in 2005, Binyavanga Wainaina’s “How to Write About Africa” remains one of Granta’s most read pieces. The scathing satire is sharply observed and darkly humorous, but beneath the entertaining wit lies a vital critique, as relevant today as when it was first published. “How to Write About Sudan” is inspired by Wainaina’s excellent approach, piercing through the obfuscation and dismal, platitudinous discourse surrounding the current counter-revolutionary war. It is an acerbic mocking of the neocolonial framing used by Western media when describing the conflict, subverting language which flattens and dehumanizes while claiming to “raise awareness.” Yet, this article’s role is not to scold. It is a balm for Sudanese readers, African readers, those who recognize the invisibilizing that Sudan and the Sudanese have been subjected to, in this decade and the preceding. It is a release, a reaction, and an invitation: what might it really mean, to write about Sudan?
doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcaf026pmid: N/A
Sudan’s war is often framed as a war between two generals, it is not only an attempt to paint the war as a struggle over power by two generals, but also an approach to shape the discourse around the Sudan war by localizing the problem and disengaging the war from the global shift in power relations. Attempts by local voices and the international media to tell the real story of how Sudan is primarily a war that is largely financed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a rising imperial power, which invests heavily in its soft power to whitewash its reputation while supporting the creation of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in Sudan have proved futile. This article examines how the UAE’s soft power through cultural, humanitarian, media and people’s diplomacy was used to maneuver, manipulate and challenge the accurate depiction of Sudan’s war.
doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcaf023pmid: N/A
Using Congolese artistic modalities as a tool for excavation, this article reflects on narratives around violence, memory, the environment(s) and identity in the Democratic Republic of Congo and its diasporas. I disrupt visibility using what I term the “technologies of race-making,” to simultaneously explain: (1) the functions of a peripheral visuality that flattens and erases our land relations and coerced participation in extractive global colonial and imperialist technological “advancements”; (2) how Congo is (then) reproduced as a volcanic environment; and (3) the erasures of the multi-sense and interior violence of ecocide and genocide experienced in Congo and its diasporas, particularly for, disabled and/or trans/gender expansive and queer peoples. Employing a Congolese and Black African diasporic transfeminist and queer ecological disability justice approach, I contend that marginalized Congolese and Congolese diasporic perspectives are uniquely positioned to understand the interconnected convergence of human-land-animal-plant catastrophes and possibilities within and outside of Congo.
, ; Dixon-Román, Ezekiel; Parisi, Luciana; Pârvan, Oana; Terranova, Tiziana
doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcaf027pmid: N/A
This article posits that the recursive algorithm of apocalypse, including fascism, can be understood as part of the continuous logic of recursive colonialism. Recursive colonialism explains the relationship between Western European colonialism, the bio-economic model of extraction and computational technology at the core of racial capitalism and its current intensification through the massive planetary deployment of artificial intelligence systems. The concept of recursive colonialism suggests that planetary computation is a reconfiguring pattern of the global colonial projects of expropriation-appropriation in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Drawing from thinkers of the Black radical tradition, this article posits that the recursivity of knowledge structures must be understood on a global political scale in relation to how these structures reproduce and subtend regimes of colonial and racial capitalism. Finally, this article proffers directions for technologies of political resistance through cosmocomputation.
doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcaf020pmid: N/A
In 2023, a decade after the 2011–2013 Syrian uprising, many had forgotten the country’s revolutionary struggle. Then, a year later, Bashar Al-Assad was ousted just as suddenly as the 2011 revolts had arisen. This article investigates how we remember, recount and mediate events. It does so by examining the way different features of digital visual media produced by the art collective Al Sha’b Al Suri Aref Tarikh (ASSAT) (“Syrian people know their way”) correspond to different stages in Syria’s revolution. The article presents ASSAT as a unique phenomenon that visually documented Syria’s uprising. It argues that ASSAT’s visual expressions provide a temporal appraisal of the different junctions of revolutionary experiences. Finally, it demonstrates that chronicling the extraordinary phases of resilience, has also shaped their own lives. Their engagement set in motion future political effects, even when they were unable to salvage a revolutionary project in the present.
doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcaf008pmid: N/A
This article explores the use of smuggled digital technologies by prisoners in Lebanese carceral spaces. Since 2012, prisoners have smuggled cellphones to document and share their experiences and protests, despite efforts by authorities to restrict this access. The study adopts Martín-Barbero’s mediaciones and Mattoni’s activist media practices, to propose “prison media mobilization”—the strategic and illicit reconfiguration of digital technologies by prisoners to subvert constraints and amplify dissent. The analysis focuses on four approaches: representation, production, circulation, and material practices. By examining recordings and contextual information from significant events in Lebanese prisons, the research shows how contraband digital technologies catalyze mobilizations. These technologies document, incite, propagate, and aid prisoners perform acts of defiance against prison conditions. The study highlights the complexity and innovation in prisoners' media practices, calling for a comprehensive framework to understand media mobilizations in carceral spaces.
Moskovljevic, Milos; Masood, Muhammad; Skoric, Marko
doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcaf018pmid: N/A
This study examines alternative media (i.e., graffiti) use in contesting the public sphere in the context of the 2019–20 Hong Kong protests. Utilizing the observation method and a theoretical framework of (hybrid) mediation opportunity structure we demonstrate that the protesters have utilized graffiti and street art as the circuit for messages of political resistance in both the material and virtual world. Streets and walls were treated as an extension of the digital sphere by employing graffiti as a memetic means of self-mediation and political resistance in the city.
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