Studying media ‘from’ the South: African screen media and global perspectives

By taking the 2014 Johannesburg edition of DISCOP, the largest fi lm and television
content market in Africa, as its ethnographic starting point, this essay critically discusses
the position of Africa in contemporary fi lm and media studies. It argues that,
if the marginal position to which studies of African media have historically been relegated
within fi lm and media studies curricula and conferences around the world has
never been justifi ed or justifi able, today, in light of the transformations that have taken
place in media sectors worldwide over the past two decades, this marginality seems even
more striking and diffi cult to accept. In fact, paraphrasing the provocative argument that
Jean and John Comaroff propose in their recent book Th eory from the South: Or, How
Euro-America Is Evolving Toward Africa, it is possible to say that to look at media
from the South is today a necessary move to interpret the way media production and
dissemination are transforming worldwide. Th ese very transformations tend to manifest
themselves fi rst, and with their sharpest and most immediate consequences, in the
South, for, as the Comaroff s would have it, “contemporary world-historical processes
are disrupting received geographies of core and periphery, relocating southward—and,
of course, eastward as well—some of the most innovative and energetic modes of producing
value.” Th is invites scholars to try to make sense of the world from these same
vantage points—that is, it invites us to study media from the south as a way to make
sense of wider transformations taking place the world over.