Synopsis:
African content creators have been quick to realise the affordances of the digital sphere. In the face of crippling digital divides, social inequalities, and political and economic instability, people across Africa have actively embraced the potential of social media, in particular, as a means to express themselves creatively to a range of ends.
Yet, while social media platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram command a global stage, not to mention the lion’s share of research, very little is known about how these platforms and the networked cultures they support are harnessed by African digital content creators within local contexts.
In some ways, this lack of research reflects the paucity of scholarly understanding of African popular “vernacular” creative culture and its relationship to the digital sphere. This may be due to scholarly concerns about pursuing critical topics that support a development agenda.
For example, a key area of digital research in the African context examines the scope and implications of the digital “divide” or explores the relationship between the digital sphere and gender relations or democratic participation (Mano and Willems 2016).
This proposal suggests that, while these topics are important and necessary, a “virtuous” approach to digital content tends to obscure the scope and nature of creative digital practice in Africa on the social media coalface.
This is not to say that critical foci are not important—they certainly are. But we suggest that by foregrounding creative digital practices, we might come closer to understanding by what means African content producers put social media to use for local ends.
Situated at the “frontier” of African social experience, creatives of the marginalised majority world “contest taken-for-granted and often institutionalised bounded ideas engrained by social norms and binaries of thought and practices of identity and belonging” (Nyamnjoh and Brudvig 2017, 2).
Through their creative work, social media activities, and the kinds of content they produce, African creatives expand ‘what is out there’ for us to encounter and consider.
Popular culture, specifically its digital manifestations, is recognised as a primary means to articulate political resistance, social belonging, and cultural identity. The conditions of coloniality that pervade the social and political African landscape render this role particularly important.
Far from simply copying the dominant genres of the social media world, African creatives adapt social media affordances to connect with and reinvigorate African ways of knowing and social belonging, such as community, family, and spirituality.
The most “modern” of technologies thereby becomes a vehicle for the translation (or recuperation) of African forms of sociality that were supplanted by Western colonial social and political formations (for example, the “public sphere” or “civil society”).
Yet, tied to globalised digital networks, African creatives are necessarily co-opted into dominant platforms and their associated genres. This tension between local meaning and global participation can be seen as a generative force that demands more sustained scholarly attention.
We call on digital media scholars to submit proposals that deal with the following questions and themes:
● What are the contexts in which and for which African creatives produce social media content?
● What is the scope of African digital creative practice? What kinds of content are deemed interesting or necessary?
● How do African creative choices show us what is “at stake” in local contexts?
● In what ways does the creative digital work of African content producers foster or otherwise promote African ways of knowing and being?
● How do new modes of creative practice construct new forms of social and cultural identity?
● In what ways does African creative content stretch or reimagine contemporary digital genres, and with what cultural, social, and political consequences?
● In what ways do African creatives work within and around the formal constraints of global social media platforms?
● How do African creatives work with, against, or around digital infrastructural, geographical/spatial, and social inequalities and marginalisation—and to what effect?
● What strategies are used by African creatives to foster communities of practice or affiliation in/for local and online contexts?
● What measures do African creatives adopt to overcome algorithmic invisibility/marginalisation?
● How do African creatives respond to or otherwise manage attempts to censor, silence, or shame them and their creative work?
● How do African content producers protect their creative content?
● How do African content producers leverage their creative work for their own or others’ benefit?
● Young people, social media influencers, and creative work in African contexts
● Digital labour, exploitation, and creative work in Africa
● Platformisation, creative work, and its potentials and challenges in Africa
● Platform monetisation and creative work in African contexts
● Nollywood and emerging interfaces with content creators and skitmakers.
To be edited by:
Prof Priscilla Boshoff (Rhodes University)
Dr Bimbo Fafowora (Rhodes University)
Dr Chikezie E. Uzuegbunam (Rhodes University)
Possible publisher: Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, or Rowman and Littlefield (we are in conversation with them).
Submission: Please email your abstracts to the editors at: creativedigitalcultures@ru.ac.za
Timeline: Abstracts deadline: 31 October 2024
Communication of outcome: 30 November 2024
Full paper due: 31 March 2025
Note: No payment from the authors will be required.
