Repositioning African media studies: thoughts and provocations

This article engages with contemporary debates on the state of media studies in Africa. It comments on the dialectic between metropolitan centres of knowledge production and dependent peripheries. A brief discussion of Fordism and post-Fordism and their implications for Africa follows. Nation-building discourses are opposed to hyper-real notions of meaning, calling on Africans to transcend their idealized understanding of culture, African values and identity as unchanging absolutes. The often alarming anti-democratic conceptual, policy and ideological shifts that occur when theories travel between different contexts are examined. Some research agendas for Africa in the postmodern age are proposed.