Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria(A John Hope Franklin Center Book)

Mainstream media and film theory are based on the ways that media technologies operate in Europe and the United States. In this groundbreaking work, Brian Larkin provides a history and ethnography of media in Nigeria, asking what media theory looks like when Nigeria rather than a European nation or the United States is taken as the starting point. Concentrating on the Muslim city of Kano in the north of Nigeria, Larkin charts how the material qualities of technologies and the cultural ambitions they represent feed into the everyday experiences of urban Nigeria. Media technologies were introduced to Nigeria by colonial regimes as part of an attempt to shape political subjects and create modern, urban Africans. Larkin considers the introduction of media along with electric plants and railroads as part of the wider infrastructural project of colonial and postcolonial urbanism. Focusing on radio networks, mobile cinema units, and the building of cinema theaters, he argues that what media come to be in Kano is the outcome of technology’s encounter with the social formations of northern Nigeria and with norms shaped by colonialism, postcolonial nationalism, and Islam. Larkin examines how media technologies produce the modes of leisure and cultural forms of urban Africa by analyzing the circulation of Hindi films to Muslim Nigeria, the leisure practices of Hausa cinemagoers in Kano, and the dynamic emergence of Nigerian video films. His analysis highlights the diverse, unexpected media forms and practices that thrive in urban Africa. Signal and Noise brings anthropology and media together in an original analysis of media’s place in urban life.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. Infrastructure, the Colonial Sublime, and Indirect Rule 16 2. Unstable Objects: The Making of Radio in Nigeria 48 3. Majigi, Colonial Film, State Publicity, and the Political Form of Cinema 73 4. Colonialism and the Built Space of Cinema 123 5. Immaterial Urbanism and the Cinematic Event 146 6. Extravagant Aesthetics: Instability and the Excessive World of Nigerian Film 168 7. Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy 217 Conclusion 242 Notes 257 Bibliography 277 Index 301

About the Author :
Brian Larkin is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is a coeditor of Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain.

Review :
"This thoughtful, scholarly, and original book links the transnational traffic of media forms to the logics of the colonial state and to the vulnerabilities of large cities in Africa. It will provoke new thinking among Africanists, urbanists, anthropologists, and all students of globalizing media processes. Brian Larkin is a major new voice in the study of media as lived infrastructure in a world of uneven connectivity."--Arjun Appadurai, author of Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger "This eagerly anticipated book is a wonderful contribution to several fields: media studies, cultural studies, African studies, anthropology, and analyses of globalization. Brian Larkin writes with eloquence and passion, and he compels us to rethink our assumptions about the work of transnational media and the formation of identity."--Purnima Mankekar, author of Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India This book is a fascinating historical ethnography of media technologies in the Muslim city of Kano in the north of Nigeria. - SIM Review, Autumn 08