Signal and Noise | Professor Brian Larkin | sku-8250360

Professor Brian Larkin's Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria is a hardcover John Hope Franklin Center Book listed under African History Books as sku-8250360. Larkin examines how media theory changes when Nigeria, rather than Europe or the United States, is the starting point.

His history and ethnography centers on Kano, a Muslim city in northern Nigeria, and considers how the physical qualities of media technologies and the cultural ambitions behind them shape everyday urban life. He describes colonial regimes introducing media to shape political subjects and create modern urban Africans, alongside electric plants and railroads in a wider colonial and postcolonial infrastructure project.

Through radio networks, mobile cinema units and cinema theaters, he argues that media in Kano took shape through encounters with northern Nigerian society and norms shaped by colonialism, postcolonial nationalism and Islam. The book also examines Hindi films circulating in Muslim Nigeria, Hausa cinemagoers' leisure practices in Kano and the emergence of Nigerian video films.

It brings anthropology and media studies together to account for the varied media practices of urban Africa.