(Re) Presentations of Africa in British Media

A study into a Western media’s representations of Africa, this book pays particular attention to constructions of ‘Africa’ occurring especially on contemporary British television. It seeks out dominant thematic discourses and patterns of representation to establish how ‘Africa’ is constructed and construed. Interestingly and uniquely, it adopts a cross-genre approach expanding the field of scrutiny beyond just factual programmes. Uniquely, the book’s approach to television material, from a postcolonial critical perspective, moves the chiefly textually-based politics of the postcolonial into the audiovisual and the mass media. It breaks new grounds using this canon-questioning angle to unravel covert factors at play in the media’s selection and structuring. Situated within the postcolonial ambit and correlated to Said’s ‘Orientalism’, it further draws on the disciplines of Anthropology, Cultural Studies, English, International Communication and Media Studies, Linguistics and Literary Studies, employing aspects of analysis that are triggered by the representations found in popular television. It shows how discourses, language, silences and absences construct and conceptualise ‘Africa