ABSTRACT
African Media and Communication: Foundational Conversations addresses the representational deficiency evident in how hegemonic scholarship in media and communication studies situates itself in relation to the margins (milton & Mano 2021: 258, Mano and milton 2021: 19). The book avoids shallow representational politics by offering a more complicated and nuanced account hinged on the career trajectories of the selected scholars from their vantage points. As part of our drive towards epistemological emancipation, conversationalists were asked to present a considered overview of their intellectual life work and to consider this work in relation to the as yet undecided status of African media and communication studies. As such, these conversations provide nuance to our perspective on the emerging African media and communication studies field. In an interview with the Paris Review (1994), Chinua Achebe [one of the first African creatives to publicly challenge European narratives of Africa] noted that storytelling “is something we have to do so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail – the bravery, even, of the lions.” In Conversations, we, as editors, in essence, brought together the lions to historicise their stories from their own points of view. Here, we are not just listening to their often ignored and/or excluded narratives but also amplifying these in hopes that others (i.e. our readers) will listen with decolonial ears. Conversationalists were asked to consider the epistemological, axiological and ontological agendas that guided their work. At the same time, readers are invited to consider their deliberations as a space to reclaim the capacity to envision the new and push back against academic marginalisation. In the Routledge Handbook of African Media and Communication Studies, we argued that
The immediate task includes a concise rendering of the nuances within media and communication contexts arising from the shared geographies, histories and experiences of Africa that constitute this emerging academic space. For us this quest is more urgent in the area of African media, communication and cultural studies. We are keen to unpack the rationale behind existing theories and practice.
(Mano & milton 2021: 8) As can be ascertained below, the conversations, in this sense, present next steps in our Afrokological toolkit for advancing the narrative of media and communication as a transformative field of enquiry, which itself is a place of struggle. For us, the narratives in this book form the threads of our collective journey, causing us to seek self-understanding and new ways to relexicalise our field because we acknowledge that one perspective is never enough to understand the whole story.