This article focuses on covers published in British, French and US American news magazines between 2011 and 2013 as micro-textual cases that can shed light on the evolution of Africa’s media image from Afro-pessimism to Afro-optimism. On the one hand, these depictions blend signifiers of modernity, positivity and ‘Africanness’. On the other hand, these covers are a prime example of a visual style that favours symbolic representation and generic imagery. By combining a detailed analysis of textual material with interviews with media professionals, this article critically examines the ways in which Africa’s difference is summoned and framed within a specific visual style. Although the article finds a significant amount of media self-reflexivity, it argues that this positive and reflexive trend should not be embraced as radically undermining Afro-pessimism. Instead, this way of visualizing Africa mainly contributes to the discursive (re)inscription of Africa’s difference within a dominant discourse of globalized neoliberalism.

No abstract

This article explores one of the most notorious and controversial initiatives by tech corporations to increase connectivity across the Global South: Facebook’s Free Basics project. Public attention focused on its ban in India following nationwide protests about net neutrality. In Africa, however, Free Basics expanded without much public scrutiny to some 32 countries. This article traces this quiet expansion by using an innovative virtual private network (VPN)-based method and by calling for an analytical focus on the landscape of the digital civil society in Africa. Specifically, I outline two key, interrelated phenomena: (1) Facebook’s evolving strategy, including a greater engagement with civil society organizations and (2) the focus of digital rights activists in Africa on issues like Internet shutdowns, government surveillance, and the lack of data privacy frameworks. In the process, I illuminate broader trends in the digital industry including tech corporations’ growing investments in mobile social media, network infrastructures, and in civil society; the use of disadvantaged populations and unregulated territories for digital experiments and data extraction; and the mounting recognition of Facebook’s political role, both within and outside the corporation.

Over the past 30 years, scholars have criticized the propensity of the international media to reproduce damaging and racist stereotypes about Africa. How do foreign correspondents, who are key actors in the production of Africa's media image, position themselves in relation to this criticism? Based on 35 interviews conducted with correspondents in Kenya and South Africa between 2013 and 2017, I find that many correspondents recognize the negative contributions of the news industry to representational Othering, thereby agreeing with the general tenets of the criticism. This paper is an in-depth exploration of this phenomenon, which I call postcolonial reflexivity. I outline the features of this postcolonial reflexivity, discuss its impact on journalistic practices, and explore the reasons for its prevalence among correspondents. Overall, the research contributes to bridging the gap between the textual orientation of postcolonial studies and the inclination for analyzing production practices in journalism studies.