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Felicitas Becker, Joel Cabrita, and Marie Rodet (eds.). 2018. Religion, Media, and Marginality in Modern Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press. ix, 320 pp.
Starting from the basic assumption that "a medium is a means.. .for connecting.. .the people interacting with it" (p. 3), this volume discusses how media include and exclude certain people, bringing various publics and dynamics into being. Its ten case studies of Christian and Muslim media usages in 20th century sub-Saharan Africa address "old," i.e. print and written, as well as "new," i.e. electronic and digital, media in the same framework. Thereby, the volume convincingly challenges an all too prevalent technological determinism in media studies, according to which "new" media instigate fragmentations and change, whereas "old" ones tend to unify their publics and marginalize their Others. As Becker, Cabrita, and Rodet argue in their comprehensive introduction, and as the contributions show, media and their ramifications are too diverse to be brought under a single narrative. How media are performed, activated, and deployed on different scales is contingent, circumstantial, and ambiguous; so are the usages they are put to: "any media are what people make of them" (p. 18).
In the Gold...