Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (a John Hope Franklin Center B

Media technologies were introduced to Nigeria by colonial regimes as part of an attempt to shape political subjects and create modern, urban Africans. Larkin considers the introduction of media along with electric plants and railroads as part of the wider infrastructural project of colonial and postcolonial urbanism. Focusing on radio networks, mobile cinema units, and the building of cinema theaters, he argues that what media come to be in Kano is the outcome of technology’s encounter with the social formations of northern Nigeria and with norms shaped by colonialism, postcolonial nationalism, and Islam. Larkin examines how media technologies produce the modes of leisure and cultural forms of urban Africa by analyzing the circulation of Hindi films to Muslim Nigeria, the leisure practices of Hausa cinemagoers in Kano, and the dynamic emergence of Nigerian video films. His analysis highlights the diverse, unexpected media forms and practices that thrive in urban Africa. Signal and Noise brings anthropology and media together in an original analysis of media’s place in urban life.

• Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network
• Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise (Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge)
• Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
• The Promise of Infrastructure
• The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
• Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
• Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies)
• The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
• Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain
• The Undersea Network (Sign, Storage, Transmission)