This book advances alternative approaches to understanding media, culture and technology in two vibrant regions of the Global South. Bringing together scholars from Africa and the Caribbean, it traverses the domains of communication theory, digital technology strategy, media practice reforms, and corporate and cultural renewal. The first section tackles research and technology with new conceptual thinking from the South. The book then looks at emerging approaches to community digital networks, online diaspora entertainment, and video gaming strategies. The volume then explores reforms in policy and professional practice, including in broadcast television, online newspapers, media philanthropy, and business news reporting. Its final section examines the role of village-based folk media, the power of popular music in political opposition, and new approaches to overcoming neo-colonial propaganda and external corporate hegemony. This book therefore engages critically with the central issues of how we communicate, produce, entertain, and build communities in 21st-century Africa and the Caribbean.

In this media history of the Caribbean, Alejandra Bronfman traces how technology, culture, and politics developed in a region that was "wired" earlier and more widely than many other parts of the Americas. Haiti, Cuba, and Jamaica acquired radio and broadcasting in the early stages of the global expansion of telecommunications technologies. Imperial histories helped forge these material connections through which the United States, Great Britain, and the islands created a virtual laboratory for experiments in audiopolitics and listening practices. As radio became an established medium worldwide, it burgeoned in the Caribbean because the region was a hub for intense foreign and domestic commercial and military activities. Attending to everyday life, infrastructure, and sounded histories during the waxing of an American empire and the waning of British influence in the Caribbean, Bronfman does not allow the notion of empire to stand solely for domination. By the time of the Cold War, broadcasting had become a ubiquitous phenomenon that rendered sound and voice central to political mobilization in the Caribbean nations throwing off what remained of their imperial tethers.

First Published in 1991. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

"Revisiting the Transatlantic Triangle is a comprehensive study of the decisive 5-year period between 1962 and 1967 which witnessed the unfolding of an intense decolonization dialogue between Britain and its far-flung Eastern Caribbean possessions at the height of the Cold War. The process of decolonization of the so-called Little Eight: Antigua-Barbuda, St Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, Montserrat, Dominica, St Lucia, St Vincent, Grenada and Barbados, is often overlooked in the annals of postcolonial Caribbean history. The missing revolutionary element in this decolonizing narrative downplays the significance and complexity of the transatlantic dialogue leading to Britain s withdrawal from this colonial melting pot; disengagement negotiations that were decisively shaped by the wider geopolitical imperatives of an uneasy Anglo-American relationship. In this work, Raphael Cox Alomar tests the conceptual boundaries of the very meaning of decolonization as a socio-political phenomenon. Decolonization in this area of Britain s colonial world was characterized by the gradual transfer of instalments of sovereignty, rather than by the immediate devolution of full political authority. In the Eastern Caribbean, the decolonization process quickly became a multifaceted triangular dialogue entangling the Little Eight, London and Washington. Revisiting the Transatlantic Triangle is an authoritative and insightful interpretation and presentation of the decolonization process in the Eastern Caribbean. "

New technological innovations in the sphere of media and communication have dramatically transformed the nature of international interactions. The Commonwealth Caribbean region, in common with most underdeveloped territories of the world, is on the receiving end of much of these innovations designed to meet the needs of the industrialized north. Some of these technologies, global in their very nature and social implications, can offer important opportunities to address productivity and communications need. At the same time these technologies can place the region at a disadvantage particularly when as recipients these societies become uncritical hosts or fail to ensure an independent understanding of the social and policy implications of the innovations. This volume explores the economic, social, political and cultural implications of the new technologies especially as they relates to the Caribbean are. The editor uses an interdisciplinary approach to reflect the extensive reach of the new technologies into all sectors of the global economy and society. Discussion of the central issues of globalization and communications technology is supplemented by case studies from Barbados, Canada, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago on the impact of imported media content and cultural identity.

Examines the problem of inedequate access to information and communication technology (ICT) and the need to develop appropriate pro-poor ICT policies. Shows how market reforms have failed to ensure that the benefits of the Information Society have spread across the region.

Outside of music, the importance of sound and listening have been greatly overlooked in Latin American history. Visual media has dominated cultural studies, affording an incomplete record of the modern era. This edited volume presents an original analysis of the role of sound in Latin American and Caribbean societies, from the late nineteenth century to the present. The contributors examine the importance of sound in the purveyance of power, gender roles, race, community, religion, and populism. They also demonstrate how sound is essential to the formation of citizenship and nationalism. Sonic media, and radio in particular, have become primary tools for contesting political issues. In that vein, the contributors view the control of radio transmission and those who manipulate its content for political gain. Conversely, they show how, in neoliberal climates, radio programs have exposed corruption and provided a voice for activism. The chapters address sonic production in a variety of media: radio, Internet, digital recordings, phonographs, speeches, carnival performances, fireworks festivals, and the reinterpretation of sound in literature. They examine the embodied experience of listening and its importance to memory coding and identity formation. This collection looks to sonic media as an essential vehicle for transmitting ideologies, imagined communities, and culture. As the contributors discern, sound is ubiquitous, and its study is therefore crucial to understanding the flow of information and influence in Latin America and globally.