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Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria by Brian Larkin. Duke University Press 2008. $84.95 cloth; $23.95 paper. 328 pages
Brian Larkin's Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria marks an important intervention in die field of Film and Media Studies because it deemphasizes a longstanding focus on die unity of cinematic articulation and enunciation in favor of examining the effects of cinema on infrastructure and reception in a well-defined cultural context. Larkin examines colonial and postcolonial media in the nortiiern region of Nigeria, known as Kano State, which serves as a privileged site for examining the context and effects associated with colonial film, radio, and contemporary Nigerian video-film. Cinema, in particular, has served as a source of wonder and debate in the lived reality of postcolonial modernity, and Larkin is especially keen on addressing its effects in die variable current of the lived Nigerian urban experience.
As Larkin explains, Signal and Noise focuses on "the experience of going to the cinema as greater than the films themselves" in an effort to "unpack the cultural logics of media technologies and dieir unintended consequences, which create the particular experience of urban life in colonial and postcolonial Nigeria."1 As you might have guessed, Larkin is an andiropologisl, but he works very much within an interdisciplinary strand of Media Studies. Larkin has spent long periods of time in the Hausa-speaking and Muslim Kano State.
Larkin foregrounds the relevance of the discourse of urban modernity to early cinema, following Miriam Hansen's lead,2 while also evoking the broader discourse of alternative modernities, which has been an important theme in African Studies over the past few years.3 Instead of merely proposing a neutralized sense of cultural difference...