Religion, Media, and Marginality in Modern Africa

Felicitas Becker is professor of African history at Ghent University, and a specialist in the history of Islam in East Africa. She is the author of Becoming Muslim in Mainland Tanzania and coeditor of AIDS and religious practice in Africa. Her current work focuses on Islamic preaching, the rhetoric of development and aetiologies of poverty in East Africa.Joel Cabrita is Susan Ford Dorsey Director of the Center for African Studies and an associate professor of African history at Stanford University, and a senior research associate in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Johannesburg. Her work focuses on religion, gender, and the politics of knowledge production in Africa and globally. She is the author of Text and Authority in the South African Nazaretha Church and The People's Zion: Southern Africa, the United States, and a Transatlantic Faith-Healing Movement.Marie Rodet is a senior lecturer in the history of Africa at SOAS. Her research interests lie in the field of modern migration history, gender studies and the history of slavery in francophone West Africa. She is the author of Les migrantes ignorées du Haut-Sénégal, 1900–1946 and coeditor of Children on the Move in Africa: Past and Present Experiences of Migration.

"This highly original volume offers new pathways for the study of religion and media in Africa and beyond. Understood as means for connecting people, media are carefully situated in specific social configurations. Spanning from the colonial times to our current age, the ten chapters open up new vistas into people's use of media—from paper forms to Facebook—in negotiating, producing, or mitigating marginality. The introduction masterfully situates the contributions in current debates on the role of old and new media in the constitution of publics and the relation between religion and secularization in Africa."