Panel 148: Radio Trottoir Revisited

The panel aims at discussing the relationship between the well-known, but in the last years perhaps a little bit neglected concept of radio trottoir (informal public spheres & popularmodes of expression & communication; such as rumours, gossip, backstage talks, urbanlegends; small media; cf. Ellis 1989), and (mass-) media-related public spheres.The concept of radio trottoir has been often used to demarcate a deviating and liberal realm of free communication in hegemonic systems in colonial and post-colonial times, and to conceptualise popular expressions of resistance. Following the writings of Mbembe, Geschiere etc, any clear-cut differences between “official” and “non-official” or “popular”spaces of communication are difficult to maintain, as there are various interrelations and blurring between “popular” and “official” discourses. This holds especially true today, after the introduction of policies of media liberalisation and since the growing plurality of electronic media and ICT. Examples include witchcraft accusations against politicians, partly expressed in some tabloids or informal mailing lists; rumours on corruption voiced in popular morning phone-in-shows; allusions to matrimonial conflicts (the president’s wife beats her husband) in soap operas; and nicknames of politicians used in commentaries etc.These contemporary forms of radio trottoir playfully blur boundaries between genres, medias and spheres of communication, sometimes brought forward by the necessary opening especially of competing commercial media. The panel proposes to deal with immediate“political effects” of these practices of communication, and also with the more general consequences and theoretical challenges of these developments. This may, among others,require a wider concept of political communication that includes the permanent circulation,re-medialisation and multiple re-appropriation & transformation of news, ideas, commentaries and images across various spheres, forums & communication spaces where current changes in African mediascapes may probably add a new dimension, to challenge previous models e.g.developed by Spitulnik (2002).