j. Siguru Wahutu
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j. Siguru Wahutu is an Assistant Professor of Sociology & African Studies at Yale University and a Fellow at the MacMillan Center of International and Area Studies at Yale as well as the Center for the Study of African Societies and Economies at Harvard University. His research interests include the effects of ethnicity and culture on media representations of human rights violations, global and transnational news flows, postcolonial land claims, and the political economy of international media, with a regional emphasis on postcolonial Africa. His book, In the Shadow of the Global North: Journalism in Postcolonial Africa offers an extensive account of media coverage of Darfur by various African states. When not studying media and genocide, he works on data privacy issues and media manipulation in African countries. This secondary research stream is the subject of his second book project titled Silicon Colonists: 21st century scramble for Africa. His work has been published African Journalism Studies, African Affairs, the International Journal of Press/Politics, Global Media and Communication, Media, Culture, and Society, Media and Communication, and Sociological Forum.
Book
Wahutu, j. S. 2024. In the Shadow of the Global North: Journalism in Postcolonial Africa. Cambridge University Press.
In the Shadow of the Global North unpacks the historical, cultural, and institutional forces that organize and circulate journalistic narratives in Africa to show that something complex is unfolding in the postcolonial context of global journalistic landscapes, especially the relationships between cosmopolitan and national journalistic fields. Departing from the typical discourse about journalistic depictions of Africa In the Shadow turns our focus to the underexplored journalistic representations created by African journalists reporting on African countries. In assessing news narratives and the social context within which journalists construct these narratives, In the Shadow captures not only the marginalization of African narratives by African journalists but opens up an important conversation about what it means to be an African journalist, an African news organization, and African in the Postcolony.