Deadline: March 31, 2026

Editors:

• Tendai Chari, University of Venda, South Africa
  
• Ufuoma Akpojivi, Independent Researcher/Research Fellow, UNISA
  

Digital media technologies have become a key site upon which political meanings are produced, consumed and challenged. While politicians use digital popular cultural repertoires to ingratiate themselves with the electorate, the same technologies are being harnessed by ordinary people to speak truth to power, exposing abuses, mobilising protests and demanding accountability from authorities, often bypassing centralized traditional media. On the African continent, examples include the #EndSARS in Nigeria in 2020 when youth shared videos of police brutality via Twitter (formerly X) and Instagram, sparking nationwide protests, crowdfunding, and global solidity that pressured the government to dissolve the SARS unit. In 2024 during the Kenya Gen Z Protests against the Finance Bill, young people used TikTok, X and AI generated content under the hashtag #RejectFinance Bill2024 to educate, organize street actions and crowdfund transport, forcing parliamentary rejection of the Bill amid clashes. Similarly, in 2020 Zimbabweans used the hashtag #ZimbabweanLivesMatter during protests against human rights abuses, trending globally and attracting support of the global community. In all the cases highlighted above, the mutual amplification of politics and popular culture was on display signifying the enmeshment of politics and popular culture (Street et al, 2013). Increased “fluidization” of the border between politics and popular culture in the digital age demonstrates how popular culture is a crucial realm for shaping, performing and challenging political meanings (Chen, 2023). Digital technologies are enabling citizens to participate in the simultaneous production and consumption of content, highlighting the importance of popular culture in the production of politics (Hamilton, 2016). The intersection manifests at different levels. For instance, politicians are becoming more of digital icons while popular artists such as musicians, sports and media personalities, are venturing into politics using digital media (Street, 1997) either as participants or endorsers; a phenomenon referred to as “celebrification/celebritisation of politics” (Agyepong, 2016; Ahmad, 2020; Brooks et al, 2021). In Africa well-known artists who have vied for political office include the Democratic of Congo’s Rhumba maestro, Kanda Bongoman, soccer idol, George Weah who participated in the 2006 Liberian presidential elections and most recently South African musician Penny Penny (real name, Erick Nkovane), who became a councillor for the opposition MK party, to mention but a few. Despite online activism being criticized for being “vacuous and superficial” (Drumbl, 2012) resulting in pejorative descriptions such as “clicktivism” or “slacktivism” digital media has enabled citizens to perform political activism such as signing petitions online and sharing protest messages with virtual communities. Existing scholarship problematizes the intersection of popular culture and digital media in Africa as a double-edged force where digital media are lauded for their potential to democratize discourse through grassroots memes, hashtags and music remixes, yet derided for engineering fragmentation, misinformation, erosion of political trust and creating “multiple truths” as aiding vigilantism (Ajaegbu & Ajaegbu, 2024). Drawing on network society theory, studies highlight how platforms like WhatsApp and X enable networked publics to challenge elite control but amplify echo chambers and post-truth rhetoric. For instance, studies on Nigerian #EndSARS or election memes illustrate how digital popular culture subverts governance narratives through pidgin and Nollywood tropes (Ajaegbu & Ajaegbu, 2024), how online media have become veritable sites of youth cultures from which vulnerable young people negotiate the unstable landscape of a post-colonial state that has foisted on its vulnerable youth population (Imoka, 2023). Prior scholarship has examined the intersection of digital media and politics has predominantly focused on how digital media have been leveraged for political purposes in industrialised democracies of the West and “popular cultural manifestations” of politics in digital media (Hamilton, 2016:4) while very few studies have been devoted to understanding how digital media shape the production, consumption and contestation of political meanings and narratives. Consequently, this has left a lacuna on how everyday practices, the banal and the trivial, what Roland Barthes refers to as the “what-goes without-saying” (Barthes, 2009: 10) shape the production, consumption and contestations of political meanings and narratives in the African context. The proposed edited volume seeks to fill this gap by providing an expanded view of the digital popular culture-politics nexus from a global South, particularly an African perspective by examining politics in Africa through the prism of digital popular culture, and its potential to transform our perception of the “sights, sites and cites of power” (Hamilton, 2016:4). Taking after Hamilton (2016) we contend that studying politics through the prism of digital popular culture not only creates possibilities to illuminate the myriads of ways in which politics intersects with everyday lived experiences of citizens thus reclaiming the status of popular culture as an important site upon which political meanings can be constructed and deconstructed. Our goal is to foreground digital popular culture as a potent vehicle for contesting power. The volume seeks to demonstrate that contrary to perceptions that popular culture is ‘vacuous’, ‘trash’, ‘inferior culture’ ‘artificial’ or mere entertainment devoid of any substance (Englert, 2008; Fabian, 1997; Street, 2001; Marchart, 2008; Street, 2004; Street et al, 2013), digital popular culture can be an authentic source of knowledge about the way in which politics is understood, practiced, performed, and consumed in the African context. The volume illuminates how politics is substantiated through diverse digital popular cultural forms and artefacts. The volume explores the intertextuality between politics and popular culture, demonstrating how political discourse draws on references, or mixes prior texts, popular discourses, symbols or cultural narratives to create layered meanings, particularly in Africa’s digital arena through social media memes, videos, and posts. This manifests through citizens repurposing historical slogans, popular aphorisms, wise sayings, biblical allusions, or popular media to critique power, blending traditional rhetoric with digital formats or viral posts.

The book makes two important contributions. First, it  addresses the paucity of African focused studies on popular cultural manifestations of politics in digital spaces by systematically examining everyday practices and intertextual remixes of popular tropes that construct and subvert power – moving beyond Western-centric perspectives to foreground banal and everyday socio-political dynamics. Secondly, the book reclaims popular culture’s agency by challenging dismissals of digital popular culture and repositioning it as a potent, decolonial site for reclaiming political imagination – transforming perceptions of power through citizen authorship on digital platforms while problematizing risks like misinformation and vigilantism.

 The book addresses the following questions:

• In what way is digital media expanding our knowledge and understanding of politics in contemporary Africa?
  
• How do popular cultural artefacts stimulate and sustain political expression on digital platforms in the African context?
  
• How do politicians and political institutions discipline and co-opt digital media to manufacture consent through ordinary everyday practices?
  
• How are citizens leveraging the everyday cultural practices on digital media to subvert the power of powerful elites and institutions?
  
• How has the ubiquity of digital media shaped the production, performance and consumption of political meanings?
  
• In what ways are the borders between politics and popular culture collapsing in the digital age?
  

The book distinguishes itself from existing scholarship by foregrounding political significations embodied everyday practices in the digital sphere. It views digital popular culture as having the potential to influence politics and communication, thereby expanding perspectives on politics by exposing citizens to “different places, voices, views and experiences” (Hamilton, 2016:4). The volume offers a continent-wide exploration of everyday digital popular cultural practices in Africa, thus addressing existing knowledge gaps in the global South.

We invite contributions that engage with theoretical and empirical research that consider the socio-political and cultural factors shaping digital media and popular culture in Africa. We are particularly interested in original contributions that tackle the identified and related themes using a broad range of theoretical and methodological approaches.

Chapters may draw on interdisciplinary approaches from media studies, communication, political science, sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, and related fields. The abstract must clearly state the objectives of the study, the theoretical framework and the methodological approaches to be deployed. Possible topics include, but are not limited to the following:

• Intertextuality of politics and popular culture in the digital age
  
• Sports and politics in the digital age
  
• Fandom and politics in the digital age
  
• Religion, politics and digital media
  
• Popular theatre and politics online
  
• Political advertising in the digital age
  
• Film, politics and digital media
  
• Popular Music and politics in the digital age
  
• Political satire in the digital media
  
• Celebrification/celebritisation of politics in the digital age
  
• Clandestine radio and politics in the digital age
  
• Intersection of food cultures, politics and digital media
  
• The politics of political party regalia, costume and national symbols in the digital era
  
• Popular theatre, politics and digital media
  
• Sculpture, politics and digitality
  
• Political propaganda online
  
• Avant-garde arts and politics
  
• Politics, hactivism, clictivism and slacktivism
  
• Memefication of politics
  
• Microcelebrities and influencers and politics
  
• Digital politics and celebrity activism
  
• Digitality and celebrity humanism in Africa
  
• Gamification of politics in Africa
  
• Digital media and political scandals
  
• Subversive digital artefacts and politics
  
• Digital political satire in Africa
  
• Fictional representations of politics in the digital media
  
• User-generated content and politics in Africa
  
• Podcasts as alternative public spheres
  
• Blog, vlogs and politics in Africa
  
• Popular entertainment and politics in the digital age
  
• Political cartoons in the digital era
  
• Mass culture and politics in the digital age
  
• Popular culture and politics in the age of Artificial intelligence
  

Abstracts and biographies

Abstracts of between 400 and 500 words should be send by the 31 March 2026.

Abstracts should be emailed as word to tendai.chari@univen.ac.za/cc ufuoma.akpojivi@gmail.com

Chapters (6000 -8000 Words) will be due by 30 September 2026

Biographies should not be more than 200 words

Reference Style: Harvard

Note: We do not require an article publishing charge (APC)

Important Dates

• Abstract Submission Deadline: 31 March 2026
  
• Notification for Accepted Abstracts:  15 April 2026
  
• Deadline for Full Papers: 30 September 2026
  
• Expected Date of Publication: 31 December 2026
  

Targeted Publisher: Routledge

References

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Ahmad, N. (2020). Celebrification of Politics: Understanding Migration of Celebrities into Politics Celebrification of Celebrity Politicians in the Emerging Democracy of Indonesia. East Asia, 37:63-79.

Ajaegbu, O.O. and Ajaegbu, C. (2004). The New Democratisation: Social Media Impact on the Political Process in Sub-Saharan Africa: Frontiers in Communication. 9:1394949. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2024.1394949.

Barthes, R. (2009) [1957] Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. London: Vintage.

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