Global Media and Cultural Policy: The European Union and Audiovisual Industries in the Global South

Abstract

Recent initiatives by international organizations, NGOs, and national governments in the Global North have attempted to mitigate inequities in North-South media flows by funding film, TV, and new media production in the Global South and its circulation in global media markets. In positioning their activities as part of global economic development and social justice efforts, these initiatives take a critical stance towards both modernization notions of development and Northern-produced media for development and take up concerns such as Hollywood’s global dominance. At the same time, however, through their funding priorities and organizational arrangements these “audiovisual assistance” programs shape local industries in ways that privilege Northern audiovisual textual norms and industrial practices, leading to criticism of paternalism and even neocolonialism.

This dissertation explores audiovisual assistance programs through an examination of the largest such program: the EU’s ACPCultures+, which since 2008 has awarded over 50 million Euros to nearly 60 audiovisual training programs, distribution initiatives, and production projects in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean. Using textual and policy analyses, in-depth interviews, and both digital ethnography and multi-sited ethnographic research in Brussels, Addis Ababa, and Nairobi, I analyze three case studies of projects funded by ACPCultures+ – a screenwriting course in Kenya, a pan-African video-on-demand platform, and the first Ethiopian film to screen at Cannes film festival – while tracing the circulation of the program’s aims and policies from its headquarters in Brussels to audiovisual professionals in Africa and the Caribbean. These cases show how, as ACPCultures+ grapples with media diversity in an era of globalization, it builds on postwar histories of both international development and EU cultural and audiovisual policies in ways that simultaneously enable and constrain media industries in the Global South. Ultimately, this research demonstrates how audiovisual assistance programs are an underexamined piece of the global media landscape in which Northern policies and Southern practices together can reframe debates about media and cultural hegemony and suggest new ways of conceptualizing the geographies of audiovisual industries and policy.