Media, Culture and Decolonization: Re-Righting the Subaltern Histories of Ghana

Join the Department of Rhetoric & Communication Studies for a book talk with Wunpini Fatimata Mohammed, assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University.

Media, Culture and Decolonization: Rerighting the Subaltern Histories of Ghana invites us to look at media and culture from a decolonial perspective. Through African epistemologies and knowledge systems, this book examines media by highlighting how African languages, cultures and traditions can completely shift how we think of knowledge. It is an offering to anyone curious about the relationship between culture, language and media. By focusing on African language media in Ghana such as film, television and radio, the book emphasizes the importance of espousing a decolonial politic and praxis in the process of co-creating knowledge with indigenous communities. It succinctly connects the struggles of global majority countries and demonstrates the ways in which (neo)colonialism and imperialism impede the work toward liberatory futures. It deconstructs subalternity and marginality within the nation state demonstrating its fixity and malleability in the processes of cultural production. This book demonstrates the potential that African language media hold as tools of cultural and epistemological decolonization. [Forthcoming, Rutgers University Press, 2025]

Wunpini Fatimata Mohammed (pronouns: she/her) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. She is co-editor of the book, African Women in Digital Spaces: Redefining Social Movements on the Continent and in the Diaspora (2023). She is an activist-scholar whose research focuses on feminisms, decolonization, and social movements. Her research is published in peer reviewed journals such as  Communication Theory, the Howard Journal of Communications, The International Journal of Communication, Feminist Media Studies among others. She has won top paper awards at the International Communication Association (ICA), the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) and other academic conferences. She has worked as a radio journalist in Ghana for several years and her writing has appeared on Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, Global Voices, Okay Africa, and several Ghanaian media platforms.

Sponsored by the Department of Rhetoric & Communication Studies and the School of Arts & Sciences.