Visual media and political communication: reporting about suffering in Kinshasa

Abstract

ABSTRACT Many sub-Saharan African societies have undergone significant political shifts in the last two decades. Changes in political representation and leadership have generated new forms of political mediation and communication. This article interrogates one of the most visible transformations in Kinshasa's political society: television news reports about urban misery, often resulting from a malfunctioning state, in which Kinshasa's inhabitants testify about their difficulties and press fellow citizens, as well as local and national leaders, to bring about change. Exposing suffering is a shame mobilisation strategy, and so becomes a political act. Through the discursive and visual aesthetics of the proximity account, citizens and political leaders are inserted into one political community. The main argument of this article is that the proximity account illustrates a new kind of political communication. In this article I analyse the socio-political contexts in which the proximity report emerged and became popular. I trace the materialisation of this new kind of interaction between political leaders and citizens to the transformation of the late Zaïrian ‘state’, to vernacular understandings of ‘democracy’, and to the influence of NGO activities and Pentecostal Christianity.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.