Neighbours Vol. 7: The Media System of Empire, Brian Larkin / HITAM, TPOD, THEMA
Event details
| Date | 22.04.2026 |
| Hour | 18:00 › 20:00 |
| Speaker |
Bio Brian Larkin is the Director of Graduate Studies and a Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University. His research focuses on the ethnography and history of media in Nigeria. Most broadly he examines the introduction of media technologies into Nigeria—cinema, radio, digital media—and the religious, political, and cultural changes they bring about. He explores how media technologies comprise broader networked infrastructures that shape a whole range of actions from forms of political rule, to new urban spaces, to religious and cultural life. He has also published widely on issues of technology and breakdown, piracy and intellectual property, the global circulation of cultural forms, infrastructure and urban space, sound studies, and Nigerian film (Nollywood). He is currently completing the manuscript for Secular Machines: Media and the Materiality of Islamic Revival, which analyzes the role media play in the rise of new Islamic movements in Nigeria and explores theoretical questions about technology and religion. |
| Location |
Archizoom
|
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
| Event Language | English |
The Media System of Empire
In 1839 the British Colonial Office received 902 pieces of correspondence from its far-flung territories. By 1909 this number rose to 90,000, and by 1939 it passed 300,000. Empire is the extension of political power and administration across racial, linguistic, and cultural difference. In the case of the British Empire that power depended upon a communicative infrastructure of files, memos, minutes, dispatches, and other documents which enacted the practical work of drawing disparate territories into a single system. As the size and complexity of empire grew, British imperialists had to innovate new forms of storing and circulating information. My book project examines the infrastructures, protocols, circulatory forms, and storage mechanisms by which information was moved and stored at different points in British imperial history. Cumulatively, these changes formatted the civil service for a modern era of information, one that undergirded empire as an organizational system. I examine the material infrastructures of imperial information systems. This is what I term the media system of Empire.
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Organizer
- HITAM THEMA TPOD