As emerging economies like China reshape the global order, transnational media flows are undergoing significant transformation, featuring flows within the traditional periphery in the Global South that do not necessarily pass through the traditional center of the West. Recent digital migration in sub-Saharan Africa has given rise to a burgeoning pay-TV industry. Amid this technological transition, a Chinese pay-TV provider StarTimes has become a major player with multinational operations in Africa. This dissertation looks beyond West-driven media globalization to explore emerging South-South media flows through the case of StarTimes. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from global media studies and media industry studies and insights from ethnographic fieldwork, the dissertation investigates the global-local nexus in transregional media flows, local linguistic and cultural politics in Africa, negotiation of market imperatives and national soft power, and inequalities in global television markets. The findings generate insights into local, national, and transnational characteristics of the South-South media flows. First, the Indigenous African language channels tap into local linguistic markets in East and West Africa through the approaches of pursuing attractive Indigenousness and gatekeeping unsuitable foreignness. Second, the private corporation plays a boundary-spanning role in promoting the Chinese media industry and soft power in Africa, and practices boundary conforming and negotiation to balance national soft power and market imperatives. Third, in navigating uneven global media industry structures and local cultural politics, television buyers promote alternative flows of international content from traditionally peripheral media hubs in the Global South to Africa. The imagined proximities articulated by professionals extend beyond traditional notions of cultural proximity to include transnational, phenomenological, and institutional dimensions, aligning with the notion of parallel modernity. The South-South media flows revealed in this study are multifaceted, complex, and ambivalent, as emerging media institutions and media exchanges present new opportunities for linguistic and cultural diversities in global media flows but also reflect new sets of power asymmetries.
FengYi Yin (Thu,) studied this question.