Voices of Africa: Podcastas a New Form of Oral History

At the beginning of the 21st century, the digital revolution has become global. Digitalization has overcome the boundaries of the field of information technology and began to provoke the metamorphosis of sociocultural reality. Gradually, society itself and, as a consequence, social sciences are changing. African studies, despite the fact that digital transformations in the region have been slow, is no exception. New plots and sources started to appear; new practices and methods began to develop and apply. This article is devoted to the evolution of the oral tradition of the Africans and representatives of the global African diaspora in terms of the “digital turn”. It emphasizes the importance of oral history as one of the main directions in the study of the history and culture of Africa, introduces and analyzes the terms of “orature” and “cyberture”. The author focuses on the transformation of the form and content of African narratives in the post-colonial era. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that it is the first time an African podcast is considered as an oral historical digital source. The article provides a brief overview of podcasts created by people from Sub-Saharan and Southern Africa in the 2010s, describes the prerequisites for creating these projects, their thematic field, and analyzes their features. Particular emphasis is placed on issues of representations and interpretations of the cultural and historical experience of Africans and members of the African diaspora. The main dilemmas of placing podcasts into the context of oral history are articulated at the end of the article. The author also concludes that African podcasts are in line with the metamodern discourse.

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