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Abstract

When Nicole Amarteifio, a Ghanaian born-United States raised repatriate to Ghana, uploaded the first episode of An African City to YouTube on March 2, 2014, she began a transnational televisual movement. The series, with two seasons completed and aired and a third season in the works, is a global powerhouse that not only shifts narratives about African mass media production and consumption, but also challenges limited notions of African life, especially for a new generation of the continent’s women. As the first of its kind on the African continent, the web series not only reconfigured the West African media landscape but also reconstituted gender identity within African televisual culture. Employing Pierre Bourdieu’s fields of cultural production theoretical framework for analyzing mass media production (1993, 1998), this study shows that Amarteifio used her cultural, economic, and social capital to deploy production skills and a YouTube distribution and consumption template in a cultural field considered the first Ghanaian series initially made specifically for the video sharing platform and shifted to a paid subscription model. Ultimately, the study reveals that Amarteifio’s access to various capital enabled her to create a series that performs as a form of digital activism designed to actively combat and interrogate gender roles and explicate new ways of thinking about gender and sexuality on the African continent.

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