Colonial shadows: From mobile cinemas to digital platforms: scales of cultural influence in Sudanese foreign media consumption

Abstract

Scrutinizes the core-periphery cultural imperialism model by examining the relations of media flows in Sudan. Ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 2018 to 2023 on Sudanese consumption of film, television, and music. Of particular interest is a hierarchy of cultural flows that results in cultural saturation, thereby undercutting classical theoretical assumptions. American media is offered in greater quantities, but is primarily understood as distant from local culture, while Egyptian media, which has the advantage of language and cultural proximity, is normalized into “our” media. However, the regional contra-flow is less significant than the essential process of culturally reinforcing internal cultural politics. The data reveal that music consumption becomes a primary site for negotiating an internal hegemony of Arabic that actively displaces local dialects and culturally cements sub-national cultural hierarchies. This article argues that the most damaging “effect” of global media for many Sudanese is not Western cultural imperialism itself, but the way these flows reinforce regional and subnational power structures. This necessitates moving beyond the nation-state as an analytical framework and into a multi-scalar framework that addresses the frictions of global, regional, and sub-national processes in shaping cultural identity in Sudan.