Television Buyers as Institutional Cultural Intermediaries in Centralizing Alternative Media Flows

Abstract

In explaining transregional media flows, cultural proximity has been embraced in academia and industry. However, in the past decade, drama series produced in traditionally peripheral media hubs in the Global South have been increasingly circulated on major pay TV platforms in sub-Saharan Africa, despite crossing geographic, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. This article investigates how television buyers as institutional cultural intermediaries navigate the interplay of the global media industry, commercial goals of media institutions, social stratification of local societies, and interpretations of audience proximity to mediate the contact zone between content alternative to globally dominant productions and audiences in sub-Saharan Africa. Centralizing alternative media flows in a region historically at the margin of the global television market, this research complicates the traditional discourse of proximity, suggesting the fluidity of culture and identity in the interaction of the local and global, and contributes to media industry studies with the Global South perspective.