Images of Africa challenges the widely-held idea that Africans are powerless in the creation of self-image. It explores the ways in which image creation is a process of negotiation entered into by a wide range of actors within and beyond the continent - in presidents' offices and party HQs, in newsrooms and rural authorities, in rebel militia bases and in artists' and writers' studies.

Its ten chapters, written by scholars working across the continent and a range of disciplines, develop innovative ways of thinking about how image is produced. They ask: who controls image, how is it manipulated, and what effects do the images created have, for political leaders and citizens, and for Africa's relationships with the wider world. The answers to these questions provide a compelling and distinctive approach to Africa's positioning in the world, establishing the dynamic, relational and sometimes subversive nature of image.

Foreword, V. Y. Mudimbe
1. Theorising image: a relational approach, Julia Gallagher
2. Constructing images of Africa: from troubled pan-African media to sprawling Nollywood, George Ogola
3. International news and the image of Africa: new storytellers, new narratives?
Mel Bunce
4. 'Image management' in east Africa: Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya and their donors, Jonathan Fisher
5. Mirrors, mimicry and the spectre of a failed state: how the government of Ethiopia deploys image, Emmanuel Fanta
6. Images of a traditional authority: the case of Ker Kwaro Acholi in northern Uganda, Clare Paine
7. The war of images in the Ivoirian post-electoral crisis: the role of news and online blogs in constructing political personas, Anne Schumann
8. Negotiating narratives of human rights abuses: image management in conflicts in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, Georgina Holmes
9. Re-imagining Ethiopia: from campaign imagery to contemporary art, Wanja Kimani
10. Silent bodies and dissident vernaculars: representations of the body in South African fiction and film, Lizzy Attree
Index

Editor

Julia Gallagher is a lecturer in International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London

Julia Gallagher is a lecturer in International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London