Remixing Transnational Media: Global Cultural Flows and their Hermeneutic Navigation in Kenyan DJ Afro Movies

Abstract

One of the prominent features of contemporary global modernity is mobility in its various manifestations, among which are transnational media. In the absence of a robust film industry in Kenya, foreign films have tended to monopolize the market. Of significance is the fact that the foreign films grant their local audiences the necessary access to global cultural flows. However, in the process of consuming such films, local audiences have had to come to terms with the reality of linguistic and cultural disjuncture between the content of the media and indigenous ways of knowing. To address this, a practice has emerged involving the use of innovative remediation strategies by the local consumers in a bid to temper the foreignness of transnational media. In Kenya this is evident in the form of the video jockey phenomenon involving the remixing of imported films for the local market by an emerging crop of artists such as DJ Afro. Making sense of these films presenting largely alien cultural material rendered through equally strange tongues calls for a hermeneutic critical approach adopted in this essay. In the process, the essay intends to demonstrate how the foreign films, otherwise presumed to be complete products, are technologically reconfigured and refracted through the prism of local cultural sensibilities to reinstitute contextual relevance.