In a number of important articles on colonial and postcolonial Northern Nigeria, Brian Larkin has established himself as a leading scholar in the emerging field of African media studies. In this book he incorporates that work in an ambitious effort to understand ‘what a theory of media would look like if it began from Nigeria rather than Europe or the United States’ (p. 253). His goal is to use this particular vantage point to emphasize questions that existing approaches to media largely ignore. He organizes this effort around the link between media and infrastructure, focusing his sharp critical attention on technological instability, on the complex patterns of cultural flows, and on the ways that media themselves serve as the locations for the expression of power and contests over its application. This approach permits him to avoid both the technology awe that has marked much media scholarship and the appropriationist tendencies of much recent work on African media. Unveiling a series of infrastructural moments, located in Kano from the 1920s to the present, he shows how media technology is always contingent, representing not only an important tool for the articulation of power, but a locus for its determination and expression.

Larkin demonstrates a daunting erudition and brings this knowledge to bear in a series of often highly stimulating theoretical interjections. Yet for all their interest, these discursive sidebars seem sometimes to detract from the book's broad interpretive purposes. Most important, the referential quality of these discussions (drawing as they do substantially on studies rooted in exploration of Western societies) implicitly undermines his strategy of rethinking those theories from the perspective of Northern Nigerian history. Yet if this book does not add up to more than the sum of its parts, those parts still individually and collectively represent the most important contribution to African media studies and the history of African media to date.

In an introductory chapter Larkin lays out the concept of ‘the colonial sublime’ in an exploration of the ways that the technological instruments of the colonial state in Northern Nigeria, such as railway lines and bridges, were used to ‘incite awe’ (p. 37) but rapidly entered the realm of the mundane. This was a process that occurred repeatedly, both as new technologies were introduced and as their frontiers rolled forward. In a fascinating exploration of the largely forgotten history of ‘diffusion radio’ in Northern Nigeria, Larkin shows how this system of sending radio programming through wires to a restricted number of radio sets created a culture of radio listening quite distinct from the more conventional wireless system that was introduced in the 1950s. Although many of the diffusion sets were in the hands of expatriates and well-to-do Africans, the bulk of the audience experienced radio at communal listening sites. The beauty of this technology, from the state perspective, was the degree to which it embodied control – not only of content (which would continue to be a hallmark in radio and television programming until the 1990s) but of listenership as well. Not surprisingly, the state sought a similar strategy with film technology, in the introduction of the mobile cinema.

It is tempting to dismiss as marginal the cinema vans and their propaganda films that were staples of British colonial media policy and ‘progressive’ officials in the 1940s and 1950s, but as Larkin shows this was anything but the case. In 1937, for example, in the course of three days more than 30,000 people filled the emir's compound in Kano to watch films provided by the new colonial propaganda unit. These exhibitions provided both education and entertainment, but, perhaps most importantly, inscribed performances of power – in this case, that of the British colonial administration and of the indigenous authorities. Larkin argues that mobile cinema had a history distinctly different from the commercial cinema. While popular film was routinely denounced, the mobile cinema found acceptance among the religious authorities who were continually debating the relationship between Islam and technology. It is not so clear, however, that in practice Northern Nigerian audiences respected such a sharply bounded dichotomy between the two kinds of film experience. Larkin's discussion of commercial film audiences is particularly rich and insightful. Initially intended as entertainment for elites, the cinema in Kano rapidly became the somewhat illicit territory of male Hausa youths, who over several decades have been passionate fans of Bollywood films, their song and dance routines, and their distinctively chaste evocation of romantic love. While movie theatres have mostly disappeared from the urban Nigerian landscape, Kano's theatres remain open, if threatened. Similarly, as Larkin notes in his discussion of the new Hausa video film industry, the recent introduction of shari'a caused only a momentary interruption in film production, although censorship was certainly tightened.

A discussion of the critical role of film piracy leads into a concluding consideration of breakdown and repair. In sharp contrast to the temporary technology awe are the derailments, van wrecks, power failures and persistent acts of piracy that hobble the most powerful technologies and lead to the ingenious solutions that operate in spite of the state. As Larkin so aptly observes, it is no longer the rhythms of Afro pop that provide the background noise in contemporary Nigeria, but the persistent hum of generators providing an alternative source of power. It is with insights like this one, often eloquently expressed, that Larkin's effort to refashion media theory is likely to be realized.