Sanctioned and Controlled Message Propagation in a Restrictive Information Environment: The Small World of Clandestine Radio Broadcasting

This dissertation seeks to identify the elements that inform the model for competing message propagation systems in a restrictive environment. It pays attention to message propagation by sanctioned and clandestine radio stations in pre- and post-independent Zimbabwe. This dissertation uses two models of message propagation in a limiting information environment: Sturges' information model of national liberation struggle and Chatman's small world information model. All the message propagation elements in the Sturges and Chatman's models are present in the broadcast texts analyzed. However, the findings of this dissertation indicate that communication in a restrictive information environment is designed such that its participants make sense of their situation, and come up with ways to solve the challenges of their small world. Also, a restrictive information environment is situational, and message propagators operating in it are subject to tactical changes at different times, accordingly altering their cognitive maps. The two models fail to address these concerns. This dissertation focused on message propagation in Zimbabwe because there is military belligerence involved in the information warfare. It therefore provides an extreme situation, which can help our understanding of more everyday instances of communication and interference of communication. Findings of this dissertation recommend the need to emphasize that information input, output and suppression are components dependent on each other; not discrete and independent categories of information activities

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: Networks, Literary Activism and the Production of World Literature

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via the link in this recordThis chapter explores Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s significance in world literature through the frame of publishers’ networks and literary activism, and argues for the ways in which his work has redefined ideas of ‘world literary space’ (Casanova 2004). The chapter opens by reading the networks and structures of value made visible through the Nairobi launch of Petals of Blood ̶ Ngũgĩ’s fourth novel published in Heinemann’s African Writers Series and his last written in English. Leading on from this, it places Ngũgĩ’s critical interventions on world literature in essay collections Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms (1993) and Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (2014) into dialogue with his own Africa-centred publishing relationships and trajectories. Ultimately, the chapter draws attention to Ngũgĩ’s crucial work ̶ visible through his literary production, critical interventions and publishing decisions ̶ in ‘moving the centre’ of world literature away from the West