Idol hopes: Media dream worlds and the politics of youth futures in Zambia

In the Zambian economy of decline, the linear narrative of development is broken–"progress" lies in the past not in the future. This experience of temporal re-ordering raises the future itself as a problem for Zambian youth. This ethnography addresses the question of future making through the prism of media circulation and production. I analyze the engagement with global media's commodity dream worlds by youth and media producers in Zambia as the site of future making that links the political and aesthetic. I argue that these media are enmeshed in critical relationships between African sites. Through multi-sited research, I follow the media circuit between South Africa and Zambia to show that "global" forms have continental and regional politics with national contours. I consider the production of the category of "African" youth as a cultural experience that contains both the immanence of sudden death and the possibility of lasting forever. Tracking the attempts to regulate reality television in Zambia, I argue that the category of African youth is a site of the political for nations scrambling for membership in the global economy. Finally, youth in Zambia put these global media forms to the service of a method of hope–re-orienting their knowledge production toward not yet realized Zambian future with an open-ness to that which is not-yet.