Stereotypical Home Making: Producing Subjects through Spatial Stories in Afronovelas

Abstract

In recent decades, television series in Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire have emerged as influential mass media forms with broad audiences, driven by a dynamic and rapidly evolving industry in these countries. In this paper, we study series belonging to the soap opera genre, depicting everyday family stories that thematise current, sometimes controversial, social issues in the stories of the main characters. Following a sociospatial approach, we take a closer look at the tangible side of fictional spaces and to scrutinize spatial stories regarding housing practices in the Senegalese middle and upper classes. The staging of everyday domestic spaces, conveying concrete projections of a successful life within West African metropolises, offers a fascinating object of study for analysing the ways subjects are constituted with space in the course of the refiguration of West African cities.