Media, Memory, and the Politics of Historical Representation in Nigeria: A Critical Theory Perspective

This study applies critical media theory to examine how Nigerian media institutions engage in the politics of historical memory and representation, investigating the construction, contestation, and silencing of national historical narratives across media platforms. The politics of historical memory is particularly acute in Nigeria, where colonial history, civil war memory, ethnic crisis narratives, and the legacies of military rule are active sites of political contention. Media's role in constructing collective memory has received limited systematic theoretical and empirical attention in the Nigerian context. This study employs a critical discourse analysis methodology applied to a corpus of 400 historical representation texts including documentary films, newspaper anniversary supplements, digital archive projects, museum documentation, and radio and television programmes addressing Nigeria's contested historical events including the Biafra war, oil nationalisation, and military coup periods, produced between 2017 and 2023. Critical theory, collective memory theory, and postcolonial media theory provide the analytical framework. Analysis examines selective memory, subaltern voice inclusion, commemorative communication strategy, and the political economy of historical archive access. Findings reveal systematic patterns of state-aligned historical narration in government-funded media, counter-narrative construction in ethnic and regional media, and emergent digital archive activism producing alternative historical memory in online spaces. Subaltern voices, including war survivors, displaced communities, and indigenous groups, are consistently absent from dominant commemorative media. The study contributes an original Nigerian media memory theory and recommends digital archive democratisation and minority historical memory funding as cultural communication priorities.

Keywords: media memory, historical representation, Nigeria, critical theory, collective memory.