TY - JOUR
AU - Parameswaran, Radhika
AB - Abstract This article presents a pathway for forging “postcolonial communication and media studies,” an area of inquiry that emerges from collaborations between communication and media studies and postcolonial theory. We aim to show the affinities between these two fields and explore how our discipline can benefit from postcolonial theory’s commitment to understanding the legacies of colonialism’s vast historical reach. This article’s itinerary has three stops. At the first stop, we make a case for the insights that a historicized understanding of global “cultural power” can yield. The second stop outlines the contours of a vigilant approach to alterity that can unpack the hegemonic identity politics of Western modernity. At the third and most important stop, we point to a future research trajectory for postcolonial communication and media studies, an agenda that avoids the limitations of existing postcolonial theory and fosters a robust conversation with the larger interdisciplinary project of postcolonial studies. Is postcolonial theory relevant for communication and media studies in a largely “decolonized” world? Responding in the affirmative to this question, this article explores the potential for deepening collaborations between postcolonial studies and communication and media studies. We aim to highlight the existing affinities between these two bodies of scholarship and point to productive directions for forging what we call “postcolonial communication and media studies,” a still-emerging area of inquiry. Our exploration here is timely and worthy because postcolonial theory’s finely tuned historicized approach to global power, conflict, culture, politics and economics is indispensable for a discipline that views itself today as global and increasingly finds a home in many former colonies. The contemporary global political climate also underscores the urgent need for an invigorating dialogue between postcolonial theory and communication and media studies. We are witnessing today the widespread retreat from progressive global connectedness, with right-wing politicians in the Global North regurgitating colonial discourses under the guise of economic nationalism and new-found nativism while right-wing leaders in the Global South invoke the rhetorics of “anti-imperialism,” disguised as anti-colonial nationalism, to justify their imposition of authoritarian forms of governance. Such a blatant inversion of emancipatory discourses as a means to achieve reactionary ends can only be fully digested when historicized within conceptual frameworks that recognize the affective charge of enduring symbolic structures (e.g., nation, culture, home) and the strategic ideological (often jingoistic) goals that drive the deployment of essentialized discourses of alterity, both of which are prominent areas of inquiry within postcolonial studies. Why does the formation of postcolonial communication and media studies matter? We contend that for communication and media studies to seek a global presence—alongside its global objects of inquiry—while disavowing the vast historical reach of colonialism that profoundly changed the world as we know and experience it today would betray the very ideals of social justice, global solidarity and an acute awareness of power relations. Key pillars in fashioning inclusive, ethical and innovative research agendas. Two recent provocations by Kumar (2014) and Shome (2016) show how, devoid of postcolonial theory’s historical sensibility towards global exploitation, communication theory can too often talk of globalization and development as ahistorical categories (Kumar, 2014) and how it can push forward a certain Euro–American telos of media history as a global one (Shome, 2016). Building upon such previous work, our itinerary in this article, as we chart an intellectual journey that can revitalize engagements between postcolonial theory and communication and media studies, has three stops. The first stop highlights postcolonial studies’ enduring historical attention to the varied and morphing qualities of cultural power to emphasize how this approach can sharpen our field’s grasp of the ways in which media and communication phenomena are enmeshed firmly in both old and newly revamped global permutations of dominance. The second stop outlines how postcolonial theory’s vigilant orientation to alterity or difference in all of its neocolonial avatars enables media and communication scholars to unpack the chameleon codes of fluctuating social hierarchies that continue to structure global media imaginaries. At the third and most important stop, we invert our critical gaze to call for a self-reflexive bi-directionality within the larger interdisciplinary terrain of postcolonial studies—populated largely by scholars in literary studies, history and anthropology—so it can open itself to new perspectives and potential gains from an increased intimacy with its still young sibling, postcolonial communication and media studies. We invite scholars in both areas to work together to attend to deficiencies that constrain postcolonial critiques from acquiring greater legitimacy in media and communication studies and in the broader realm of cultural studies. First stop: cultural power Communication and media studies has devoted substantive energy to the global dimensions of communication phenomena. However, previous scholarship that has sought to theorize relationships between dominant Western media and culture institutions and non-Western societies has invariably done so through the rather reductive lenses of development communication, cultural imperialism, or, more recently, the celebratory lenses of hybridity. We acknowledge the value of these approaches in turning the academic gaze towards the Global South. However, the nuanced attention to human experience, the detailed elaboration of non-Western subjectivity and the meticulous socio-historical contextualization of objects and sites, so visible within scholarship about Western locations and experiences, have been less conspicuous in scholarship about the Global South. In calling for more emphasis on such granular approaches in the future, we clear a path through postcolonial theory to put together a conceptual scaffolding for cultural power that deepens our understanding of the symbolic, epistemic, conventional and psychological ways in which power operates within large parts of the world today. This theoretical schema enables our scrutiny of the morphing and masked forms of power within a globalizing world, wherein seemingly decentralized media technologies and empowering narratives of produsers, resistance, and collapsing barriers risk drowning out the equally important analyses of exacerbating divisions and asymmetries. Analyses of such a transmogrification in manifestations of power have historically emerged from diverse quarters (Deleuze, 1992; Rose, 1990; Foucault, 1980), but we often forget that postcolonial theory deserves credit for paying close attention to the global/imperial context that shaped complex iterations of power as invisible, intangible and yet palpable forces that one can perceive but not fully name (Fanon, 2008; Gandhi, 1998). Postcolonial theory has analyzed the ways in which structures of power endure in the psychic realm, thus creating a colonized subjectivity through altered schemas of aspirations and cultural regimes of legitimation. Key thinkers in the discipline (Fanon, 2008) have shown how the conflation of particular kinds of cultural knowledge and languages with civilization, and others with the lack of it, reified certain aspirational goals while denigrating colonized others and their systems of knowledge and ways of living. Thus giving us new conceptual vocabularies for investigating the operation of a similar dynamic within the global circulation and consumption of culture. Such a hierarchical dynamic also persists in the realm of knowledge, where the lessons of postcolonial theory illuminate how the shifting needle of what counts as legitimate knowledge that is worth pursuing, accumulating and archiving and what is marginal and deserving of erasure and denigration (Connell, 2014; Spivak, 1999), perpetuates an invisible (because it is intangible) and seemingly immutable global hierarchy. Despite their invisibility (and in fact precisely due to it), modalities of Western power are efficient and enduring as they self-perpetuate, as in the case of knowledge production, through a normativizing process that scholars have called “extraversion in the Global South” (Connell, 2014, p. 218). Absorbing lessons from critiques of these historical and ongoing re-structurations in the realm of culture, knowledge, psychology and the symbolic (that we bring together in the category cultural power) within the folds of communication and media studies has much to contribute to its future trajectory as a globalizing discipline engaged with the urgent questions of our time. A key area for such potential absorption is the domain of inquiry, which interrogates the motivations for and consequences of the global circulation of media and culture. By infusing such analyses with the lessons of postcolonial studies on the role that symbolic structures play within longitudinal experiences of domination, communication and media studies research can emerge as far more politically conscious and skeptical of the gleaming cultural surfaces of modernity that have historically concealed bubbling and criss-crossing global and local inequalities (Harindranath, 2003). A historicized communication and media studies perspective could emphasize how the symbolic, epistemic and psychic structures of the past survive and shape cultural choices in the present by focussing on the ways in which vestigial structures of colonialism (language, educational institutions, cultural practices) create the conditions of possibility for cultural globalization today (Parameswaran, 2008). When filtered through this lens, pressing questions within our field, such as the popularity of Hollywood and television shows within Anglophone countries (Miller, Govil, & McMurria, 2005), rock music at seemingly unpredictable locations (Kumar, 2016), or the framing of artistic and popular fictional texts as signs of refinement, sophistication or cultural capital, emerge as inextricably related to the enduring historical structures that already made those texts less foreign to global audiences (Parameswaran, 1999). We do not allege here that all contemporary cultural consumption is purely determined by history. Instead we argue that by taking seriously postcolonial theory’s claim that colonialism irreversibly altered the relationship between colonized subjects and their cultures in unfavorable ways, we can begin to unpack the re-orienting of cultural desire towards hegemonic colonial cultures. In so doing our discipline can foreground and critique a key modernizing process whose effects continue through and within the globalization of media and culture today. A second predominant strain of interest within communication and media studies, the global spread of digital culture, can similarly gain from postcolonial theory’s suspicion towards claims of universality and its untiring call for plurality within the global cultural sphere. The power asymmetries of digital/networked media technologies arise from the global digital divide’s perpetuation of unequal access to economic and cultural capital, the opacity of technology as a means for domination, and a seemingly decentralized, neutral and acultural digital network’s capacity to mask the cultural and political ethos embedded within the web’s architecture. The first issue of access arises due to the persistent digital divide, which ensures that when we talk about the web we continue to exclude about half of the world’s population, a majority of whom live in what scholars have called “archipelagos of disconnection” (Straumann & Graham, 2016). Inequity of access preventing sustained academic inquiry also arises due to the medium whose technical architecture, as well as the data produced by it, remain hidden behind corporate secrecy, institutional paywalls and indecipherable algorithms, thus taking them beyond the immediate reach of critical scholars of media. When culture becomes code (Manovich, 2001), as it does in all new/digital media, prior theories of cultural power seem woefully inadequate in helping us understand its operations, thus leading to facile perceptions about digital media and the web as empty vessels within which each culture pours itself, thus allowing true unencumbered expressions of authenticity. These empowering narratives elide significant evidence to the contrary that points to how digital technologies and the networked web that they inhabit both have cultures of their own (Winner, 1980) and could function as the most efficient media of control, surveillance and hence cultural power in the global context. By making access to the web conditional to our acceptance of their rules and procedures, the affordances of digital platforms exercise what scholars have called “network power” at the global level, wherein particular ideals and values are advanced through conventions, protocols and default settings that regulate user behavior online. Insights from postcolonial theory can show how the seemingly “universal” values and ideals embedded within the web such as notions of free speech and the public/private divide (Vick, 2001), the incentivization of a radically individualized and self-revealing subject (Rose, 1990), and exclusionary definitions of knowledge (Connell, 2014), have contingent and parochial origins. This theoretical stance, informed by a history of skepticism towards Enlightenment’s claims of universality (Mignolo, 2011), can advance our consciousness of cultural power’s disappearing act on the global web. Second stop: alterity/difference Postcolonial theory offers media and communication studies creative, flexible and historicized geopolitical, cross-cultural, and psychological frameworks to critique “alterity” (also meaning difference). This refers both to encounters with externalized figures whose Otherness surfaces in relation to one’s collective/group/tribal identity—along the vectors of gender, race, class, nation and sexuality—and to internal psychic struggles of Otherness within the self (the other resides within us) that index individual identity formation as a mutable and evolving process (Zalloua, 2005). Resisting inherited binaries and territorial boundaries to examine scattered (read Foucauldian) power relations while simultaneously retaining the notion of the subaltern subject, recent formulations of postcolonial theory have critiqued cultural representations spawned by neoliberal globalization in order to unpack global difference. These recent formulations have done so by contesting the following: the superficial allure of liberal “solutions,” the gratification of premature closure promised by certain strains of activist politics, simplistic assumptions that “positive” images of marginalized groups will reduce inequality, knee-jerk arguments that cast only the big bad West as the source of all problems in the Global South, as well as myopic disavowals of the self’s deep investments in producing an other. Far from being immaterial for the contemporary moment, postcolonial feminist studies’ attention to gender, one visible source of difference, offers an illustrative example of the sharply political critiques that become possible when we marry postcolonial theory to media and communication studies. Since 9/11, the rise of ISIS—a militant group with ambitions to become a territorial state power—the onset of civil war in Syria and ensuing flows of migration, and recent incidents of terrorist violence in Europe and the United States, the figure of the submissive Muslim woman suffering at the hands of the menacing Muslim man has gained renewed traction in the worlds of media, academia, policy regimes, and activism. Lila Abu-Lughod (2013), author of the book Do Muslim Women Need Saving, argues in a Time magazine article that Western projects of salvation centered on rescuing Muslim women, which often bring together “conservatives, liberals, sexists and feminists,” have “justified all manner of intervention from the legal to the military, the humanitarian to the sartorial” only by confining Muslim women to a “stereotyped singularity, plastering a handy cultural icon over much more complicated historical and political dynamics.” Abu-Lughod sifts two decades of her fieldwork among Muslim communities through the sieves of postcolonial feminist theory. She challenges the universality of hegemonic notions of emancipation and equal rights, which emphasize religion at the expense of socioeconomic factors, overlook both non-Western women’s local priorities and the similarities in many women’s conditions across the world, as well as gloss over imperial histories and the vested interests of global and local elites. Such postcolonial feminist critiques of the non-Western woman as the subjugated other (feeding the Western self)—including the selective appropriation of non-Western women’s cultural practices in performances of Western femininity and regimes of morality—have shaped the far too few, but incisive critiques of gendered representations and cultural difference. From veiling, body art, and beautification projects to honor killings and humanitarian activism in various genres of media culture. However, postcolonial feminism has also taken us beyond media narratives that produce the silent brown/oppressed subaltern Muslim woman, mobilized to serve different opportunistic causes. What are the possibilities and limits of the seemingly exceptional “speaking other,” the articulate and heroic Muslim woman, who navigates the mediatized orbits of celebrity culture? What can we make of the media appointing Malala Yousafzai (campaigner for girls’ education from the Swat valley in Pakistan, shot by the Pakistani Taliban and now living in the United Kingdom) and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (a former Somali refugee and vocal anti-Islam political commentator, now living in the United States), two prominent and quite different women, as global spokespersons on women’s conditions in Muslim communities? Walters’ (2016) granular deconstructive postcolonial feminist analysis of U.K. newspapers’ extensive coverage of Yousafzai’s shooting, recovery and media activism reveals that the media did portray her as courageous, however, the problematic framing of her positive qualities—the infantilization of Yousafzai, the packaging of girls’ education in consumerist humanitarian language, and the hegemonic production of a “caring Britain”—undermined the potential of these stories to crack dominant gendered and Orientalist discourses. In contrast to Yousafzai, who has steered clear of controversy, the Somali-American Muslim public intellectual, Ayaan Hirsi Ali—a former fellow of the conservative American Enterprise Institute whose rhetorical denunciations of Islamic patriarchy have resembled the dominant-colonial “clash of civilizations” discourse—offers postcolonial communication and media studies the ability to connect with the diversity in expressions of women’s agency, rather than reduce such troubling figures to stooges of powerful Western neoliberal actors. Calling for postcolonial feminism to contend with alterity across ideological divides, Grewal’s (2012) intricately calibrated essay analyzes Hirsi Ali’s varied media texts to position her as a multifaceted icon whose public appeal can be traced to the authority and feminist agency attributed to Third World women’s authentic lived experiences, the legitimacy of Ali’s views on some strains of fundamentalist Islam, and her complicated attempts to navigate her postcolonial habitus, oscillating between “oppressed Muslim woman” and “emancipated European intellectual.” Grewal’s analysis points to a constructive challenge for postcolonial media and communication studies, one that would take seriously embodiments of difference that often get swept under the label of the neocolonial. Postcolonial feminist theory has also enriched our critical capacity to investigate a range of public communicative practices that seek to represent the explosive experiences of gendered alterity that get ignited in the Global South’s transforming urban spaces, which are witnessing the exacerbations of class and gender inequality wrought by neoliberal globalization. For instance, the gang rape of Jyoti Singh Pandey (on 16 December 2012, by six assailants on a bus) in the aspiring global megacity of New Delhi, attracted a great deal of Western and Indian media attention. Postcolonial feminist scholarship on this rape case traverses a spectrum of vantage points that foreground the production of difference, from exploring the imperial consequences of Western media coverage of the case, including activist Western media productions, to unraveling the implications of Indian media representations for the divisive social and economic legacies of colonial modernity in India. On the one hand, U.S. media productions of Delhi as a “rape capital” evoked colonial archetypes of India as a primitive patriarchal nation (Durham, 2015), with the disappearance of the rape victim’s male friend from the public sphere only serving to erase brown men as allies of brown women (Roychowdhury, 2013). As Jyoti Singh Pandey’s image as a sympathetic victim, an upwardly mobile relatable Hindu everywoman, began to solidify (Shandilya, 2015), her male assailants symbolized the city’s unruly rural male migrant population (untouched by urban modernity), who deserved their violent criminalization at the hands of the Indian state (Atluri, 2013). Finally, the “biopolitics” of activist media narratives surrounding the 2012 rape case, including the discourses of feminine respectability that mobilized calls for social justice, marginalized the rapes of invisible others (neither the elite beneficiaries of colonialism or of globalization), lower-caste, lower-class, non-Hindu women whose rapes do not incite middle-class horror (Shandilya, 2015). Third stop: navigating new destinations Cultural power and alterity offer productive ground for yielding future streams of scholarship, but the long-term project of infusing communication and media studies with postcolonial theory’s vernacular has to be far more ambitious and rigorously self-reflexive. Even as postcolonial theories have unified multi-disciplinary critical scholarship that addresses the social, political and economic conditions of the Global South, they have also had their share of problems that the still-growing area of postcolonial communication and media studies has also inherited. These representative critiques (hardly an exhaustive list) include the disproportionate focus on certain parts of the world—India, for example—at the expense of others, the dangers of essentializing and reifying difference, an inability to attend to race, the marginalization of settler colonialism, the ambiguity of “post” as a temporal marker, and the privileging of textual critique at the expense of ethnographic and qualitative fieldwork methods. These continuing blindspots within postcolonial theories’ oeuvre remind us of the need for continuous introspection and course correction as we import these approaches into communication and media studies. One of the most recent scathing critiques of postcolonial theory came from Vivek Chibber (2014), who argued that in its obsessive call for cultural difference from the universalizing ideals of Europe, postcolonial theory not only resurrects but “relentlessly promotes Eurocentrism” (p. 291, emphasis in original). Other critiques of postcolonial theory (Moore, 2001) have called for expanding its geographic scope and contesting the primacy of British colonialism, questioning why the experience of the post-Soviet bloc of Eastern Europe (comprising of 27 countries) has rarely been explained through the lens of postcolonial theory, despite being subject to “brutal Russian domination” (Moore, 2001, p. 115). Scholars have also sought more prominence for “break away settler colonies” (McClintock, 1992, p. 295) that inhabit a dual identity of being both “postcolonial and neocolonial” (Singh & Schmidt, 2000, p. 5) within the field. From the vantage point of the United States where we live and work, it is rare to find research on Native Americans in postcolonial communication and media studies, despite this community’s continued battle with the state apparatus to meet basic needs, including routine health care (Frosch & Weaver, 2017). Such scholarship as Smith’s (2011) deft Spivakian critique of the possibilities and constraints of subaltern postcolonial Maori television in New Zealand is a fine exception that only highlights the absence of similar work on indigenous communities. Ella Shohat reminds us that postcolonial theory’s “ambiguous spatio temporality” betrays the mistaken perception that the “post” is a marker of the end to global domination of the kind colonialism witnessed (1992, p. 102). The marker “post” could also be seen to reify a Western temporality of linear progress wherein “political differences between cultures are thereby subordinated to their temporal distance from European colonialism” (McClintock, 1992, p. 294). In addition to registering gender and nation on its radar, a more sustained explication of other intersecting axes of discrimination, such as race (Schueller, 2003) and caste—a necessary extension of its conceptual foundations to encompass diverse regions and colonial regimes—and wariness towards perpetuating “abiding orientalism” by elevating difference (Chibber, 2014, p. 179), can only make postcolonial theory more inclusive and relatable to a wider audience. As scholarship in postcolonial communication and media studies grows, it also presents an opportunity for the larger field of postcolonial studies, constituted by older disciplines, to stretch the scope of its compass by absorbing useful conceptual, methodological and political interventions from a newer field’s concentrated scrutiny of our thoroughly mediatized world. Postcolonial communication and media studies has borrowed liberally from the humanities orientation of postcolonial studies, learning from its methods of theory-driven close readings of texts. However, the latter has remained largely impervious to our field’s hybrid methodological approaches and to theoretical innovations that target the materiality and political economy of media forms and the rhetorical packaging of communicative practices in political and cultural settings. Scholarship within communication and media studies, such as Pal and Buzzanell’s (2013) mixed methodology that combines focus groups and interviews with constructivist grounded theory to study the experiences of call center workers in globalizing India, reveals the myriad ways in which cultural encounters with the West simultaneously replicate and disrupt postcolonial categories of cultural power and alterity. Similarly, textual analysis of cultural texts, such as cinema and music, informed by postcolonial theory, can be significantly deepened by attention to the political economy and labor practices of the global culture industries (Miller et al., 2005), as well as the technological dimensions of new media emphasized in sound and Internet studies. Facilitating a reverse flow of intellectual currents from postcolonial media and communication studies to postcolonial studies will go a long way to correct the perception that the latter’s resistance replicates the very hierarchies within global knowledge production that it so passionately critiques. These substantial provocations are most effective when they can help us pry open bi-directional channels for mutually beneficial cross-disciplinary exchanges. How then do we create the optimal conditions of knowledge production and distribution that will be conducive to exporting our ideas beyond these pages—and the solipsistic echo-chambers of the postcolonial academic choir—to reach those broader constituencies that need to hear them? We offer three concluding thoughts here to sow the seeds for the broader dispersal of our critiques and recommendations. First, taking the classroom to be a site of praxis for critical communication scholars, we call for a more robust inclusion of postcolonial research within mainstream pedagogical programs of communication and media studies. Despite its famed inter-disciplinarity, undergraduate and graduate curricula in communication and media studies have been surprisingly cursory when engaging with postcolonial perspectives, if they are dealt with at all. Postcolonial theory’s historicized sensibility to power and difference can help deepen immeasurably a range of concepts and processes we teach in our courses—globalization, political economy, hegemony, media ethics, mediatization, the public sphere, digitization, and symbolic power and democracy. Second, we venture to make the political claim that scholars situated within the relatively privileged vantage point of Western academia need to embrace the burden of importing insights from postcolonial media and communication studies into mainstream communication theory and research. Asking scholars located in postcolonial sites to carry out the labor necessary to infuse our field with the flavor of postcolonial theory ignores First World privilege, the inequities in access to academic resources, research support and the economic assistance (e.g., cost of journal subscriptions) that impede scholarship within the Global South and marginalize seemingly “exotic and esoteric” intellectual pursuits in the Global North. Lastly, in a moment charged with contentious public conversations on identity, belonging, home, migration, citizenship, cultural difference, and nationalism, we believe that postcolonial communication and media scholars need to step up and offer contributions to debates that take place outside the academy. The challenges of venturing beyond our comfort zones to become public intellectuals are manifold, but so are the rewards. As postcolonial media and communication studies is rendered accessible through curricular interventions, integrated into mainstream theory and research by a wide swathe of scholars, and circulated in public media and cultural venues, it will not only enrich the world of scholarship, but also the lives of our students who inhabit ecologies intimately shaped by colonial and neocolonial economic and cultural formations. 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TI - Charting an Itinerary for Postcolonial Communication and Media Studies
JF - Journal of Communication
DO - 10.1093/joc/jqx025
DA - 2018-04-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/charting-an-itinerary-for-postcolonial-communication-and-media-studies-VRq331K3zq
SP - 347
EP - 358
VL - 68
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -