The Decolonial Turn in Media Studies in Africa and the Global South [1st ed.] 9783030528317, 9783030528324

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The Decolonial Turn in Media Studies in Africa and the Global South Last Moyo

The Decolonial Turn in Media Studies in Africa and the Global South “This very interesting and potentially controversial book begs for a robust and honest discussion in media and communication studies. It argues for the decolonization of the field through what Last Moyo refers to as the decolonial turn, a turn he argues, should bring about cognitive justice in the field and relocate the project of theory building from Western universalism to decolonial multiculturalism emerging from the decolonial thinking of media scholars in both the Global North and the Global South. A very powerful and no holds barred critique.” —Professor Helge Rønning, Professor Emeritus, Media and Communication Studies, University of Oslo, Norway “This book is a unique theoretical contribution to the de-Westernising and multiculturalism debates in media and communication studies. It adds a fresh and robust African voice to the contemporary debates about the theoretical directions of our field. Last Moyo provides a new critical imagination which goes beyond Africa as he both rethinks and unthinks the field within conditions of the Global South. Moyo asks if the South can produce its own radical critical media theory informed by its colonial subalternity in the Euro-American world system? His answer, based on a deep reflection and critical engagement with current debates, is deep, conceptually nuanced, and impressively optimistic.” —Dr. Winston Mano, Reader in Media and Communication Studies, Editor-in-Chief, Journal of African Media Studies; University of Westminster, United Kingdom “With this book, Last Moyo has added a powerful and unequivocal voice to the project of the decolonization of media and communication studies. With a multicultural and non-partisan lens, the book provides us a deep gaze into the knowledge politics of the interdiscipline. This work represents a bold statement from Moyo about the significance of decolonizing media and communication studies for a true multicultural theory. This effort deserves our resounding applause.” —Professor Abiodun Salawu, Director of the Research entity, Indigenous Language Media in Africa, North-West University, South Africa

Last Moyo

The Decolonial Turn in Media Studies in Africa and the Global South

Last Moyo Department of Communication and Multimedia Design American University of Nigeria Yola, Nigeria

ISBN 978-3-030-52831-7 ISBN 978-3-030-52832-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52832-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Alex Linch/shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For my mother, With the tenderness of a rose and the resolve of a soldier. For my wife, A beauty personified beyond perfect art. And for my children, The pearls I hold in the delicate palm of a loving heart, Until the end of time.

Foreword

The Decolonial Turn in Media Studies in Africa and the Global South is a timely as well as a necessary book which surfaces the key questions and issues that have been debated for some time now. For example, one of the most recurring questions in the book is: To what extent does Africa and the Global South have any distinguishable theoretical approaches or do they just transpose theories, methodologies, and pedagogies more appropriate to the Global North? Put differently the author asks the questions: What is African about African media and communication studies or Asian about Asian media and communication studies or Latino about the field in Latin America? The author situates these questions within a decolonial critique of media and communication studies, a turn that is not only cultural and epistemic, but also emphasizes the value of the decolonization imperative as a route to a transformed discipline. The book represents an ambitious and compelling critique where the author does not limit his analysis to Africa, but also expands it to the Global South. As an analytical category, the author argues that the Global South is not limited to a geo-political configuration, but can also be recast as non-geographical effective for analysing questions of culture, power imbalances at multiple levels in knowledge creation, and the project of multiculturalism that underpins social and cognitive justice for a transformed discipline and world in an unequal global village. To that extent, the book develops a conceptual apparatus of the Global South that helps

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the reader to rethink previous geo-political characterizations of place in the discipline and manifestations of culture and hegemonic knowledges. The book elevates the debates on how, and from what epistemic and theoretical positions, critiques of media and communication in the Global South can be raised to the next level of asking much deeper questions about transforming media and communication studies. It does so by, among other ways, making searing critiques of extant traditions in communication and media studies, especially the dominant and hegemonic theoretical traditions of the Global North. In this regard the book is very provocative and will elicit a lot of debates and perhaps even fiercely critical counter arguments as a good book should do. There will be a lot to agree with and perhaps as much to contend with in the broader arguments made by the book on theory, methods, and pedagogies of the South. However, what is crystal clear is that the author does not tinker at the edge of the debates about the field, but delves deeper by taking a historical and contextualized approach that makes the book more grounded, intellectually provocative, and ground breaking. The author’s argument is well anchored in historicizing not only the development of media and communication studies, but that of media systems as well. Apart from the fact that the book recuperates texts like the UNESCO’s McBride Commission’s report One World Many Voices of which most people failed to understand the theoretical, methodological, pedagogical, policy and regulatory implications it posited. The reaction of the United States and the UK on ideological and geo-political grounds shrouded what could have been a very rich debate for understanding media and communication in local contexts and globally. This debate, as the book amply demonstrates, had a huge transformative potential on the development of a truly multicultural media and communication studies. The book also demonstrates a very high level of critical and nuanced engagement with debates, arguments, and positions in media and communication studies that is a pleasure to read and something that is new, intellectually provocative, and will itself engender interesting debates in the field. In this regard, it eschews a reductionist approach without holding back from being robustly critical and intellectually engaging. The book demonstrates the author’s vast knowledge and depth of reading in communication and media studies and decolonial approaches. It demonstrates an interesting trans-disciplinarity that gives content to the term ‘decolonial’ which has been much bandied about in some books without much thought or substance. The author has applied himself intelligently

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to the task of imagining and laying out the approaches of a decolonial critique not only to media and communication studies in the Global South, but in conversation with the Global North. He accomplishes this task with great proficiency, diligence, and care. Finally, a major strength of the book is that it asks a lot of deep questions which will equally raise even more questions and elevate the NorthSouth dialogue in the discipline to a higher level. Although it does not necessarily answer all of the questions, it leaves the reader with some questions to reflect on about the future prospects of the multicultural question in media and communication studies. In this respect, the book is not a closed text since its dialogic and conversational position is made clear from the outset. Scholars of media and communication studies and related fields will find that the book is not only rivetingly critical and analytical, but also refreshing and very engaging. We definitely need more such books if we are to develop theories, methodologies, and pedagogies that anchor the pursuit of an emancipatory social justice project in the Global South. Pretoria, South Africa

Professor Tawana Kupe

Professor Tawana Kupe Vice Chancellor and Principal at University of Pretoria, South Africa. Kupe is a full professor of media and communication studies and a member of the International Council of the IAMCR and several other academic associations.

Acknowledgements

Every writer knows how writing can sometimes feel like a lonely exercise. You jump off your bed in the middle of the night awaken not by the alarm, but a voltage of intellectual energy in the form of a golden idea that literally brings a poetic moment to life. It’s a moment that switches off your sleep as soon as you switch on the lights and won’t go until the muse is done. That was my experience during the last half of 2019 when I sat to write this book. In reality though, I did not write this book alone, but in community. I wrote it in the company of the forerunners of the interdiscipline, from both the Global North and the Global South: those who produced path-breaking works that over the years inspired me as an African scholar to develop my own argument about the form and content of media and communication studies and its possible futures. Needless to say, I also wrote the book in the company of colleagues, academic friends, and my family. Their intellectual conversations watered the seeds of some of my authorial ideas and sharpened them into the cogent arguments that now form this book. It therefore makes sense for me to begin by thanking my colleagues in my department at the American University in Nigeria. I thank professors Ritchard Mbayo, Samuel Tesunbi, Emeka Umejei, Suleiman Suleiman, and Abdul Mousa. I would also like to thank other colleagues in the School of Arts and Sciences for the intellectual culture and everyday scholarly exchanges we share in corridors and seminars. I thank professors Loveday Gbara, Agatha Utaka, Bill Hansen, Patrick Fay, Wasiq Khan,

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Jennifer Tyndall, Jennifer Che, Jennifer Lofkrantz, Feisal Farah, and Ikechuku Ike. A special thanks also goes to my office colleagues, professors Mahamadou Sagna and Malachy Okeke for the rich and informative debates that have come to characterize the jocund and convivial atmosphere of our office. I also feel immensely indebted to professors Bruce Mutsvairo, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, and Tawana Kupe, who have been part of my academic journey into decolonial studies in media and communication studies. In particular, I have enjoyed the long telephonic debates and exchanges with some of these colleagues in ways that always helped me to refine and sharpen some of my ideas in the course of writing this book. Whoever said family is everything really said it on my behalf. I could not have been able to write this book without my family as my pillar of strength and a fountain of love, peace, and sanity that are a bedrock for any effort towards sustained critical writing. In particular, I thank my wife for the sea of motivation that never dried up. She always listened to my ideas with a keen ear and a positive mind, and always told me how excellent my ideas were even in those moments when it was clear that I was producing more heat than light. I should also thank my daughters for keeping me sane with their intermittent break-ins into my study and the unexpected chauffeuring duties they forced me to have for their errands. As I write this piece, I can see them in my mind’s eye banging my study door and demanding that I must open because, ‘Daddy don’t forget that yesterday you promised to take us to the beach for ice cream’. Well, every time that happened, I knew it was time up: the book and the writer have their own separate lives and as they say, when it’s time to go, it’s time to go. Last but not least, I must thank the Palgrave-McMillan team, Camille Davies, Liam McLean, and Naveen Dass for their meticulous job on the demanding routines of book production from a prototype to something we can now hold and peruse through. Thank you.

Contents

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Introduction Introduction The Decolonial Turn and Border Studies in Media and Communication What Does the Global South Mean by Social and Academic Multiculturalism? On the Necessity of a Southern Theory in Media and Communication Studies Conclusion References Rethinking Internationalizing Media Studies: Directions and Indirections for the Global South Introduction Understanding the Liberal/Colonial/Imperial Internationalism Trap The Socialist, Pan-African, and Black Internationalism Options The Politics of Internationalizing Media and Communication Studies Rethinking the De-Westernization Alternative: Spatial or Epistemic Process?

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29 29 36 40 42 51

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Africanization and Asianization: Culture as a Pathway, Culture as a Slippery Slope Conclusion References 3

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The Global South: Recalibrating Our Geo-Cultural and Epistemic Agency Introduction The Global South as a Geo-Politico Cultural Imaginary The Global South as an Epistemic Angle or Worldview What Are Epistemic and Ideological Turns in Media and Communication Studies? Epistemic/Ideological Turns Centred in the Global North The Cultural/Linguistic Turn The Ethnographic Turn Turns from the Global South Afrocentric Turn Afropolitan Turn Postcolonial and the Decolonial Turns On the Politics of Recognition and Validation Conclusion References The Decolonial Turn: Towards a Southern Theory in Media Studies Introduction Decoloniality and Feminist Media Studies Decoloniality and Marxism The Decolonial Epistemology in Media and Communication Studies Decolonial Theory and Its Exponents Building a Southern Critical Theory of Media and Communication Studies The Coloniality of Power: Counterhegemonic Impulses of the Southern Media Theory The Coloniality of Knowledge and the Struggle for Epistemic Freedoms in the South On the Problem of the Coloniality of Social Theory in the Field

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65 65 69 76 79 81 85 87 89 91 95 99 102 105 106

113 113 120 121 123 128 129 133 137 142

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The Coloniality of Being and the Struggle for Cultural Freedoms Conclusion References 5

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Academic and Epistemic Freedoms: Struggles of the Border Intellectual in Media Studies Introduction Academic Freedom: History, Philosophy, and Border Reflections Academic Freedom as a Navigation of Political Economy Between Autonomy and Responsibility: Loyalty and Defiance of the Conscious Border Intellectual Conclusion References

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153 153 160 168 171 180 181

Decolonial Research Methodologies: Resistance and Liberatory Approaches Introduction The Darker Side of Media and Communications Research Decolonial Research as Resistance Methodology The Participatory Action Research Methodology Indigenous Research Methodology Decolonial Ethnography Decolonizing Research Ethics Conclusion References

187 187 189 195 202 207 210 215 220 220

Reflections on Critical Pedagogy and Multiculturalism in Media Studies Introduction Critical Pedagogy and Its Epistemic Limits The Rise of Decolonial Pedagogy Decolonial/Border Pedagogy in the Classroom From a Multicultural to a Pluriversal Media Education Conclusion References

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Conclusion: The Paradigm of Dialogue and the Future of Media Theory Introduction Normative Foundations and the Future of Media Theory Conclusion References

Index

253 253 256 260 262 263

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

As communication research preoccupies itself with the problem of hegemony, homogeneity, and the role of media in the distribution of power and influence in societies, turning away from the same issues within the field itself is no longer justifiable. Georgette Wang (2011, p. 2)

Today, new voices and novel ideas in the discipline are ushering in what can be called the multicultural turn in communication theory. In the waves of globalization and localization, Western theories of communication are increasingly questioned by non-Western experiences and widely tested in non-Western contexts. Yoshitaka Miike (2007, p. 272)

Introduction In recent years, the humanities and social sciences have been under an introspective and retrospective mood about their directions and indirections in the face of global, systemic, epistemic, and ecological crises that require new thinking and new ideas. In most academic disciplines, theory has reached a dead end in terms of its explanatory and transformative power. Indeed, the wellsprings of critical theory such as structuralism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism in the West are drying up and

© The Author(s) 2020 L. Moyo, The Decolonial Turn in Media Studies in Africa and the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52832-4_1

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face the possibility of epistemic closure. The need for new critical imagination for new explanatory paradigms and new ways of knowing has compelled the Global North to look to the Global South for alternatives (Rehbein 2015; Santos 2018; Comaroff and Comaroff 2016). In universities, academic disciplines are going through a deep reflective process of rethinking or even unthinking Euro-American paradigms that are increasingly seen as advancing a hidden colonial and imperial agenda. Media and communication studies have not been an exception in this soul-searching journey. The central and enduring problem for the interdiscipline has been how to transform the field from the grip of Eurocentric, Western-centric, and monocultural universalism to a more progressive cultural politics of a multicultural, inclusive, emancipatory theory and pedagogy. Indeed, there is a growing consensus within the field from both the Global North and the Global South that such an intervention is a necessary moral and political project in order to reanimate and decentre the act of theory building from the West and create a possibility for a new trans-epistemic knowledge paradigm born out of the dialogue between Southern and Northern epistemologies in the field. What is interesting about this North-South consensus is that it resonates with the call for a just World Information and Communication Order by the McBride Commission 40 years ago. The McBride Report argued that communication was indispensable to both culture and knowledge for all societies across space and time. Communication disseminated ‘culture for the purpose of preserving the heritage of the past’ just as it also provided ‘a common fund of knowledge which enables people to live and operate as effective members of the society in which they live’ (1980, p. 14). Its analysis of the potential of the emerging and nascent globalism on culture and education in the 1980s indirectly gestured towards the need for a multicultural media and communication studies with which media intellectuals are consumed today (pp. 25–31). Notwithstanding the apologetic view that posits that the field of media and communication studies is relatively young and therefore in some ways still formative, the interdiscipline is now grown and over the years has matured in ways that require honest reflections about its epistemic and cultural relevance in a fast globalizing, but culturally diverse world. Since their emergence in the twentieth century from the Western world, media and communication studies have not only developed an intellectual canon of theory and method, but have also created several spaces for debate and

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conversation by way of regional and international conferences. The International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), for example, is now truly global in terms of its geo-political and cultural appeal. For instance, as of February 2020, its website indicated that the Association’s membership comprised individuals and institutions from more than 100 countries across the North-South divide. In principle, the IAMCR’s global reach gestures towards a powerful wave of transnational cultural diversity that has created the much needed cultural ferment in the field. In addition to the several international journals, this signals the best of the times for an intellectual dialogue that seeks to preserve as much as it invents and translate as much as it transforms the critical traditions of the field. Consequently, it should not come as a surprise that Georgette Wang has usefully reminded us that ignoring the question of hegemony, homogeneity, and geo-political and cultural power imbalances within the field was no longer acceptable. Indeed, the continued dominance of Western universalism as a locus of enunciation for the entire interdiscipline against the backdrop of a very globalizing field is an anathema. Western universalism amounts to the death of the dialogue between cultures. In many ways, Wang’s observation echoed the concerns of many scholars within the field from both the Global North and the Global South: concerns that have sometimes, but not always traversed gender, race, culture, and geography (Curran and Park 2000; Downing 2003; Miike 2007; Asante 2011; Thussu 2009; Bâ and Higbee 2012; Willems 2014). Again, in many ways, her views resonate with a conversation that is sometimes considered to be already underway. However, as she rightly observes, while the conversation might be global in scope, it is not multicultural in character. Indeed, as she perceptively put it: ‘One may talk about media and communication studies around the world, yet the discussion is essentially an intellectual monologue with the mainstream West- with itself’ (Wang 2011, p. 2). Over the last two decades, media and communication studies have witnessed the emergence of what can be loosely characterized as an intellectual movement that has been preoccupied with the need for a multicultural approach to theory in the interdiscipline, necessitated in part, by the cultural visibility of the ‘Other’ through the technologies of globalization. The tropes of this broad-based movement have ranged from Africanization, Asianization, to internationalization, de-internationalization, and de-Westernization (Thussu 2009; Waisbord and Mellado 2014; Moyo and Mutsvairo 2018; DeWit 2013). However,

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the meaning of these concepts has largely remained kaleidoscopic just as their content and praxis have also been fuzzy. For example, on the one hand, the discourse of internationalization has mostly been abstract where liberal/colonial/imperial/capitalist internationalism is tacitly privileged as a normative position over the counterhegemonic internationalisms such the ‘Socialist/Pan-African/black/decolonial internationalisms’ (Jeronimo ´ and Monteiro 2018). Yet as Jerenimo and Monteiro observe, the vocabularies and practices of internationalism as political and epistemic projects have not only been multiple, but also polycentric thus creating room for numerous possibilities for a variegated praxis in how we internationalize media education. On the other hand, as discursive formations that also aim to transform media and communication studies, Africanization and Asianization have been accused of advocating primordial blood and soil cultural essentialism. However, in reality, they are about the reaffirmation of African and Asian cultures and values as constitutive centres for media and communication knowledges and practices. As Nyamnjoh and Shoro (2011) lucidly explain, ‘far from promising a single identity, [they are] about offering a mental space for disparate identities to co-exist in freedom and dignity’ (p. 35). The position of scholars like Francis Nyamjoh, Molefi Asante, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Yoshitaka Miike and others cannot be reduced to African or Asian ethnophilosophies of yesteryear that were sufficiently denounced and discredited by Paulin Hountondji (1996, 1997). In Endogenous Knowledge: Research Trails, Hountondji advocated for African indigenous knowledges that are reflective and endowed with an in-built ability to think above and beyond themselves (Hountondji 1997). While, to others, Africanization and Asianization imply a banal and crude de-Westernization of media and communication studies based on the resurgent ethnocentrisms of the South, their undeniable strength and contribution to the interdiscipline are in the reconstruction of alternate counterhegemonic geo-cultural and epistemic centres for media theory building in the Global South. The geography of this theorization is predicated on ‘strategic essentialism around the fact and experience of being Black/Asian/Latin American in a world of hierarchies of purity shaped by being White’ (Nyamjoh and Shoro 2011, p. 36). Most recently, the anti-imperial theories of transforming media and communication studies have crystallized around decolonization and found greater nuance from decoloniality, a theory that as I argue in this book represents a cultural-epistemic turn whose

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value is not only in deep ‘critical engagement with the politics of knowledge production and dissemination under a Western knowledge order’ but also in unmasking Euro-American modernity’s ‘concealed problems such as racism and the embedded asymmetrical power dynamics in theory building ’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018, p. 81, Emphasis added). The criticism of Western universalism and its claims of universal validity in media and communication studies is not new. Since the late 1990s, it has also been a project of the West representing what we can characterize as Euro-America’s self-critique of its theoretical domination in media and communication studies. While the decolonial turn identifies itself as a radical border critique that emerges from the exteriority of Euro-American theoretical paradigms, it has tremendously benefitted from the Western postmodern critique of universal paradigms in media and communication studies (Hardt 1992; Garnham 1990; Morley 2006). In any case, the dividing lines between internal postmodern critiques and exogenous decolonial critiques of the interdiscipline are increasingly blurred as scholars and theory travel across frontiers. Consequently, the exteriority of the decolonial critique and endogeneity of the postmodern critique are not geographic characterizations, but epistemic geographies pointing more to the problem of epistemic location as opposed to geographic location. However, the decolonial critique is very pessimistic about the revolutionary and transformative potential of the Western postmodern critique in the Global South since it represents an internal project that the late Samir Amin, following Immanuel Wallerstein, saw as ensnaring the Southern intellectual into the trap of ‘anti-Eurocentric Eurocentrism’ (Amin 2010; Also see Wallerstein 1997). The project of ‘anti-Eurocentric Eurocentrism’ represents a project of false alternatives for the intellectuals and societies of the Global South who, consciously or unconsciously, are engaged in the struggle to recover their cultures, humanity, personhood, languages, and worldviews from inferiorization, pathologization, and exclusion in academic disciplines. Epistemic freedom in media and communication studies, for instance, cannot be delivered through the anti-Eurocentric-Eurocentrism project because it represents the master’s sword which he cannot turn against himself. The Western postmodern critique of the field cannot liberate the Global South because it is still undergirded by Euro-American modernity’s ethnocentric value system and Enlightenment’s myths of progress, rationality, and science (see Allen 2016). This problem constitutes part of the in-built epistemological blind

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spots of the internal critique of media and communication studies that substantially erode its emancipatory potential in the Global South. It is, however, important for me to state with great emphasis from the outset that the aim of this book is not to pour cold water on the Western critique of its own domineering universalism in the field. The futility of such an attempt will be greeted by the hard, incontrovertible, and self-evident factuality of the unprecedented canonical contributions of the Western archive to the politics of knowledge production in media and communication studies and other related fields. Indeed, as David Morley warns us, in the best and worst of times in media and communication studies, the interdiscipline should avoid the language of clamours of ‘epistemological’ or ‘methodological’ breakthroughs that ‘dethrone’ this or that school of thought. Our intellectual labour should be focused on creating a dynamic multicultural disciplinary space ‘which builds new insights on to the old, in a process of dialogue transformation’ (Morley 2006, p. 3). This book is written in that spirit and more particularly to contribute to the North-South dialogue in media and communication studies. It aims to add more lines to the contours of this dialogue of disciplinary transformation from the standpoint of an African scholar who happens to be black and male. I am saying this because it may not be immediately obvious to others that we speak from where we stand in terms of our social location and epistemic location. As Walter Mignolo famously observed, epistemology and ontology are very entangled. We cannot speak of one outside the other. While epistemology ‘does not appear ingrained in the politics of location to the point where you cannot think the former without the latter’ in reality ‘it [is]so unless one assumes that epistemology is not located; that it is universal and ungrounded, and a neutral guardian of knowledge’ (Mignolo 1999, p. 238). Indeed, in media and communication studies, decolonial thinking is mindful of the politics of positionality just as it also strives to understand the contributions of the Western internal critique and its Euro-American paradigms within their own social and historical contexts (Grosfoguel 2008; Moyo and Mutsvairo 2018). Decolonial thinking does not hide its locus of enunciation since knowledge is never universal but perspectival and thus wrought in social and historical contingency. Closely interwoven with the politics of location and self-disclosure in academic discourse is the question of the Global South that appears in the title of this book. How could a scholar sitting in a dimly lit hut of darkness in some corner of Africa ever think of writing a book about the

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Global South? Furthermore, how possible is it to speak of the Global South in media and communication studies without conflating different and perhaps even incommensurable intellectual traditions? I must accept that such concerns would be legitimate and have to be addressed. Indeed, as a geo-cultural or disciplinary delimitation concept, the Global South is not homogenous, but culturally diverse. However, one overarching and cross-cutting characteristic of the geographic South of media and communication studies in Africa, Asia and Latin America is that they are all currently deeply rooted in Western liberal and critical traditions as a consequence of history (see M’Bayo et al. 2000; Waisbord and Zurmuk 2011; Scolari and Rodriguez-Amat 2018; Calderón et al. 2018). Although there have been claims of regional home theories from some optimistic disciplinary historiographies of the Global South, none of the geographic South can claim to be sovereign or to have broken free from the orbit of Western paradigms and epistemologies in its theory building projects. The term ‘Global South’ in the title of this book is used as a non-geographic concept. Far from just being limited to a geo-spatial formulation, the Global South is increasingly reconstructed as an epistemic location or epistemic angle to the important questions of our time in the humanities in general, and media and communication studies in particular. As Anne Mahler observes, ‘The Global South which generally refers to a political consciousness resulting from the recognition by diverse peoples of their shared experience of the negative effects of globalization, might productively be considered a departure from the limitations of postcolonial theory. As a category, postcoloniality has not had a reach commensurate with the transcendent geo-cultural boundaries of globalization. The Global South has emerged to provide a more useful rubric for theorizing contemporary hegemony and resistance’ (2015, pp. 95–96). The Global South is certainly used here not just in reference to a geo-cultural category, but more importantly to refer to the diverse decolonial positions of Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the Western-centred global power structure of knowledge production. Indeed, the Global South now conceptually denotes a nongeographical space for intellectual resistance against the marginalization, provincialization, exclusion, colonization, and silencing of African, Asian, and Latin American epistemologies and cultural values that must inform their theories about media, communication, and subjectivity especially under the circumstances of global coloniality (see Waisbord and Mellado

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2014; Jedlowski 2016; Santos 2018). The Global South is an intellectual and interpretive frame that is anchored on the struggles of those that have suffered dismemberment through slavery, colonialism, racial capitalism, and the free-market fundamentalism of neoliberal globalization. It is a resistance imaginary, a space for reflexive cultural and philosophical self-validation as part of a political, moral, and epistemic project for self-re-humanization, self-re-writing, and self-emancipation against the increasingly subtle and invisible forms of colonization. In media and cultural theory, its analytical power spotlights the illusory entanglements between the Global North and the Global South and unmasks global coloniality’s convenient myths of the discourses like cosmopolitanism, hybridity, cultural mélange, and melting pots that are to a greater extent products of a powerful postmodernist lie in both the empire and the post colony. As Trefzer et al. (2014) observe, the Global South as an analytical apparatus empowers the subaltern of colonial modernity with politically and culturally conscious readings of the chameleon-like manoeuvres of the new deterritorialized empire. It does so by tracking how the modern empire dispenses its power, resources, media monopolies, symbolic violence, and its army of intellectuals and cultural workers. Lastly, the Global South as a geo-cultural formulation is useful for distinguishing between the Northern and Southern epistemic and political projects in media and communiction studies. On the one hand, the Global South is deeply rooted in the epistemic and political projects of decoloniality which is symbolized by the decolonization struggles against the neocolonial oppression of the Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans by European colonizers. The Bandung Conference (1955) symbolizes the crystallization of decoloniality as a resistance epistemic and political project of the Global South. Indeed, there would be variations here and there, but ‘the political and epistemic projects emanating from Indigenous and Afro-[Asian] histories, have [something] in common with the Creole/Mestizos, and the imperial designs of Euro-American capitalism “Latin” America’ (González 2006, p. 47). From the shared histories of struggle and resistance emerges decoloniality as an episteme that is inherently against global coloniality and the empire. On the other hand, what characterizes the epistemic and political projects from the Global North, whether they are liberal or leftist, is their coloniality and hegemonic universalism. Coloniality has its roots in Euro-American modernity. As González explains, from the African, Asian,

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and Latin American points of view, both Renaissance and Enlightenment were ‘dark’ political and epistemic projects advancing the coloniality and exploitation of the Other. Indeed, as political and epistemic projects, the Renaissance and Enlightenment ‘share their darker side of coloniality; the first hidden under theology; the second under philosophy and science’ (p. 46). One could also add neoliberal globalization whose coloniality is hidden under democracy and human rights. To conclude this section, the Global South still remains the most valid way for provincializing Euro-American coloniality and hegemonic universalism in disciplinary knowledge, being/subjectivity, and culture. By invoking the Global South, we are inventing a new cartography of epistemic and cultural resistance against global capitalism, Western media monopolies, and the metaphysical empire of the colonial library.

The Decolonial Turn and Border Studies in Media and Communication I have already stated that the decolonial turn is a cultural and epistemic turn that has found firm intellectual expression outside Euro-American paradigms. Following the Portuguese decolonial thinker Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Western modernity thinking is characterized by visible and invisible abyssal lines. The colour line, first diagnosed by William Du Bois (1903), constitutes a world system of racial classification that divides humanity into a zone of being and none-being. The darker populations from Africa, Asia, and Latin America belong to the zone of none-being, a place characterized by the denial of their humanity and is also perceived as a void of nothingness. The colour line is a line of erasure of their humanity, cultures, knowledge, histories, ontologies, and epistemologies of the South where ‘reality, becomes nonexistent, and is indeed produced as nonexistent’ (Santos 2007, p. 45). The epistemic line operates as the body politics of knowledge where the West represents rationality, scientific truth, technology, and progress while the non-West wallows in sympathetic magic, superstition, and ignorance. As Ndlovu-Gatsheni correctly observed, ‘the epistemic line cascades from colour line because the denial of humanity automatically disqualifies one from epistemic virtue’ (2018, p. 3). In the colonial modernity’s politics of knowledge and its geographies of reason, the epistemic line transmutes into an ontological line which as I argue in the book has created the border as a place of exteriority, colonial difference, racial oppression, non-ethics, death, suffering,

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and struggle and resistance. Indeed, the border as a place of exteriority and none-being has also given birth to what we can call decolonial or border studies in media and communication studies. In media and communication studies, decolonial or border studies can be defined as a sub-interdiscipline that ‘attempts to produce a cultural politics of diversity and inclusion…produced only by means of [and] founded only upon [geographic, cultural, racial, ethnic, sexual, and epistemic] exclusions of the non-West by coloniality in the centre and periphery’ (Johnson and Michaelsen 1997, p. 3, Emphasis added). Decolonial or border thinking represents an epistemic rapture with imperial thinking and theory since it is thinking that is informed by the experience of not just exclusion, but also silencing or denial of cultural voice. In essence, decolonial or border thinking is a product of a ‘rift, a fracture, the spatial epistemic break that opens up to an-other-paradigm, [that is] irreducible to chronological epistemic breaks or paradigmatic changes in the monotopic history of Western thoughts’ (González 2006, p. 46). Indeed, the border is not only imbricated in ‘the academy, in culture theory, [but also in] the global contexts of late capitalism’ (Lugo 1997, p. 45). The task of border studies in the interdiscipline is to unmask the problem of the coloniality of knowledge and coloniality of being in mainstream media and communication theory. As Maldonado-Torres rightly points out, even in the age of the so-called global knowledge economy and global information society, ‘coloniality is still alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, and in cultural patterns’ (2007, p. 247). Coloniality is ‘the hegemony of Eurocentrism as an epistemological perspective’ in which ‘dominated populations [are] assigned identities and subjected to it as a worldview or way of knowing the world and themselves ’ (Mignolo 2000, p. 54, Emphasis added). Because it is predicated on the Southern epistemologies of imperial resistance, border media and communication studies work to unmask the imperial realignment of geographies of knowledge in the Global South. The empire speaks of knowledge and not knowledges, a formulation that is rejected by border studies as a politics of provincialization, erasure, and epistemicide. Indeed, as Lewis Gordon intelligently argued, the coloniality of knowledge ‘was a function of various stages of imperial realignment, where local reflections shifted their attention to centers elsewhere to the point of concentric collapse. On their way, those varieties of knowledge coalesced into knowledge of the center, and successive collapses of centers under the weight of other centers led, over time, to the global situation of the center and

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its concomitant organization of knowledges into [a singular] knowledge’ (Gordon 2011, p. 95). As a philosophy of liberation, border studies in the interdiscipline are also influenced by the onto-decolonial turn, a turn that not only restores ontologies of the Global South as legitimate geographies of media theory, but also Blacks, Asians, and Latinos, and their values, histories, knowledge, and world views, as part of the cultural heritage for the global human family. In other words, border studies actively delink with the false globalisms and their knowledge orders so as to reimagine a new decolonial globalism that is characterized by a multiplex knowledge order, real cultural diversity, and multidirectional transnational cultural and ideational flows between the North and the South. For the colonial subaltern, the border is a space of resistance and liberation against imperial epistemologies, psychological boundaries, hard and soft borders, double consciousness, and schizophrenic being. It is a space for renegotiating cultural difference in a labyrinthine of heterotopia and colonially induced hybridities in search of true multiculturalism. Hence, border cultural analysis is, inadvertently, a counterhegemonic discourse that targets global capital, new cultural imperialisms, enduring racial prejudices, and sexism (Castronovo 1997). Theorizing the border in media and communication studies then invariably throws one into unpacking the intersectionality between state and market, culture and subjectivity, body politics, bio-politics and geopolitics, and what Thomas Nail (2015) calls the kinopolitics of Euro-American modernity and how its many invisible boundaries undermine the struggles for true multiculturalism not only in society, but also in academic disciplines. While the border has been reified as a melting pot of cultures and a place of transcendental emancipatory hybridities, it seems to me the border is also a dialectical place that is characterized by deep-seated social contradictions that border studies in media and communication cannot ignore. The border is a place of resurgent cultural imperialisms, albeit, as Collin Sparks observes, newer kinds of cultural imperialism that are facilitated by the conscription of the border state and border elites by global coloniality: that is, ‘the use of state power in the international cultural sphere and the fact that some cultural exchanges are closely connected with imperialism’ (2015, p. 158). This point is also raised by Samir Amin who argues that cultural imperialism has mutated from being a dissemination of cultures of the empire to being a dissemination of cultures of capitalist consumerism. The former, he argues, ‘have long since disappeared and has been absorbed by capitalist culture, defined here by its

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essential content- economistic alienation- and not by its European origin and form. However, this universal capitalist culture has never been able to impose a universal legitimacy, because it accompanies and sustains a polarised world system’ (2015, p. 104). This legitimacy gap creates spaces of cultural resistance in the border. However, while both Collin Sparks’ and Samir Amin’s observations are true, they do not go far enough to address other contexts of cultural production, including media consumption experiences in the imperial South. For instance, in most African countries, modern forms of cultural imperialism are inextricable from the local content philosophies and practices of local media. Local content is interpreted at the most basic level of local producers and actors as opposed to foreign producers and actors. It is not about decolonizing the codes and conventions of storytelling and promoting indigenous cultures, themes, symbolism, and worldviews as part of a deliberate policy of decolonial cultural healing. Put differently, cultural imperialism in the Global South is no longer about unbalanced transnational cultural flows between the West and non-West, but about decolonizing the mental and cultural universes of the border being whose cultural creativity fails to transcend the Eurocentric grip. Furthermore, there are other cultural production spaces in the empire and the postcolony that are still habitants of the crude cultural imperialism of old. In South Africa, for example, the postcolonial imperial university and its academic disciplines have for very long functioned as a conduit for the colonial library and Western theory. It took more than two decades after the end of apartheid for the universities to acknowledge the epistemic and cultural gap created by their Eurocentric curriculum and the white institutional culture in their spaces. In 2015, student movements such as Rhodes Must Fall demanded that South African universities decolonize both the curriculum and institutional culture, including cartographical racism perpetuated through a pervasive presence of statues of apartheid personages and other racist cultural symbols. Indeed, while the border is considered a place bubbling with moral possibilities, its dialectical nature also reflects that it can also be a zone of none-being, wretchedness, cultural invisibility, and pedagogic colonialisms. Russ Castronovo articulates border dialectics as both a resistance imaginary and prison-like entrapment by global coloniality be it through a captured state, patriarchy, or capital itself. As a ‘site of contested cultural production, the border offers a shifting ground ripe for articulations of oppositional consciousness; however, this uncertain terrain is

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laden with traps…Negotiations along the border also have the unintended counter purpose of solidifying and extending racial and national boundaries’ (Castronovo 1997, p. 196). Following Lugo, the border can also be imagined ‘in the realm of the inescapable, mountainous terrains of power dispensed by capitalist modernity and its political and ideological technologies ’ (1997, p. 45, Emphasis added). Thus, the critical agenda for border studies in media and communication must be to study, not just the centrist structures and cultures of postcolonial whiteness and their convergence with colonial modernity, but also the new technologies of necropolitics for the alienation, dismemberment, and social death of the ‘Other’ in local and global cultural visibility.

What Does the Global South Mean by Social and Academic Multiculturalism? The issue of a multicultural discipline and theory is often at the centre of the transformation debate of media and communication studies. However, much of the time multiculturalism has existed merely as a floating signal that is either never explained or assumed to be commonsensical. There is always an assumption that it is obvious and merits no explanation. However, the search for a multicultural media and communication studies is taking place against the backdrop of many visible and invisible traps. On the one hand, some scholars in the Global North and the imperial South ‘find it difficult to stop viewing European/American culture as the centre of the universe’ (Asante 1998, p. 4). This school of thought erroneously believes that multiculturalism in the interdiscipline will be occasioned by internationalization and globalization because of the demotic turn of the cultures of ordinary people and their intellectuals from the Global South. They subscribe to non-transformative theories of changing the media and communication studies through a kind of lowlevel Africanization, Asianization, or Latin Americanization approaches that amplify racial inclusion at the expense of knowledge inclusion. They think that employing black intellectuals and adding communications books from Asia, Africa, or Latin America automatically transform the curriculum and the field. However, needless to say ‘this is a poor form of decolonization that takes the lazy format of just adding [new people] and new items to the existing canon and existing curriculum’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018, p. 81). The advent of technologies of globalization like the Internet has emboldened this approach that seems to advance

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a cultural politics of tokenism and not transformation. At the heart of the problem of this school is their overemphasis of ‘globalization as a communicational concept’ while overlooking that it ‘transmits cultural and economic meanings of a Western-centred world system’ (Jameson 1998, p. 55, Emphasis added). Stuck in Eurocentrism, they fail to imagine alternative geographies of globalization and internationalization that are informed by struggles from exclusion and from below and carry a deeper sense of moral commitment to true multiculturalism as a social and pedagogic ideal. Similarly, for this school, any argument that supports African, Asian, or Latin American cultures and value systems is by default fundamentalist, but not because it represents extremist views, but because it rejects the monoculturalism of Western universalism. On the other hand, among those advancing a politics of recognition for the Global South cultures to be the locus of enunciation for their projects of theory building, there are those who have fallen into the invisible trap of cultural essentialism. Cultural essentialism from the Global South is not any different from Eurocentrism from the Global North. It replicates Eurocentrism in reverse form. Ramon Grosfoguel so eloquently warns us that decoloniality is not a fundamentalist episteme of ethnicism, nationalism, indigeneity, or an anti-modern, anti-democracy, anti-white essentialism, but that of ‘transmodernity’ as a project of decolonial multiculturalism: a utopic planetary ideal of many cultural centres in the life world and in media theory and pedagogy (also see Dussel 2012). Grosfoguel posits that decoloniality ‘is not an essentialist, fundamentalist, anti-European critique. It is a perspective that is critical of both Eurocentric and Third World fundamentalisms, colonialism and nationalism’ (2009, p. 11). Let me now move on to directly address the question of what the Global South understands by social and academic multiculturalism in media and communication studies. In his pathbreaking book Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory, Bhikhu Parekh gives us a typology that is helpful in constructing a Global South approach to multiculturalism. Although a little long, his ideas are worth paraphrasing for better understanding. Parekh (2000) observes that the Northern view of multiculturalism, predicated on moral monism and liberalism, sharply contrasts with that of the South. In the Northern epistemologies, the concept of multiculturalism is a clustering of differences that emerge not only from culture, but individual practices and

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individual life style choices. In the politics of recognition, this ultraliberal perspective attributes equality of right not just to culturally embedded differences, but also other differences like homosexuality, feminism, vegetarianism, etc. This broad-based politics of recognition is based on differences emanating from a liberal, rights-based discourse that defends personal choices, personal differences, and personal practices as individuated expressions of a multicultural society. However, in the Southern epistemologies, multiculturalism is not ultraliberal, but critical-realist, closer perhaps to what David Palumbo-Liu calls ‘critical multiculturalism’ (1995, p. 15). Critical multiculturalism, used broadly to include decolonial multiculturalism, acknowledges the power geometry between cultures, subcultures, lifestyle choices, and practices. It, however, uses the power geometry for the purposes of normative strategic balancing based on the moral weight attributed to the community over the individual in African, Asian, and most indigenous communities in the Global South. After all, the ultra-liberalism of Western multiculturalism is seen as deceptive because in the Western paradigm of difference, difference is hierarchical. Hence, in Western multiculturalism, difference may appear to be lateral, but in reality it is vertically and hierarchically placed in the social power structure of racial modernity as a colonial/modern/global and capitalist system (Taylor 1994, p. 65; Also see Appiah 1994). Parekh observes that there are three layers of distinction which we can use to understand the Northern and Southern epistemologies on multiculturalism. The first layer is what he calls sub-cultural diversity. In it we have, for example, gays, lesbians, or people perceived by the dominant culture as living different lifestyles compared to the mainstream. What is important to note about this group is that even though they seek change, ‘they broadly share their society’s dominant system of meaning and values and merely seek to carve out within it spaces for their divergent lifestyles. They do not represent an alternative culture, but seek to pluralize an existing one’ (Parekh 2000, p. 3). The second layer, perspectival diversity, is symbolized by the struggles of feminists, environmentalists, and religious groups and ‘consists of those that are critical of some of the central principles or values of the prevailing culture and seek to reconstitute it along appropriate lines’ (ibid., p. 3). Feminists attack patriarchy, Christians attack hedonism, and environmentalists attack capitalist environmental destruction. According to Parekh, this group is not a subculture since it challenges and resists the very essence of the dominant

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culture. The Global South obviously values both subcultural diversity and perspectival diversity, but sees them as part of the progressive cultural politics which, while important in their own right, have greater impetus in contexts of intersectionality with communal diversity, which is the last layer in Parekh’s typology. Communal diversity is a diversity that ‘springs from and is sustained by a plurality of long-standing communities, each with its own long history and way of life which it wishes to preserve and transmit’ (2000, p. 4). Communal diversity, which extends to what I will refer to as national diversity, is indispensable in the understanding of the Global South perspective to social and academic multiculturalism. Compared to subcultural diversity and perspectival diversity, communal diversity and national diversity carry more weight in the Global South because at its ‘heart multiculturalism is not about [any] difference, per se, but those differences that are embedded in and sustained by culture’, that is, ‘a body of beliefs and practices in terms of which a group of people understand themselves and the world and organize their individual and collective lives’ (2000, p. 2). Western colonialisms, old and new, have destroyed the social and cultural fabric of African, Asian, and Latin American communal and national cultures through the triple evil of genocides, linguicides, and epistemicides. The Global South wants to revive their communal and national diversities—long silenced but enduring, long buried but resurgent. They want to do so because these will constitute the locus of enunciation for their media philosophies on theory, method, and pedagogy in a multicultural media and communication studies. As Molefi Asante explains so compellingly: If we have lost anything, it is our cultural centredness; that is, we have been moved out of our own platforms. This means that we cannot truly be ourselves or know our potential since we exist on borrowed space…By regaining our platforms, standing in our own cultural spaces and believing that our own way of viewing the universe is just as valid as any, we will achieve a kind of transformation that we need to participate fully in a multicultural society. However, without this kind of centredness, we bring almost nothing to the multicultural table, but a darker version of whiteness. (1998, p. 9)

By invoking the language of centres, I do not understand Asante to be essentialist in the sense of searching for solid, pure, cultural pasts.

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We can never truly be ourselves in the sense of solid cultural pasts and unchanging cultural presents and futures. That has never been possible for any community whether colonized or uncolonized. However, for the Global South, communal and national cultural pluralism and diversity constitute the epistemological centredness of its diverse populations. In their diversity, they ‘carry a measure of authority [since] they are patterned and structured by virtue of being embedded in a shared historical system of meaning’ (Parekh 2000, p. 3). They make the foundation for a cultural community that may share ethnicity, language, religion, history, and other foundational myths that constitute the sacred bonds of national culture. It goes without saying then that for the Global South, social and academic multiculturalisms are primarily about culturally embedded differences between nations. However, this is not to imply a statist cultural formulation that conflates national culture and nationalism, but to point to national culture as unity in diversity. Although subcultural, perspectival, and communal/national diversities overlap in real life, communal/national diversity is central to how the Global South understands social and academic multiculturalism as a normative principle. The Southern perspective cannot be said to be essentialist or fundamentalist because although it emphasizes the shared values or cultural bonds of a nation, it does not overlook the ‘internal inconsistencies, conflicts, and contradictions’ or ‘zones of difference within and between cultures’ (Rosaldo 1993, pp. 27–28). The Global South approaches to multiculturalism do not seek to collapse cultural differences of the community and ethnic groups into a singular organic national culture, but represent culture in a none holistic manner that while acknowledging cultural diversity still views ‘culture as a historically created system of meaning and significance or a system of beliefs and practices in terms of which human beings understand, regulate, and structure their individual and collective lives’ (Parekh 2000, p. 145). Both social and academic multiculturalisms are an acknowledgement of a people’s humanity and their ways of life. To echo Walter Mignolo’s view on language, culture, like language, is not what people have, it is what people are (see Mignolo 2006). Social and academic multiculturalisms are not possible if we shy away from the axiomatic truth that ‘to be human …is to belong to a common species and to a distinct culture’ (Parekh 2000, p. 124). They both gesture towards dialogue between cultures to share in the miracle of human nature and the beauty of its variegated cultures or ways of being. Indeed, this understanding of humanity helps us ‘to approach

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[others] on the assumption that they are similar enough to be intelligible, and make dialogue possible, and different enough to be puzzling and make dialogue necessary’ (p. 124). Academic and social multiculturalisms recast the problem of identity politics into identity in politics which informs planetary synergies of thought between cultures. González illuminates this point when he argues that ‘In order to imagine collaboration without loosing the respective identities, it is necessary to think seriously about identity in politics and not about identity politics. Identity in politics allows for reaching out and linking, without pretending a new abstract universal will be good for all. Pluriversality presupposes identity in politics and connectors as nodes, where the pluriverse will not become a universe’ (2006, p. 47). In other words, both academic and social multiculturalisms are a product of transformative dialogic action that expresses a deeper understanding that no humanity or culture is disposable. Consequently, it can be argued that multiculturalism appears to be naturally incompatible and incommensurable with the paradigms of the West. While the paradigm of difference uses the colour line to undermine non-Western cultures and identities, the paradigm of war unleashes linguicides and epistemicides on them. However, as Connell (2007) observes, academic multiculturalism can only be possible if there is ‘a dialogue of cultures’ and ‘dialogue of theories’ (47). She argues that robust social theory, and indeed media and cultural theory, is a product of the dialogue between cultures: ‘When theory derives wholly or mainly from the metropole where the theorist’s concerns are a problem of the metropolitan society, the effect is erasure of the experience of the majority of human kind from the foundations of social thought’ (46). The Global North epistemologies are rooted in universalism and coloniality, elision, and erasure thus leading to a cultural monologue of the West as observed by Georgette Wang. The Global South, through its concepts of ‘ubuntu’ (an inclusive humanity) and other geo-cultural articulations of the same in Asia and Latin America, represents a paradigm of dialogue that is in search of true multiculturalism (see Santos 2018). The paradigm of dialogue is not a paradigm that speaks of Fukuyama’s language of the ‘clash of civilizations’, but the language of a single, yet culturally versatile humanity. It rests on polycentrism and multiversalism as the true pillars of a decolonized multiculturalism. It does not seek for another abstract universalism, but pushes for a new universal of planetary diversity as points of departure for a multicultural interdiscipline.

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Nick Couldry acknowledges the importance of academic multiculturalism when he argues that a genuine internationalization of media and communication studies will radically and positively change the interdiscipline as we know it. But for this to happen, he states that the West’s disposition must be futuristic and oriented towards North-South engagement than mourning its loss as the epistemic centre of the field. He compellingly argued with an astounding sense of moral and intellectual conviction that the ‘path towards a genuine internationalization starts out not from our assumptions about the past, but from our assumptions about the present (and future): we need to unwork the Western bias behind continual claims that current forms of media-saturated society in parts of the West represent a necessary “modernization”, a path towards an unavoidable and fully “wired” future’ (Couldry 2007, p. 247). He concluded by almost pointedly commenting about the indispensability of communal and national diversity to academic multiculturalism: it ‘goes without saying that in China or India or Iran, to name just three important cases, media are embedded in wider society in very different ways from either the US or the UK, yielding potentially quite distinctive perspectives on global media [theory] and ethics, which we cannot afford to ignore’ (250).

On the Necessity of a Southern Theory in Media and Communication Studies Can the Global South produce its own radical critical media theory informed by its colonial subalternity in the Euro-American world system? In the global age of transnational media monopolies, proclaimed managerial revolutions, and transnational cultural flows, what value does culture, history, and location bring to theory? To answer these questions, one must understand the hidden agenda of theory in academic disciplines. The most obvious function of theory is to spotlight issues that are worthy of critical analysis for the theorist. By so doing, it serves to illuminate the critical agenda of the discipline. However, the influence of theory is also subtle and far reaching, going as far as determining what methods and pedagogies are appropriate to use in a discipline. In essence, theory maps the discipline and through myth, enjoys a revealing or concealing status. In any discipline, it is not easy to see beyond the delimiting power of the theories of a discipline. In the context of Western theory, the obfuscation of theory is also compounded

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by the coloniality of knowledge. For example, while the Habermasian public sphere might appear an innocent theorization of the democratic value of speech practices in the West, in the South it also interpellates the Other as a loyal subject of colonial modernity’s Cogito, ergo sum (I think therefore I am). However, we know only too well that the cultural politics of the Cartesian logic is not in favour of the non-Western subject because its bio, geo, and ego politics is centred in the West. Therefore, while the public sphere can be studied from any historical contexts of the Global South, it is, in the final analysis, ‘an artefact of modernity’s social dynamics, ontological conditions of the West and its cultural politics of the Other’ (Ginev 2004, p. 76). The observation about the hidden functions of theory is interesting for two reasons in relation to media and communication studies. First, it helps us to reflect on the myths behind Western liberal and critical theories in the field and the extent to which they have constituted the interdiscipline in the image of the West. To Westernize the interdiscipline, Western media and communication theory hid its locus of enunciation so as to claim universal validity. It ‘assumed that all societies are knowable in the same way and from the same [Western] point of view’ (Connell 2007, p. 44). Universal validity, however, is not attributable to media scholars from Africa, Asia, and Latin America because their theories, if any, are provincialized through the idioms of hyper locality such as ethnic studies or area studies. In the global hierarchies of scholarship, these intellectuals are merely conduits of literal translation of the Northern achieve and imperial theory from which they derive legitimation of their status to their admiring students and villages. In that vein, it would be interesting to study how often media intellectuals from the Global North cite scholars from the Global South and vice versa. In fact, Connell observed that ‘theorists from the colonized world [of the Global South] are rarely cited in the metropolitan texts except perhaps just to confirm the universal validity of observations of Western theorists ’ (p. 46, Emphasis added). Second, the observation about the hidden functions of theory can also help us to reflect on the following questions. What alternate methods and pedagogies would the analytical impulses of a Southern theory in media and communication studies reveal or unveil? What would such a theory contribute to the interdiscipline? Would it disrupt the reigning imperial theories of the field? Put differently, if we turned the interdicipline on its head and positioned the reigning imperial epistemes on the underside, would this reconfigure the critical agenda of media and

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communication studies in the Global South: its theories, methods, and pedagogies? Indeed, I argue in this book that the Southern theory heralds the period of the rise of anti-oppression liberatory border theories, pedagogies, and research methods. From a Southern point of view, media and communication research methodology is historically deeply imbricated in global coloniality and the imperial projects of the Global North (Hardt 1992; Denzin 2009; Smith 1999). Similarly, critical pedagogy also falls short in many respects because of being anchored on the Cartesian doubt of the Global South. Critical pedagogy throws the non-Western subject into the trap of Hegelian hierarchies of reason which render the South as synonymous with irrational reasoning and intellectual poverty. As such, the Southern theory in media and communication studies can be considered as a theory with a counterhegemonic decolonial attitude because it emerges from the histories of anti-oppression struggles against slavery, colonialism, capitalism, and other new forms of exploitation experienced by the Global South as a non-geographic category. Hence, its locus is not just academic institutions, because it can also be produced in indigenous and artisanal spaces that have been delegitimized as spaces of theory building in Western pedagogy. For example, Southern media theory is a product of critiques of bourgeoisie capitalist media systems, media emerging from the provincialized community folklores, myths, legends, narratives, including artisanal media ecologies that emerge in the periphery of mainstream capitalist’s new information and communication technology projects. In fact, it is interesting that Connell (2007) used the term Southern theory to re-affirm the fact that non-Westerners—excluded from rational and logical beings by the Hegelian line—could also think and theorize their social experience in a sound way. As a descriptor, the term also amounts to a rejection of the view that theory only emerges from the centre, that is, the Western modern/colonial/capitalist world system. Theory building can also originate from the exteriority of colonial modernity in the border and ‘from the social experience of the periphery [and] in many genres and styles’ (p. ix). As such, a true radical and liberatory media theory for the Global South can only be a product of an honest acknowledgement and appreciation of the colonial subalternity position of the majority of Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans in the modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world system. We ‘always speak from a particular location in the power structure [between] the North and the South, Africa and Europe, centre

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and periphery’ (Grosfoguel 2011, p. 66). The current structure is one that promotes Euro-centred knowledge and theory (Shome 2016). The decolonial turn is about the insurrection of the silenced indigenous and postcolonial knowledges that seek to produce a historically grounded Southern radical critical theory of media and communication studies. As a theory of media analysis, Southern radical critical theory unmasks all the matrices of domination in colonial modernity and places colonial difference, race, culture, and gender at the centre of its methods and pedagogy. The Western modernist discourse discursively produced the Global North as the centre of theory, culture, reason, and time (see Morley 2011). In the process, it also discursively produced a peripheral Global South as a self-serving myth constructed through the binaries of past/present, centre/periphery, black/white, and progress/backwardness, and knowledge/superstition. The periphery ‘is constituted as being outside the time of modernity [while] the centre is set up as the powerful sites and sources of modernity, [theory, culture] and progress’ (Morley 2011, p. 123). The colonization of time by the North means that the South can never be a source of any modern pathbreaking theory in media and communication studies. The Global South is framed as locked in a time warp of tradition and superstition. The task of Southern theory then is to decolonize not just the interdicipline, but also time since time determines the relevance of our theories, worldviews, media forms, and culture. Southern theory therefore has a largely therapeutic role that is premised on decolonial healing that restores confidence to the ex/colonial subject as a subject and as a creator of culture and not object of history. Consequently, the book argues that the quest for a Southern theory in media and communication studies must begin with the recognition of what I have referred to as, following Antonio’s Gramsci’s ‘Southern question’ (2005), the ‘Southern problem in media and communication studies’. Among other equally salient things, I have constructed the Southern problem as fundamentally a cultural problem largely reflected in the coloniality of being and knowledge. This does not mean that economy and the politics are any less important in the Global South, but that only through culture and black consciousness can the Global South reconstitute its humanity in a modern/colonial/racial/capitalist world system. If critical consciousness delivered civic freedoms, black consciousness as a marker of those generally referred to as people of colour by the EuroAmerican order will deliver decolonial freedoms as the apex of all human freedoms. Black consciousness is not reverse racism. On the contrary, it carries the symbolic signposts of historical memory as a lens of struggle

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for cultural and political freedoms. Black consciousness is a unifier for forging collective struggles that transcend colonial and imperial borders. It gives us community in our nightmare of social and cultural dislocation. It is about the realisation that although we may be divided by colonial and imperial borders, our economic and social disenfranchisement by the empire is the same whether you are in the geographic North, or in geographic South of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Black consciousness points to the continued relevance of race and colonial difference in media, social and cultural theory in the South. The Global South still endures the psycho-cultural trauma of the legacies of slavery, colonialism, apartheid, and the vagaries of neocolonialism and new racisms that are dehumanizing and undermine to the people’s collective agency. A dehumanized people with no cultural and mental universes of their own cannot be a community. They do not need technology or money to pick themselves up and develop, they need culture. This means the creation of robust media systems to radiate their cultures into the multiverse thus creating a sense of global cultural diversity. Indeed, if technology and economy are the hardware of social and economic development, then culture is the software. The media of the Global South should aim to give birth to a new cultural being that does not seek to escape the South through assimilation or by surfing the shallow waves of the global cultural flows, but by transforming the Global South from a prison-like habitat to a livable and hospitable space centred on his/her culture and worldviews. This is not a pedagogy of anti-border crossing, but one that is against border jumping as an escape against one’s condition of entrapment. In the book, I have portrayed the Global South largely as a borderland: a place fraught with contradictions of pain and hope, freedom and unfreedoms, liminality and centredness, doubt and confidence to change society for the better. This is because the South as the borderland is fundamentally a place that is exploited for its land, its resources, and its culture, but yet presented in the global discourses of Western modernity as a barren, impotent, and burdensome space. However, the South is also slowly becoming a vantage point of developing alternative political and epistemic projects from the experience of struggle and pain.

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Conclusion The call for a multicultural media and communication studies appears to be inescapable today. Although the internationalists and globalists of the interdiscipline tend to view multiculturalism as a consequence of internationalization and globalization, more plausible reasons have highlighted the epistemic crisis in the field and its sister disciplines (see Downing 2003; Eagleton 2004). Almost two decades ago, John Downing’s scathing attack on the field portrayed an interdiscipline going through an unproclaimed crisis characterized by a crippling intellectual poverty thinly masked by the recycling of concepts and buzz words from sister disciplines such as sociology, politics, anthropology, cultural studies, and literary studies. The new wave of reflections by the interdicipline evidenced by the growing North-South dialogue points to the realization that the field would be much better if it benefited from variegated planetary cultures and wellsprings of a multicultural, global, and trans-epistemic knowledge. The borrowing of concepts from sister disciplines and recycling of theories appear to be less and less attractive as media scholars come to the realization that the field’s self-renewal and critical relevance lie in research that produces theory not mimicry of sister disciplines. Hanno Hardt, one of the field’s enduring prophetic voices, argued for the ‘decentering of mass communication research as a discursive formation by an alternative cultural discourse that challenges its dominant ideology with a return to communication as an emancipatory practice’ (1999, p. 175). With his typical unflinching belief in the interdiscipline that must always keep its windows open to the waves of transformation, he concluded that meaningful research had to be ‘guided by the subjective nature of theory, the centrality of human agency, and the permanent critique of social, political, and economic conditions of communication’ (p. 175). As I argue later in this book, while Hanno might have spoken more specifically about the end of positivism and rise of cultural and political economy critique in the US tradition, his general support and belief in the birth of critical media and communication studies as the first step towards the virtue of disciplinary self-reflection are what has indirectly sowed the mustard seed for today’s North-South debates about de-Westernization and decolonization as routes to true multiculturalism in the field.

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CHAPTER 2

Rethinking Internationalizing Media Studies: Directions and Indirections for the Global South

New geographies of internationalism need to be mapped, novel articulation and intersection with imperialism and anti-imperialism need to be included in our research endeavours. Bandeira Jerónimo and Pedro Monteiro (2018, p. 12) Classical socialism was not just about better economic opportunities for the poor and underprivileged, but also about a new culture and new forms of social relations. Bhikhu Parekh (2000, p. 2)

Introduction Media and communication studies are a product of the epistemological and theoretical foundations emanating from the Global North. This is not surprising because the interdiscipline is historically rooted in the West. In particular, the United States and Britain played a pivotal role in how the field evolved to what it is today. Later, German, French, and Italian theorists from the cognate disciplines in the humanities and social sciences also made huge contributions especially when their theoretical and methodological canon morphed into the Anglo-American tradition. David Morley (2007) argues that Europe actually brought ‘media philosophy’ by way of ‘disciplinary theory’ to the Anglo-American ‘academic culture [that] was always empiricist, and pretty suspicious of theory’ (p. 42). Indeed, the prehistory of modern media and communication © The Author(s) 2020 L. Moyo, The Decolonial Turn in Media Studies in Africa and the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52832-4_2

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studies also reflects an entanglement of various Western intellectual traditions based on geography and connected histories, including that of Continental Europe (Hardt 2001). Later, when British media studies gained influence, a significant number of Nordic media scholars moved into UK universities in the 1990s to teach through the medium of English. Back home in their countries, a number of media and communication programmes in universities also began to use English as the medium of instruction. These two factors would further consolidate the international dominance of the Anglo-American approach that increasingly capitalized on globalization and the global dominance of the English language to spread to the different parts of the world, particularly the Global South. A decade ago, Daya Thussu’s book Internationalizing Media Studies in many ways marked the celebration of the internationalization and globalization of the field. Thussu (2009) correctly observed that the twin processes of the globalization of the media and the interdiscipline could potentially lead to some profound changes in the interdiscipline. He argued: The globalization of media together with the globalization of higher education provide excellent opportunities for researchers to broaden their intellectual horizons. Media and their study are in the process of transformation, necessitated by new global infrastructures, such as ‘network’ technologies, which have made redundant many traditional ways of teaching and researching the media. The notions of place, space and time have been challenged, making it imperative to invest in new research angles, approaches and methodologies. (p. 3)

While such observations were in principle true, they are largely based on the Northern theory of globalization. It was also important ‘to examine how looking at global and transnational phenomena from “other” epistemological perspectives could tell a different story of [the impact] of global processes [on the field]’ (Richards 2014, p. 139). Indeed, for the Global South, the story is about how globalization represents newer forms of deterritorialized and transnationalized dominance from the empire, including internationalized media education through Western media programmes that are proliferating particularly in the Middle East and Asia. In effect, this requires the decolonized reading of the globalization theory in media and communication studies so as to create a space for multiple geo-political, cultural, and epistemic standpoints about social and

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historical processes that are shaping the interdiscipline. Historical decolonial analysis is particularly important in characterizing both globalization as a process and its critiques as ways of how it has been understood by various schools of thought in the field. It must unmask the fact that ‘the globalization of the world is, in the first place, the culmination of a process that began with the constitution of America and world capitalism as a Euro-centred colonial/modern world power’ (Quijano 2000, p. 215). Liberal views on globalization decentre the real true historical and social experiences of the Global South and replace them with Eurocentred worldviews, experiences, and academic narratives. Hence, it is not just that liberal views such as those expressed by Daya Thussu do not represent the full reality about globalization in the South, but more profoundly that the analytical power of liberal theory fails to capture the deeper, ideological, and historical concerns about the globalization of field from the Global South which, for several decades, has been struggling to find a theoretical language and an epistemology that is able to characterize the legacies of colonialism, globalization, and the impact of coloniality and neoliberal education on the interdiscipline. Indeed, while internationalizing media and communication studies is an inevitable response to the new realities of the compression of time and space occasioned by globalization, the Global South must be careful not to fall into the hidden trap of the dominant liberal, imperial, and hegemonic internationalization from the centre. This form of internationalization constitutes a new seductive and self-administered form of academic colonization in the Global South more generally, and the Middle East and China more specifically. The Middle East and China’s media education internationalization projects using Euro-American offshore programmes appear to be driven by economic imperatives and not the cultural and decolonization rationales. Media and communication studies in the Global South still face major problems in terms of cultural, epistemological, theoretical, ethical, and methodological directions and indirections of the interdicipline (Kasoma 1996; Wang and Shen 2000; Dissanayake 2003; Scolari 2012; M’Bayo et al. 2012). In media and communication studies as elsewhere in the humanities and social sciences, the Global South is ‘treated less as [a] source of refined knowledge than as [a] reservoir of raw fact: of the historical, natural, and ethnographic minutiae from which Euro-modernity might fashion its testable theories and transcendent truths, its axioms and certitudes, its premises, postulates, and principles’ (Comaroff and

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Comaroff 2016, p. 1). This naturalized position in the global knowledge power structure has the effect of a hegemonic silent process that de-internationalizes, de-globalizes, and de-legitimizes African, Asian, and Latin American media ontologies, knowledge, thought, theories, epistemologies in the field while doing the opposite for the Euro-American archive. For instance, the Global South media and communications scholar can attend as many international conferences as he can especially in the West, present the most inspiring papers, but he or she does that within an interdiscipline that is autocued by a knowledge order that is undergirded by epistemic deafness and epistemic racism on Southern media insights and epistemologies. As implied by Connell (2007) it is not surprising that the Western scholar does not easily cite African, Asian, and South American scholars while the opposite is true. Hence, to the Global South, internal dynamics in media and communication studies do not constitute the problem per se, but reflect the deeper problems of the colonial/modern/global/Western-centric knowledge power structure in which media and communication studies are entrapped. As such, the Global South faces a mammoth task of not only acknowledging its peripheral position in the Euro-American global knowledge power structure as a basis for making any serious attempts to mobilize and recover its real intellectual agency and epistemological presence in the field. It has to find a theory of disciplinary transformation for media and communication studies so as to realign questions of media theory, methodology, epistemology with the South’s ontologies, epistemologies, cultures, histories, and worldviews. In the case of the internationalization debate, they must be ready to question, critique, and contest the narcotizing myths of the internationalization and globalization of media and communication studies. Such myths rarely gesture towards liberating silenced subaltern knowledges or creating a multicultural disciplinary theory, but to mask the cultural politics of the Euro-American knowledge order through tokenisms of all kinds. However, a radical Southern theory is needed to stop the Global South from saddling on the horseback of imperial theory to theorize its own cultures, its own identities, its own personhoods, and the form and content of their media spaces and cultural institutions. This is not to suggest that Anglo-American theory is irrelevant to the South. There ‘is no reason to reject a concept or theory out of hand simply on account of its cultural origin, but it surely is unwise

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to buy into any theory without reflecting on its cultural origin in-built premises and limitations’ (Lee 2015, p. 5). This is because an uncritical and wholesale application of Anglo-American paradigms is not just unashamed mimicry and parrotry, but also a self-administered process of deep cultural alienation and intellectual death. To ‘research communication is, in essence, to be critically engaged with the human impulse for fellowship, sharing, interaction…culture and knowledge production through symbols. Communication is the lifeblood of a people, the repository of their values, culture, identity, and world views’ (Moyo and Mutsvairo 2018, p. 22). As such, a critical theory of communication in the Global South at best must critique society and culture while at the same time revitalizing society in terms of ‘our sense of community, citizenship, nationhood, cultural heritage, and our social value systems’ (p. 22). And as Harrison and Huntington (2000) observe, it is culture and not politics that is central to the recovery of transformative agency in Africa and the Global South. In all this, media and communications are not just ordinary institutions in service of the people, the media are an inextricable part of our cultures, the self and the community, the vitality of our shared worldviews. In the same breadth, it is important that we begin to think of media and communication studies intellectuals in the Global South as torch bearers who cast animating spotlights and critically reflect on whether what we call our culture, real or imagined, is energizing and working in terms of cultural consciousness. The rapture between communication studies as our tool for self-analysis and cultural critique and everyday communication as a lived experience is our nemesis in the Global South. As the Chinese and Japanese scholars, Guo-Ming Chen and Yoshitaka Miike, put it more emphatically: ‘Communication is not simply a matter of speaking and listening. Nothing is more difficult for us to study than communication if we take this subject very seriously. Communication is indissolubly linked with our deeper sense of being human. It shapes, and is shaped by, our self-conceptions in interpersonal relationships, our positions and roles in society, our memories of historical events, our on-going struggles, our aims of life, and what we think of as important and ethical’ (2006, p. 2). The gap between critical communication studies as an adopted Eurocentric method and communication as everyday practices of meaningmaking and culture sense-making in the Global South points to a huge underlying problem bordering on self-conceptualization or selfperception by the ex/colonial subjects and their cultural communities

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in the post colony. Borrowing from Antonio Gramsci (2005), I have referred to these major underlying issues of the pervasive coloniality of being and knowledge and the deification of the Western method and epistemes in media and communication studies as the ‘Southern Problem’. Briefly, the Southern problem in the interdiscipline is about all kinds of Euro-American hegemonic cultural and intellectual practices—whether they are from the centre or periphery, are conscious or unconscious—that seek to advance the coloniality of knowledge and being as projects of social, economic, political, cultural, and intellectual domination of the Global South by Euro-American modernity. It is about the colonization of the mental and cultural universes not only through the institutions of higher learning through which media and communication education is delivered, but also the interdiscipline itself whose multidisciplinary simply amounts to layers of multiple colonialities that have fossilized and crystallized. Across Africa, Asia, Latin America, for example, ‘instructional languages, practices and material, nomenclature, modes of academic education, research methodologies remain tied to the patterns and trends in Europe’ (Zeleza 2016, p. 233). As such, given the dominance of the Euro-American models in media and communication studies in the Global South, it is important to reflect on Molefe Asante, Yoshitaka Miike, and Jing Yin’s question that resonates with the Southern problem and reverberates across different regions of the Global South: ‘Do the topics we pursue, the theories we [reproduce], the methods we employ, and the materials we read [in the South] adequately reflect and respond to the diversity of our communicative experiences in a globalizing world?’ (2008, p. 1). There is no doubt that as an intrinsic part of the debate on the need for a multicultural interdiscipline, new media technologies and their attendant processes of internationalization and globalization are important. However, none of them can or should serve as a point of analytical departure for theorizing the Southern Problem in media and communication studies. It is important to note that as analytical categories, internationalization and globalization cannot be used as conceptual tools for understanding the problem of ‘cognitive justice’ in the field (Santos 2018). While both have served as convenient myths for Euro-American modernity, liberal-pluralist models are far too inadequate for the construction of a coherent Southern epistemology and critique that can convincingly characterize the South’s media and communication studies problem. It is also important to note that as ideological projects for the expansion of the

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metaphysical empire in the post colonies of the Global South, the locus of enunciation for internationalization and globalization is hidden. Most scholars of internationalization in media and communication studies never expose the fact that they are speaking from a Western liberal perspective which is privileged over other competing conceptions of internalization since all ‘modern world systems and their global orders are epistemic creations in the first instance’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2019, p. 1; Also see Wallerstein 2006). From a decolonial thinking perspective, world systems are not neutral and value-free prescriptions from God, but are a product of social and ideological contestations between political formations that have vested interests in them. For example, as Jerónimo and Monteiro (2018) point out ‘It should be highlighted that there was never a single internationalism, but several internationalisms that have intersected and competed with each other…At different times there were diverse and contested perspectives of internationalism and of international ordering principles’ (p. 11). Against this backdrop, the inescapable questions from the Global South media and communication scholar are as follows: (a) Why does the internationalization debate in media and communication privilege one kind of internationalization over others? (b) Why does the dominant internationalism silence or render invisible other multiple possibilities of internationalization apart from its liberal, imperial, technology-driven, and Western-centric discourse? The latter’s ‘genealogies of ideas or practices rise from presentist problems, interpretations, and interests’ (Jerónimo and Monteiro 2018, p. 4). However, the Global South must understand that this is a natural self-regenerative impulse of global coloniality: it manipulates and re-invents the non-West’s memory of their own struggles, resistance, and solidarities as embodied and articulated through their stories, legends, and social ordering practices. This is why Bhikhu Parekh usefully reminds us that ‘socialism was not just about better economic opportunities for the poor and underprivileged, but also about a new culture and new forms of social relations’ (2000, p. 2). Global coloniality always creates its own historiography about the South’s revolutionary praxis and transnational solidarities that ushered the South critical freedoms. This historiography is often superimposed on local memory through the mass media so as to colonize information by ‘suppression of specific historical moments’ and effacing our memory and recollection of ‘historical contexts of contested and disputed production of ideas and

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practices of multiple possibilities in confrontation at the time’ (Jerónimo and Monteiro 2018, p. 4). Given the spectre of disciplinary decadence that faces media and communication studies in the Global South because of its veneration of Eurocentric theory and method, the Global South must reflect on what must be done or undone, thought or unthought, learnt or unlearned to create greater cultural, theoretical, epistemological, and methodological relevance of the interdiscipline in the South? Is internationalization, de-internationalization (especially that of the curriculum), deWesternization, or decolonization of media and communication studies the answer? What does internationalization and globalization of media and communication studies mean in the context of the North–South divide? How do we situate the colonial, cultural, and religious differences that have come not only to characterize the North–South divide, but are also reproduced and perpetuated in the cultural politics of internationalization and globalization? Does internationalization and globalization amount to the scientification and standardization of the field where, for instance, culture, history, and social contexts of study and practice supposedly do not matter anymore? Are the two processes drivers towards a multicultural media and communication studies or are they just another strategy for upscaling Euro-American worldviews, knowledge, and theory in the field? What are the implications for the Global South in further opening up its curriculum to Western models and programmes for a field that is almost, by any measure, irredeemably Eurocentric?

Understanding the Liberal/Colonial/Imperial Internationalism Trap Turpin et al. (2002) make a distinction between internationalization and internationalism on the one hand, and globalization and globalism on the other. Globalization and internationalization are said to be historical processes whereas globalism and internationalism are ideological projects. The fact that internationalism and globalism are ideological or epistemic projects means that there is more than one way to think or conceptualize of them. As such, internationalism has always been a site of ideological struggle in which different forces try to inscribe their values and interests into its objectives, processes, and institutionalization. From the time of imperialist aggression to anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles in Africa and Asia, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, history shows a

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significant presence of various contestations between major internationalisms around the world; each born out of its own political struggles, strategic alliances, and transnational discursive formations. Indeed, history shows that the ‘spaces of internationalism [have been] as diverse as its idioms and repertoires of action’ and that all were articulated through ‘internationalist vocabularies, imaginings, and practices [and] had a polycentric nature, generating multiple projects of engagement’ (Jerónimo and Monteiro 2018, p. 12). Against this backdrop, it seems to me that the critical agenda for media and communication studies in the Global South should be, among other things, to study and understand the historical and social forces that are behind various internationalisms, especially the hegemonic ones that have shaped and informed its internationalization processes. This is because ‘models of higher education, [disciplinary internationalization], as much else in the organization of global affairs, [will always] reflect the prevailing geopolitical [and geo-cultural and epistemic] hegemonies’ (Zeleza 2016, p. 233). This hegemony, however, is always concealed in the ‘Western code’, a discourse and a language system in Western historiography that labels, mischaracterizes, distorts, and demonizes competing internationalisms while fetishizing Western systems and world ordering (see Mignolo 2011). As Jerónimo and Monteiro (2018) contend, the task for the Global South critique is not only to unmask the Western code, but also map new counterhegemonic internationalisms that can form a resistance imaginary for (re)-imagining the critical agenda for media and communication studies. They state that ‘New geographies of internationalism need to be mapped’ and their ‘novel…intersection with imperialism and antiimperialism need to be included in our research endeavours in the field’ (p. 12, emphasis added). The counterhegemonic internationalisms must contest and offer alternatives to the hegemonic media internationalization programmes. Rupprecht (2018) argues that, for example, at the height of antiimperialist resistance in the 1960s and 1970s, Latin America, Africa, and Asia perceived the Soviet Union and China as models for socialist internationalism embodying non-West modes of development, industrialization, social organization, and cultural production. However, even in present-day Western historiography in the humanities and social sciences, ‘There is a [big] bias in much of the scholarship on globalization that associates too readily Western liberal capitalism with global integration and state socialism with self-isolation [and anti-internationalist attitude]’

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(Rupprecht 2018, p. 328). In media studies, this scholarship also derides all media systems and media practices that are not consistent with Western norms or are organized in ways that do not privilege capital and free market ideologies in cultural production. The most dominant internationalism that has shaped the current internationalization discourse and its accompanying practices in media and communication studies has been variously dubbed ‘liberal internationalism’ (Jahn 2013; Kott 2018; Hammarlund 2005), or ‘imperial/colonial/liberal internationalism’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2019; Jerenimo and Monteiro 2018). The imperial/colonial/liberal descriptor is more appropriate because it has greater explanatory power since it not only captures the intersectionality, cross-fertilization, and co-constitutionality between imperialism, colonialism, and liberal internationalism, but also its chameleon-like character that masks its chief objective of the coloniality of knowledge and continued economic exploitation in the territories of the Global South. It is part of what Mignolo has called the ‘modern colonialisms’ of ‘colonial modernity’ whose logic still remains the ‘planetary expansion’ of capital and Occidentalism (2012b, p. 22). Liberal internationalism is the epistemic position from which most media and communication studies scholars consciously or unconsciously speak from, albeit without much critical reflection of its myths, values system, and practices in the Global South. Just as colonial education justified itself through the myths of civilization, liberal internationalism legitimizes itself through the myths of human rights, individual liberties, development, and intercultural and global education. However, these values are often selectively applied based on the enduring politics of the colour line and of social stratification that characterize Euro-American modernity. While these values have meaning for the Western subject, they are merely a trap for the Global South whose denialism sees it continue to wallow in newer and subtler forms of economic and cultural imperialism now justified through transnational cultural flows in which it plays little or no part. Liberal internationalism also uses soft power where the much-romanticized transnational cultural flows, for example, in reality amount to the internationalization of Western media and their codes and conventions of cultural production. This Western media internationalization can easily mutate to cultural imperialism on the cultures in the margins depending on social contexts and the levels of cultural resistance agencies of given populations.

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In higher education and other sectors, liberal internationalism also uses the hegemonic international development programmes where the socalled technical experts, academic consultants, and expatriates from the West are used in Asia, Africa, and Latin America in ways that have farreaching cultural and epistemological consequences for the Global South. This is not to dismiss the importance of cultural exchange in media education, but to highlight the dangers of media education systems whose theory building projects are driven by the concepts of the geographic transfer of knowledge, literal translation of theory, and not the cultural translation of epistemologies. The system of liberal internationalism is underpinned by the ‘imperial and colonial paradigms of difference, paradigm of war, white supremacist ideologies and the color line, will to power, [and loyalty to Pan-European and Trans-Atlantic solidarities]’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2019; Bush 2009). The exploitation of the Global South’s material and cultural resources remains the main objective of its ‘neoliberal agenda which entails an expansion of capitalism into closed economies of the past’ (Jahn 2013, p. 1). In essence, the façade of neoliberal values masks liberal internationalism’s free-market fundamentalism where in reality, it is simply an extension of the ‘foreign policies of [the powerful Anglo-American] liberal states’ (Jahn 2013). Consequently, it can be argued that the national interest of the West is consistent with the liberal internationalist order because they are not incongruent in purpose. Liberal internationalism presents the process of globalization as an inevitable reality that carries great opportunities for all of us in the Global South, but only if we choose wisely and pay fidelity to international laws and institutions that are in reality creations of a Euro-centred world system. Meanwhile, in reality this is merely a myth that creates the illusions of transnationalism, interculturalism, globalism, and sovereign choice for the Global South. The reality, however, is that of asymmetrical relationships that are created and perpetuated by neoliberal globalization. Globalization’s most enduring reality that has defied space and time is that ‘some [people, countries, and regions] are more in charge than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it’ (Massey 1993, p. 57). Indeed, while the differentiating and homogenizing forces of globalization would always be experienced differently depending on the conditions of a given country, the latter is often more visible and pronounced in the Global South than the Global North.

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It is important to conclude this section by historicizing liberal internationalism. Liberal internationalism is traceable to nineteenth-century British imperialism that was characterized by colonial invasion, expropriation, and exploitation of the periphery to develop the metropolis in Europe. While liberal internationalism had moments of uncertainty during the Cold War, it re-emerged more boisterous in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Geopolitically, it marks the age of American imperialism that is characterized by the shifts on the modalities and language of empire building. There is a change from invasion and conquest of colonies to a human rights discourse that conceals the new deterritorialized empire of expropriation and accumulation through Anglo-American TNCs. In the Global South liberal internationalism constitutes a trap in the project of internationalizing higher education more generally, and media and communication studies particularly.

The Socialist, Pan-African, and Black Internationalism Options Last but not least, we look at the alternative counterhegemonic internationalisms that envision a different world order that is not driven by transnational capitalism and market forces. For a long time in discussing the internationalization of the interdiscipline, media scholars have either ignored the fact that it is taking place within a hegemonic internationalist order and that there are also other silenced competing orders that give rise to other possibilities of academic internationalization. These scholars have not only ‘adopted a narrow view of what is global order, who are its makers and managers, and what means they employ to realize their goals’ but have also underrated that ‘the nature and scope of agency in the global order—who creates it and how—needs to be redefined and broadened’ (Acharya 2018, p. 1). He further observes that ‘Order is built not by material power alone, but also by ideas and norms. While the West designed the post-war order, the non-Western countries were not passive. They contested and redefined Western ideas and norms, and contributed new ones of their own making’ (Acharya 2018, p. 1). The non-Western international orders represent temporalities that are either slowly vanishing, coalescing, or being silenced by the dominant liberal order. They comprise ‘Socialist internationalism’ and ‘PanAfrican/black/decolonization internationalism’ (Babiracki and Jersild 2016; Makalani 2011; Bush 2009; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2019). Both came

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into being as radical responses to the capitalist neoliberal internationalisms. Although, these are largely ignored by liberal internationalists, they have a potential to offer epistemologies for a kind of higher education system that is based on social justice and a media and communication studies internationalization project that is not predicated on Western capitalist interests, but a transformative pedagogy of the oppressed (Freire 1970). Socialist internationalism seeks ‘to unite the exploited workers of the world for a proletarian revolution [and the] rejection of abstract individualism while privileging historical materialism [over liberal-pluralist frameworks]’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2019, p. 1). The socialist ideals of equality, comradeship, proletariat solidarity, and collective ownership of the means of production inspired the anti-colonial struggles and labour movements in Africa and Asia. In most cases, socialist internationalism also became the source of international solidarity for Africa’s liberation movements that fought for the social justice and the liberation of the continent. The Pan-African/Marxist/black/decolonization internationalism is preoccupied with the liberation of Africa and its diasporas from colonialism, neocolonialism, racism, slavery, disenfranchisement, and capitalist exploitation (Makalani 2011; Bush 2009). It represents struggles from outside and below Euro-American modernity and the insurrection of the silenced histories of ‘the wretched of the earth’ (Fanon 2005): those that history continues to doubt, deny, and denounce their humanity in open and subtle ways. Black internationalism ‘then, is related not only to Pan Africanism, but also to other international movements: socialism, communism, and feminism’ (Bush 2009, p. 22). There are clear convergences or intersections between the struggles of the workers and those of the colonized and racialized black people, including African-Americans: ‘All over the world, the emancipatory designs of common people tempered the corrosive and socially degrading power of corporate capitalism, and people of color boldly challenged the presumptions of a global geo-culture rooted in the assumption of white supremacy’ (2009, p. 2). AfricanAmericans in the United States had a long history of socialist mobilization as exemplified by the W. E. Du Bois’s black decolonial Marxist position that attacked not just the colour lines of white supremacist ideology, but also the problems of class and gender. However, this is not to suggest that the black struggles against racism and colonialism could have failed without socialist internationalism. Rather, Marxism ‘represented less the source and more the moment of their politics’ (Makalani 2011, p. 5).

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Socialist and black internationalism have arguably dissipated due to, in part, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the global decline of black consciousness as a critical epistemic political resource for galvanizing political and cultural struggles for the darker populations of the world. Globally, the political resistance agency that characterized the 1950s and 1970s anti-colonial struggles, civil rights movements, and other resistance movements has been lost. As Bush (2009) observes ‘while it is true that the traditional anti-systemic [internationalisms] have reached the end of their rope, what this implies is a new strategy that we think has to start from a sense of international solidarity and international social justice’ (Bush 2009, p. 30). However, the re-emergence of Marxist, decolonial, Southern, black sentiment in parts of Africa, Latin America, Asia and indeed the West creates hope that this may crystallize into new geographies of internationalization for academic projects in the humanities and social sciences. In South Africa, a cultural and political ferment is producing decolonial intellectual insights that present a possibility for creating new pathways for unthinking and unlearning liberal and colonial internationalism and its internationalization programmes that pose a threat to the rise of a decolonial pedagogy that aims to restore transformative agency to higher education institutions and learning and teaching practices in the post colonies of the South.

The Politics of Internationalizing Media and Communication Studies The concept of internationalization has been widely used in media and communication studies, albeit in a broad and generic manner to refer to the extension of the geographic reach of the field beyond the EuroAtlantic orbit. Internationalization has largely been defined in terms of the geographic imperative within the context of the need for a transnational and transregional comparative media studies. Comparative education is a Northern epistemology that is deeply rooted in the modernist reformist educational policies of the post-Enlightenment period and not on the South’s quest for decolonization, cognitive justice, and epistemic freedom in the field which amount to a liberating politics of African, Asian, and Latin American cultures in the field (Cowen and Kazamias 2009). There has not been much problematization of both internationalization and comparative media education in the interdiscipline. The mainstream understanding of internationalization has been largely minimalist and

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as a result has often led to theoretical, albeit ahistorical and decontextualized conceptions of the process because of divorcing it from the political economy of the regimes of liberal internationalisms and neoliberal globalization and their ramifications on the cultural politics of higher education (Zeleza 2016; Leask 2015). Similarly, the understanding of internationalization’s transformative potential to the interdiscipline has also been problematic because of this narrow perspective. The overarching factors of neoliberalism, free-market fundamentalism, and the corporatization of higher education that shape liberal internationalization are often ignored or overlooked in favour of a normative argument informed by the liberal-pluralist theoretical assumptions of internationalization. As Mattelart (2000, pp. 52–60) observes, the fashionable one-way flows of academic theory about the impact of cultural globalization have resulted in choruses of ‘transnational flows’, ‘globalization’, ‘creolization’, and ‘cultural mélanges’. In so doing, these ‘theories…tend to magnify the logic of appropriation of global flows, without considering either their limits or their contradictions. As such, these…perspectives run the risk of being considered sophisticated theoretical constructions legitimizing…the free flow of the major players of the global system’ (p. 59). While globalization has been extensively discussed in the field, more still needs to be done to explore how it has shaped the internationalization practices in media and communication studies at the level of the nation-state, higher education institutions and their media education curricula in different parts of the world. Although critics of globalization in the interdiscipline have tended to overlook its impact on the practices of internationalization of the interdiscipline, greater focus has been on globalization’s homogenizing and differentiating impulses as epitomized by, among other factors, the overromanticized flows of cultural goods in space and time. However, a lacuna exists in empirical critical engagement with the relationship between globalization and the projects of the internationalization of the interdiscipline, particularly globalization’s ideological impact on internationalization’s cultural politics and how this in turn impacts media education in the universities of the Global South. I must state that the Global South is not opposed to an inclusive multicultural internationalization process, but to the liberal, colonial internationalization as a Western hegemonic project that obfuscates its real ideological practices of epistemic colonization in the Global South. Similarly, it is important to make the distinction that we are not just

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talking about globalization in the minimalist sense of a mere technological processes as selectively emphasized by the liberal internationalist school of thought, but a socio-economic, political, and cultural process that has a colonial, Western, and neoliberal accent wherever it goes. For example, in the twenty-first-century higher education landscape, globalization and its internationalization projects have led to the mushrooming of many offshore Western media and communication programmes that pride themselves on the British and American style of education in the Global South. An extract from a recent advertisement for faculty in communications and mass media at the British University in Egypt (BUE) can be instructive here. It states: ‘BUE has been offering a UK-style higher education experience and UK-validated degrees in Egypt since 2005…A private Egyptian university, our mission is to be a leading research and teaching university in Egypt based on UK best practice. Our teaching is in English and our UK validating partners are London South Bank University and Queen Margaret University Edinburgh’ (BUE, 6 September 2019). BUE is not an exception, but a trend particularly in Asia, the Middle East, and some parts of Africa (Zeleza 2016). In media and communication studies, the international and the global ‘is latently identified with the Western-modern’ and ‘installed as a central node through which, and only through which, different locals can relate to one another’ (Kraidy 2001, p. 50). This is also ‘reflected in the postcolonial [interdiscipline] where scholars…from Africa, Asia and the Middle East communicate in English or French’ (p. 50). While globalization thrives from the myth of de-emphasizing boundaries and the politics of the empire in its search for global markets for Western transnational corporations to which Western universities are now part, liberal internationalization actually re-inscribes the empire through deified higher education systems that are presented as ‘best practice’ to the Global South. Notice how the BUE advertisement interpellates the prospective student not only as a loyal subject of the mythologized British imperial excellence in education, but also the enduring, but false colonial binaries of a darker, primitive ignorant Africa versus an enlightened, progressive Europe. Liberal internationalization, whether intended or unintended, is undergirded by a colonial discourse where the Hegelian hierarchy of discounted peoples and knowledges underpins the narrative. As Michel Foucault observed of discounted knowledges more generally, internationalization implicitly frames Africa to represent ‘a whole set of knowledge that has been disqualified as inadequate to its tasks… or naïve

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knowledges located low down on the hierarchy beneath the required level of recognition of scientificity’ (1980, p. 82). The internationalization that comes as a solution to the problem of ignorance in the South is not one that is intercultural or dialogic, but colonial and civilizing in moral purpose. Therefore, it seems to me that a more nuanced and meaningful discussion of internationalization of media and communication studies must always situate it within a broader context, including the liberal rubric and mores of the Global North which conjure the colonial and imperial in the Global South. Similarly, the transformative potential of internationalization in the Global South must not just be based on abstract normative or theoretical assumptions, but on the analysis of the ‘forces that drive [it], the activities that constitute it, the competences it promotes, the values it creates, the processes that sustain it and its effects on teaching and scholarship’ (Zeleza 2016, p. 213). Such an approach has one certain benefit for the Global South, that is, unmasking the gap between the rhetoric and practice of liberal internationalization in institutions and disciplines in the region. Needless to say, most literature on internationalization in higher education is written from a Western and liberal perspective (Ninnes and Hellsten 2005; Albertson 2010; Williams and Lee 2015). Although its discussions tend to be transdisciplinary in approach and not exclusive to media and communication studies, the Western debates on academic internationalization can help media scholars from the Global South to understand the broader institutional, policy, and ideological contexts within which myths of liberal internationalization are manufactured and the actual internationalization of field is negotiated. For example, the hegemonic attitude of the Global North is captured anecdotally from two Australian academics who boldly, but unwittingly declare that: ‘Under internationalization, the world is our oyster, or perhaps our garden, in which we sow the seeds of our academic labour: powerful knowledges, proven best practices, and established systems of scholarship and enquiry’ (Ninnes and Hellsten 2005, p. 1). Understanding such broader hegemonic institutional and ideological landscapes is an important step in unthinking media studies internationalization as driven by neoliberal project, thought, and processes, and rethinking it in line with the diverse realities, histories, cultures, and theoretical perspectives of inclusion from the Global South. As a process, liberal internationalization as we know it is located at the interstices of global forces, state policy, neoliberal higher education

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order, and the corporatized universities as sites of cultural and intellectual production. The myths that underpin and legitimize it as a discourse emanate from globalization’s neoliberal values of interculturalism, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism(Hayden 2005). In the so-called global village of cosmopolitan values, although people live in their local communities ‘they [are actually seen as] belonging to a wider community of human ideals and aspirations’ (Brock 2005, p. 10). Everyone is ‘a member of the wider community of all humanity’ (Dower and Williams 2002, p. 16). The emergence of the global citizen that is not restricted by time-space constraints is seen as necessitating a paradigm shift of national education systems into transnational education systems that promote global citizenship, cultural literacy, diversity and pluralism, and global learning. It also implies a borderless global media education system that is based on pedagogies that produce intercultural competences such as ‘the ability to communicate effectively and appropriately in intercultural situations based on one’s intercultural knowledge, skills and attitudes’ (Deardorff 2006, p. 247). Interculturally sound pedagogies are said to produce transculturally competent citizens who are reflexive about their ethnocentric limitations and have communicative skills and attitudes that help them to navigate and interact with the diverse world cultures in time and space. All these myths that undergird liberal internationalization ideologically obfuscate the reality of the reproduction and continuation of the problem of epistemic colonization created by internationalization in the Global South. The reality of internationalization is that it is a market-driven ideology. Its motivation is twofold. First, as a driver of ‘academic capitalism’ in the twenty-first-century, the Western imperial university is now part of the global capitalist edifice of transnational corporations that have become a recognized actor in the cut-throat billion-dollar industry of exporting Western culture, Western knowledge, and Western pedagogic models (Slaughter and Leslie 1997; Zeleza 2016). Second, the globalized Western university also has the responsibility to the global capitalist order of transnational monopolies and oligopolies in various sectors of the economy to produce a globally competent workforce that is equipped with not just vocational skills, but the much-romanticized intercultural skills of cultural literacy, cultural tolerance, and independent problemsolving as a business communication skill and the centrepiece of global corporate managerialism. From this perspective, internationalization as we know it is not a transformative concept for the Global South but a conflict

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prevention and management mechanism in increasingly globalized and culturally diverse academic disciplines and workplaces. This explains why the internationalist vocabularies of interculturality have found prominence in courses like business communication, peace studies, and teacher training programmes where interculturalism is reduced to a normative skill of cultural literacy as a conflict prevention strategy. However, we should note that apart from its vacuous liberal orientation, interculturality can also be conceptualized from alternative and radical discursive terrains of alterity or the Global South. Here the understanding of interculturality is situated in culture, colonial difference, global coloniality, and the enduring problems of the colour line and epistemic line in the constitution of cultural relations in Euro-American world system. From this perspective, interculturality becomes a radical concept of cultural translation in pursuit of trans-epistemic knowledge production in media studies. Consequently, as a liberal formulation internationalization is neither a radical nor revolutionary concept, but a conservative concept that aims to serve, first and foremost, the economic objectives of the new deterritorialized empire of transnational imperial universities and a Western-centric global knowledge economy. Interculturality, a concept that internationalization advances, proves to be intellectually tepid and porous as a cultural public relations gimmick since it is not about the liberation of postcolonial beings and cultures of the Global South but merely ‘seeks ways in which [world] cultures could nevertheless get on with, understand and recognize one another’ (Welsch 1999, p. 198). Internationalization does not aim to produce an academic project that is centred on the emancipatory objectives of media theory and pedagogy, because it is merely a liberal process that acts as ‘an enabling factor in the achievement of wider corporate goals [of the corporate imperial university and other TNCs] rather than as an aim itself’ (Jones 2015, p. x). In media and communication studies, its instrumental and utilitarian philosophical underpinnings can be seen in that it basically functions to produce students who are bequeathed with social and economic skills that are in service of the vast networks of global media empires, global advertising and public relations agencies, and other service industries. As such, in the Global South the internationalization of media education has been experienced largely as a hegemonic project for Western economic and cultural domination because ‘developed countries dominate the provision of models, services, and knowledges [and] consequently, students, faculty,

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institutional practices, intellectual paradigms, and ideological influences have tended to flow from the Global North to the Global South’ (Zeleza 2016, p. 15). However, just and effective ‘internationalization would require the integration of theoretical ideas and historical experiences from the non-West in knowledge production not only in the West but also about the West, with corresponding linguistic and cultural competences’ (Kraidy 2001, p. 51). The depth of the institutional and epistemological domination in the interdiscipline is evidenced by how metropolitan-based offshore and locally based privately-owned franchise universities that teach media and communication studies have become increasingly popular in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. In China, India, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Nigeria, Egypt, and South Africa, these imperial models of universities also offer American, Australian, and British-styled degrees in the broad field of media and communication studies through cross border delivery where, for example, the continent is Africa, the student is African, but the curriculum is Western. These universities normally use expatriate faculty from the West or Western trained local graduates. In the teaching and learning processes, the metropolis curriculum in media and communication studies is either offloaded wholesale to the local student or slightly modified for contextualization, albeit without tinkering with the Western epistemological fundamentals. This is how coloniality in education works. In South Africa, for example, similar problems are faced by public universities which, despite recent epistemological decolonization demands from the students, internationalization continues to ‘present serious challenges of how to balance global engagements with local autonomy and relevance, especially in ensuring that the knowledges produced [in the interdiscipline] are empowering and transformative’ (Zeleza 2016, p. 216). In most cases, the African scholars who are supposed to decolonize the curriculum are they themselves proud products of the Western institutions and find it difficult to break free from the shackles and tentacles of Eurocentric thinking and colonial pride. This point takes us to the issue of internationalizing the curriculum of the interdiscipline. Elsewhere in the poorer parts of Africa and Asia where universities have almost collapsed due to the cutting of public funding, neocolonial media education happens by default because there is no academic research culture and the only reading material available to the students and their teachers is the Northern archive.

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Beyond internationalizing media and communication studies at the geographic level, there is need to discuss the contradictions obtaining within the interdiscipline at the level of the curriculum. This is because to discuss the internationalization of media and communication studies across the national and institutional divides ‘without discussing the internationalization of the curriculum and student learning is nonsensical’ (Leask 2015, p. 3). Internationalizing the media curriculum can be understood as ‘integrating an international, intercultural, or global dimension into the purpose, functions, or delivery of [disciplinary knowledge] or education’ (Knight 2005, p. 13). Following Knight, internationalizing the media and communication curriculum in the Global South should entail developing the interdiscipline as a space of cross-cultural dialogue and interculturalism in theory, method, content, epistemes, and pedagogical approaches of the interdiscipline. A true meaningful internationalization must not just be between nations, but must traverse cultures, worldviews, locality, and globality. As Leask (2015) usefully advises ‘If we are to internationalize learning, we must do that within the context of different cultures and practices of knowing, doing and being in the disciplines’ (p. 3). Indeed, as Thussu (2009) also observes, internationalization in the field speaks to ‘the need to develop original methodological approaches that encompass new phenomena and identify differences and similarities through comparative and collaborative research’ (p. 21). However, the opposite is true across different continents in the Global South. For example, Hans de Wit, a Professor of Internationalization of Higher Education at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, authoritatively argues that: Africa- a region with numerous academics with foreign degrees, graduates with a study abroad experience, as well as, imported knowledge and concepts from abroad, probably holds a more internationalized education than any other region. But the impact of the situation is not necessarily positive. Africa needs to go through a process of de-internationalization and liberate itself from these external influences before it can develop its own position in the global knowledge society. (2013, p. 30)

In a fast globalizing world of Western cultural and educational flows, Africa and the Global South must be careful of the risks that are embedded in Western-centric unidirectional forms of internationalization

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that continue to reproduce academic imperialism and epistemic colonization. As Walter Rodney (1981) observed decades ago, (neo) colonial education ‘was education for subordination, exploitation, the creation of mental confusion and the development of underdevelopment’ (p. 61). Liberal internationalization in the Global South entrenches the coloniality of knowledge, it does not put an end to it. While Hans de Wit proffers de-internationalization as a potential solution, it seems to me that decolonization is the only realistic antidote, although a very bitter pill to swallow for Eurocentrism and the academic empire. From the Global South perspective, real internationalization must not be ‘about the touchy-feely sensitivity toward other groups, [but] about dispersing power, empowering the disempowered, about transforming subordinating institutions and discourses’ (Shohat and Stam 2000, p. 49). It is worth re-emphasizing that the Global South is not against the internationalization or globalization of media and communication studies. Internationalization and globalization, while polychromatic and problematic, provide the field with an opportunity to develop a truly multicultural critical media theory rooted on multiple histories and cultures as loci of enunciation. However, it is against what is strikingly an uncritical, simplistic, yet intellectually and ideologically disingenuous representation of the impact of neoliberal globalization on the internationalization of the field and the Euro-American status quo in the interdiscipline. The problem is that exponents of the internationalization thesis have tended to present a euphoric, techno-centric, and depoliticized view of internationalization and globalization that paints an idealistic and romanticized picture of its potential impact on media and communication studies. Globalization is always presented as a technological and self-propelling process symbolized by hyper-mobility of cultural goods, people, money, technologies, and services. What is often left unsaid is how the globalization and internationalization processes are in reality entrenched in a neoliberal knowledge and economic power structure that has historically produced, and continues to reproduce, asymmetrical academic power relations between the Global North and the Global South in the field (Waisbord 2015; Willems 2014; Musa 2009). Last but not least, liberal internationalists have also tended to gratuitously ignore the fact that as processes or analytical categories, internationalization and globalization do not actually represent anything substantively new that radically diverts from colonial modernity and its body politics and cultural politics of coloniality. In other words, we have let liberal internationalists in the field

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to rig the argument of internationalization by using the very processes that require analysis as the analytical frames of internationalizing media studies. Put differently, globalization cannot be used to analyse the globalization of the field just as internationalization cannot be used to analyse the internationalization of the field. In this folly lies an inherent ‘danger of adopting an ahistoric and uncritical attitude to globalization [and internationalization] …that…can blind [the South] to the way in which reference to globalization [in the North has largely been] part of the ideological armoury of elites within the contemporary world’ (Baylis et al. 2001, p. 221). Indeed, the danger in the liberal internationalization and globalization thesis has been their hegemonic narratives that distort African, Asian, and Latin American geo-political, cultural and historical experience and memory in favour of a Eurocentric narrative of what the two processes can do.

Rethinking the De-Westernization Alternative: Spatial or Epistemic Process? Is de-Westernization a highway or a cul-de-sac for the transformation of media and communication studies in the Global South? Can deWesternization liberate the ex-colonial subject and border intellectual and give birth to media and communication research and theory that is relevant and empowering to the South? How one answers these questions would largely depend not only on their position in the global knowledge power structure in terms of class, race and colonial difference, but also on what they understand de-Westernization to mean based on their social and historical experience. The concept of de-Westernization has been predominantly used in media and communication studies (Curran and Park 2000; Wang 2011; Willems 2014; Waisbord 2015; Benson 2015; Lee 2015; Hjoth and Khoo 2015), film and cultural studies (Bâ and Higbee 2012; GaalHolmes 2012; Alacovska and Gill 2019; Knopf 2009) and indigenous and decolonial studies (Mignolo 2012a; Grosfoguel 2007; Smith 1999) among others. However, its contemporary meanings appear to be fuzzy as the concept straddles many theoretical and epistemological paradigms (Wang 2011). Earlier uses of de-Westernization in media and communication studies implied a reversal of the process of Westernization in the field. De-Westernization referred to the ‘broadening of media theory and understanding it in a way that takes account of the experience of countries

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outside the Anglo-American orbit’ (Curran and Park 2000, p. 11). At this level, it seemed to be synonymous with internationalization in that Western theory needed to be applied and tested in other social, cultural, and geographical contexts other than the West. The West was also viewed parochially as a spatial or geographic category and not an epistemic frame that has become a deterritorialized epistemological order. Yet it is better viewed as a shifting, mutating, hegemonic system that operates at the level of institutions as well as discourses in academic disciplines and society. It universalizes Western particularism as a yardstick for not only media systems and practices, but also academic practices. It is never static in the sense of a geographical category, but dynamic, kaleidoscopic, and slippery in the sense of a hegemonic project. John Downing (2003), a consistent insider critic of media studies and communication studies in the Global North, observed ‘the unnerving readiness of so many [Western] scholars to extrapolate by silent implication from their findings about a single country or part of it, to the nature of media and communication studies processes universally’ (p. 498). James Curran and Myung-Jin Park (2000) also criticized this as ‘the self-absorption and parochialism of…Western media theory’ (p. 3). In their book De-Westernizing Media Studies, they argued for the deWesternization of media and communication studies because ‘it had become routine for universalistic observations about the media to be advanced in English-language books on the basis of evidence derived from a tiny handful of countries. [The] same few countries keep recurring as if they are a stand in for the rest of the world’ (p. 3). Like in Downing’s characterization, Curran and Park’s analysis could not escape geographic categorization, in particular the nation-state, in their call for de-Westernization. The blueprint for achieving de-Westernization was through bringing on board African, Asian, and Latin American countries not as autonomous sites of theory building, but as sites that can be used to justify Western universalistic paradigms in media and communication studies. At the heart of most of these scholars was the concern of broadening Western media and communication theory into the sociocultural and historical contexts of the Global South in line with Hegel’s thesis on the cunning of reason. They were not concerned about the imbalances in power relations between the disciplinary knowledge order between the Global North and the Global South. In reality, this liberal-pluralist view of de-Westernization amounted to a subtle promotion of the internationalization of Western theory. In

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other words, the Global South could be sub-contracted the task of theory building, albeit in a game of academic chess where the rules have already been set where kings will remain kings and pawns remain pawns. Willems (2014) has criticized this liberal version of de-Westernization for reproducing the old colonial model of area studies in which non-Westerners at best can only provide case studies to confirm or disprove the time-space variations of Eurocentric paradigms. In more recent discussions of de-Westernization inside and outside the field of media and communication studies, there has been attempts by the Global South to reclaim the concept and save it from the liberal mischaracterization that has located it within a postmodern critique of the interdiscipline when, in fact, it is a decolonial critique (Waisbord and Mellado 2014; Mignolo 2012a). As a postmodern critique, de-Westernization is reduced to just another normative multicultural tokenism in the field and not revolutionary transformation of the interdiscipline that is centred on decolonization and deprovincialization. Mignolo (2012a), who traces de-Westernization to the Bandug Afro-Asian Conference on decolonization in 1955, has used the concept more as a political term (not just a geographic term) denoting the return of epistemological authority and power of the non-Europeans to think and act outside Western theory and method. In particular, he sees cultural de-Westernization as referring to delinking epistemologically from the colonizing power of the West, better understood as ‘an ideologically inflected mode of being and seeing, perceiving or representing the world’ (Bâ and Higbee 2012, pp. 1–2). However, delinking does not mean complete disengagement from European media and cultural theory, but undermining its misguided sense of superiority and universality in the field. In the final analysis ‘what is at issue is not whether we should learn from the West, but how we should learn from the West’ (Chen and Miike 2006, p. 3). Epistemological delinking is about restoring cognitive power and epistemic authority of the African, Asian, and Latin American ways of knowing. From this perspective, de-Westernization in the field is therefore ‘an act of cultural defense, an anti-imperialist strategy to nurture academic sovereignty’ and ‘a call for embracing an analytical perspective that reflects a de-centered, dynamic contemporary world’ (Waisbord and Mellado 2014, p. 363). As a Southern epistemology of media transformation, de-Westernization converges with decolonization on their shared concern about the politics of knowledge production between the North and South.

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Yeh (2011) makes an important intervention about the dilemmas that arise due to the entangled nature of the coloniality of knowledge and coloniality of being in media and communication studies. Only a liberated being is able to produce transformative media theory that is centred on the Global South as its geographic, cultural, and epistemic locus of enunciation. Without a liberated being in African, Asian, and Latin American academic landscapes, transformative agency cannot exist. The problem is not necessarily the interdiscipline of media studies, but the dislocated subject and being: Westernization has a centuries long history in [the Global South]. To a larger extent, it is an integral part of what we are and what we desire to become. In tracking our history of engagement with the West as a scholar of media and communication studies, our aim [must] not be to disavow what has become of us, but to come to a different knowledge about ourselves…If de-Westernization eventually leads to recuperation… we need to ask: Where is the location of this recuperation? Is it located in History? Theory? Language? Tradition? Nostalgia? (Yeh 2011, p. 99)

It is located in a consciousness about our collective colonial subalternity in Western modernity. However, others have placed their hope in the Africanization, Asianization, or Latin-Americanization of the media and media and communication studies: ‘The direction for future Communication studies [in the Global South] is emerging, and that’s culturecentricity-either Asian centricity or Afrocentricity can be considered as a solution to the problems’ (Chen and Miike 2006, p. 2). But what does it mean to Africanize and Asianize the interdiscipline?

Africanization and Asianization: Culture as a Pathway, Culture as a Slippery Slope Academic discourses about Africanization or Asianization of disciplines have lingered around for a very long time in the humanities and social sciences. In South Africa, these have intensified especially with the reemergence of debates on epistemic decolonization in the last 5 years. The schools of thought on Africanization and Asianization are variegated, but we can on the main, speak of the pragmatic and ideological approaches (Asante 1998; Hamlet 1998; Falola and Jennings 2002; Falola 2003; Ferreira 2014; Chen 2006). On the one hand, the former is

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sheer managerialism couched in the pretentious language for cognitive justice and transformation within the postcolonial university, while in reality acting conservatively, bureaucratically, and pathologically fearful of the revolutionary method and real change to the status quo (see Habib 2019; Funabashi 1993). On the other hand, the latter is largely rooted in Afrocentrism/Asiacentrism, as a theory of knowledge ‘that demands an epistemological location that places the critic/scholar inside the African/Asian experience and African/Asian ideals and values at the centre of African/Asian codes, paradigms, symbols, motifs, and myths, and give meaning to the history of the African/Asian subject and a sense of place in the world arena’ (Ferreira 2014, pp. 43–44). This view places culture at the centre of media and communication studies since everyday forms of communication are said to be ‘reflections of deep structures of worldview, and different cultures nurture different structures of worldview. Forms and functions of communication differ from culture to culture’ (Chen and Miike 2006, p. 2). However, we know only too well the contestations surrounding the concept of culture, especially the view that presupposes essentialist categories of analysis based on a homogenous notion of African culture or Asian culture. Africanizing and Asianizing media and communication studies implies developing a ‘discipline’ that is rooted within contexts of African cultures, values, and beliefs as its centre. Some cultural elements are obviously Pan-African while others are specific to social groups and subgroups. The idea of cultural centres is said to be anachronistic given the new cultural landscapes of global and transnational cultural flows where bounded cultures are replaced by new geographies of hypermobility. Africanization and Asianization are criticized for being suggestive of cultural purity where none exists or ever existed. However, Africanization and Asianization mean that African, Asian, or Latin American media and communication studies ‘has to become its own centre. It has to become its own force. Not as a way of separating itself from the rest of the world, but as a precondition for it to exercise its [sub-disciplinary] weight among other forces in the world’ (Mbembe and Balakrishnan 2016, p. 30). As such, the idea of a centred discipline does not imply static cultures or homogeneous cultures, but that media analysis should be informed by the culture, values, and beliefs of societies within which it is taking place. As such, the decolonial cultural turn in media and communication studies in the Global South must be accompanied by a deliberate heightened social consciousness about subjectivity and identity because

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‘without knowing who or what one’s cultural identity is, there is no way for the [Southern] scholars to study human communication from their own cultural perspective’ (Chen and Miike 2006, p. 3). However, culture is a porous and kaleidoscopic concept. Culture ‘evolves, adapting itself to new circumstances and environments. New ideas come from the outside, to replace older ideas or to be blended with existing ones. Culture and society can be fluid, reflecting an ongoing adaptation. Society and its culture can regress or progress’ (Falola 2003, p. 1). This means that the concept of culture has to be used without deification or reification because the so-called local cultures can still be a vehicle of domination through the coloniality of being and knowledge. For example, media Africanization polices on media content and languages in many African countries such as Zimbabwe and South Africa have failed because it is not adequate to change language, bring on board black African journalists, or soap operas without transforming the worldviews, cultural sensibilities, codes and conventions from Eurocentric to African modes of storytelling. The same applies to the problem of just changing the language of instruction in the field because local languages can still be a force of coloniality and social domination. As Chen and Miike (2006) observe about Asia ‘today it is not difficult for us to find textbooks [and journals] in Asian languages, many of which are actually translations and replications of publications in Western countries’ (p. 1). Coloniality of knowledge and coloniality of being can be translated via local languages, hence, while languages as signposts of our history and identities are perceived as empowering, they do not do so in and by themselves outside the epistemological contexts of decoloniality. Therefore, Africanization and Asianization are meaningless if they are to be only understood at the cosmetic level of replacing one race with another or as reverse-Westernization. However, while both de-Westernization and decoloniality have reemerged in the context of twenty-first-century internationalization and globalization debates in media and communication studies, in reality they are an enduring critique of seventeenth-century and nineteenth-century imperialism in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The critiques, informed by the ideals of a social justice and a common humanity, have given birth to a futuristic theory of decoloniality which, while attacking the present, is normatively inspired by the idea of a better future for all societies.

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Conclusion The discussion of the internationalization of media and communication studies has been largely rooted on the normative assumptions of the potential benefits of internationalization and globalization arising from liberal-pluralist theory. Similarly, the understanding of what we mean by internationalizing the media studies curriculum has also been abstract and detached from specific historical experiences of how internationalization is actually taking place in Asia, Middle East, and some parts of Africa. The entire discourse is characterized by an underlying problem of a presentist articulation of internationalization and globalization that valorizes popular practices and technicist idioms which ‘ignore the historical contexts of the contested and disputed production of ideas and practices and of multiple possibilities and imaginations in confrontation at the time’ (Jerónimo and Monteiro 2018, p. 4). Indeed, the ideology of presentism in globalization and internationalization as a media education policy and everyday practice is promoted and orchestrated through the seductive, but disarming new information and communication technologies: the new political technologies for the depoliticization and subjectification of the ex/colonial subject in the Global South. However, the stubborn and enduring fact about internationalization and globalization schools’ emphasis on new media technologies is that despite the overbearing power of the techno euphoric narrative emanating from the West’s ‘born-again technological determinism’, the sobering reality for the Global South is that ‘the Internet and digital communication networks are tightly intertwined with the global economy [colonized] and run by Western TNCs’ (McChesney 1997; p. 130; Also see Morley 2007; Couldry and Mejias 2019; McChesney 2013). The new media technologies serve not only as a powerful Euro-American surveillance machinery of ideas that are circulating in the Global South, but also as strategic hegemonic platforms for entrenching a Western virtual knowledge order and the continued expansion of Anglo-American capital on a global scale. As such, these new media technologies, and by extension the internationalization and globalization processes in the interdicipline, are therefore part of the problem that calls for the Global South’s critical analysis and solution (see Moyo and Mutsvairo 2018). As such, African, Asian, and Latin American media intellectuals cannot afford to naively celebrate the

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techno-inspired myths of the internationalization and globalization of the interdiscipline. They must reflect on the real socio-cultural, historical, ideological, and economic factors that have produced those new media technologies and shaped those processes. Instead of enthusing along within the Euro-American liberal-pluralist internationalist and globalist explanatory paradigms that are largely informed by Western ontologies, epistemologies and social experience, difficult questions about the ideologies that are at play and whose interests they actually save have to be asked. As I sought to demonstrate in this chapter, technologies and their global social ordering practices are tied to the hegemonic interests of global coloniality and Western education systems. To control populations in time and space, the West does not need guns anymore, but control of the Global South’s cultural and mental universes. This is the context within which the current regimes of liberal/imperial/colonial/modernist internationalization programmes have to be understood in media and communication studies.

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CHAPTER 3

The Global South: Recalibrating Our Geo-Cultural and Epistemic Agency

The global South has come to refer to this concatenation of protests against the theft of the commons, against the theft of human dignity and rights, against the undermining of democratic institutions and the promises of modernity. The global South is this: a world of protest, a whirlwind of creative activity. Vijay Prashad (2012, p. 40)

The South of the epistemologies of the South is the anti-imperial South, the nongeographical South made up of the struggles of numberless populations of the geographical south and north against the domination of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2018, p. 120)

Introduction One of the critical issues that I continuously reflected on when writing this book was the usefulness of the Global South concept in characterizing some of the book’s central concerns. To what extent can the concept be used, if at all, to illuminate some of the conceptual blind spots that existed in the previous geo-political configurations of place in media and communication studies? How can the concept be used as an apparatus to reconceptualize and add complexity to the centre-periphery model of Wallerstein’s world systems theory? (see Wallerstein 2004). Does the concept have any explanatory power to some of the most enduring © The Author(s) 2020 L. Moyo, The Decolonial Turn in Media Studies in Africa and the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52832-4_3

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problems in the media and societies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America caused by the new deterritorilized empire of global capital? How can it, for example, help the interdiscipline in the Global South to reconceptualize the age-old questions on media imperialism and cultural imperialism in a world where powerful academic discourses valorize the new geographies of circulation in which global cultural flows are said to represent the new realities of a multiplex cultural global order? And if the concept is fit for purpose, how do we use it to track new ways by which the empire dispenses epistemic and cultural violence in time and space? However, we must also be careful of the inherent danger in the North/South framework of creating rigid polarities based on totalizing claims that unwittingly reproduce the very problem of universal paradigms we are trying to eliminate in the field. Indeed, the Global South and the Global North are by no means homogenous entities because they are very diverse socially, politically, and economically. However, we cannot overlook the fact that just like the Global North, the Global South also has some cross-cutting social, cultural, political, and economic commonalities that have created the South’s own enduring sense of unity in diversity and some cultural resilience in a Western-centric world. It is these commonalities, in their unitary and diverse forms, that can create the epistemic foundations for a Southern media and cultural theory. The concept of the Global South is fairly new in the academic parlance of media and communication studies. However, it has a relatively longer history in other disciplines such as cultural studies, literary studies, political science, international relations, and development studies (Dados and Connell 2012). In media and communication studies, scholars of development communication, international communication, and postdevelopment studies have traditionally used geographic characterizations such as ‘Centre-periphery’, ‘First World’, ‘Third World’, ‘Highly Developed Countries’, and ‘Less Developed Countries’ (White 1994; Melkote and Steeves 1991; Apter 1987; Rahnema and Bawtree 1997; Servaes 2007; Cooke and Kothari 2001; Boyd-Barrett 2015; Tomlison 2001). However, these have generally been unwittingly drawn from the modernization discourse that these scholars unintentionally reaffirm through the hierarchical classifications implicitly rooted in the Hegelian and modernist paradigms. Yet two ironies exist regarding the origins of the concept of the Global South in the humanities. First, it came from Antonio Gramsci, a scholar whose enduring transdisciplinary idea of cultural and political hegemony

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is deeply rooted, if not indispensable, in the analysis of power and domination in the field of media and communication studies. Although Gramsci’s idea was originally explicated in The Southern Question in 1926, it has evolved to become a powerful cartographic metaphor for disenfranchisement emanating from Euro-American modernity and its global capitalist system (Lavender and Mignolo 2011). Second, it follows then that since Antonio Gramsci was Italian, therefore this liberatory concept actually has its historical origins in the North. The origins of the concept from the North have also created analytical possibilities for media scholars to speak of a South in the North and North in the South. However, it is interesting that the Global South has appropriated it from Gramsci and it is increasingly used as a powerful, revolutionary, and even emancipatory concept for rethinking and re-theorizing the complex cultural questions of media, culture, subjectivity, power, agency, and spatiality in the interdiscipline. In Gramsci’s typology, which must of course be understood within the context twentieth-century Italian history and society, the South represented the impoverished Southern region inhabited mostly by peasants living under the yoke of exploitation and oppression by the industrialized North. Northerners perceived themselves as developed, affluent, and better than the South whom they regarded as inferior, primitive, and unsophisticated (Gramsci 1926 trans. Verdiccio 2005). The North-South problematique continues to reverberate strongly into the twenty-first century as an analytic framework of the globally entrenched systemic inequalities and the symbolic power of the West through its media and knowledge economies. In the modern, capitalist, and neoliberal global order, Euro-American modernity continues to reproduce similar stereotypes about the non-Western world that are not only foundational to the epistemic frames of Northern media and cultural theory, but also Western media representational discourses about the Global South. I do not intend to focus on tracing the roots and genealogy of the North/South concept any more than I have done here. My aim here is to explore its critical, analytical, and liberatory potential in the critical project of media and communication studies in the Global South. In the NGO and government sectors, the Global South is often used loosely to refer to the developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. However, the way I use the concept in this book is different and largely influenced by critically and epistemologically conscious scholarship from disparate fields in the humanities and social sciences (Connell 2007; Mignolo 2011; Prashad 2012; Banarjee 2012; Mahler 2018; Santos

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2018). Following these authors, it is clear that as a critical or analytical concept the Global South has long ceased to be used merely as a geographical category that references spatiality, territoriality, or boundaries to characterize people, cultures, media systems, and practices. It is now a complex and multifarious concept whose import in media, communication, and cultural theory can be understood at two levels. First, the Global South is a geo-political imaginary. It is informed by a history of struggle and resistance against imperialism, global capitalism, and all concomitant forms of domination like racism, patriarchy, sexism, and tribalism. In other words, the Global South is a resistance category. It is ‘an entity that has been invented in the struggle and conflicts between imperial global domination and emancipatory and decolonial forces that do not acquiesce with global designs’ (Levander and Mignolo 2011, p. 3). It represents new geo-political alliances against the physical and metaphysical empire ‘against the theft of human dignity and rights, against the undermining of democratic institutions and the promises of modernity’ (Prashad 2012, p. 40). I must stress that the North-South binary within which the Global South is imagined is not in stasis: it is characterized by transnational and global flows—financial, cultural, information, knowledge, and people flows. However, it seems to me that while it is important to acknowledge these flows, we must not overlook the preponderance of an entrenched global transnational capitalistic hegemonic order within which the flows occur and systemic domination obtains. It is also the same order that must inform cultural and political resistance. Indeed, the Global South and Global North now encapsulate fluidity more than ever before. However, the fundamental focus of media and communications theory should not be limited to the global and transnational flows themselves, but extend to the question of who controls the global capitalist networks and their media that continually generate illusions of change, equality, equity, and distributive justice? In other words, the analytical language of cultural flows matters, but what matters even more is the their structure, that is, their capitalist base. Second, the Global South is an epistemological location and epistemic angle for intellectual, ideological, and cultural resistance. It is a pedestal where Southern theory should not only predicate its identity and visibility, but also sharpen itself as a weapon for the South’s collective epistemic, cultural, and economic struggles. As Boaventura Santos observes, the Global South represents epistemologies of the South that

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are the ‘anti-imperial South, the nongeographical South [and] made up of the struggles of numberless populations of the geographical south and north against the domination of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy’ (2018, p. 120). The Global South’s primary goal is epistemic resistance and the recovery of subaltern agencies and freedoms achieved through the decolonization of the mind and cultural and consciousness institutions like the media. It is a zone of the rebirth of a new being who enjoys a critical consciousness about how capitalism, racism, patriarchy, sexism interlock and intersect to oppress people, subvert popular struggles, and recast consumerism as an epitome of civic and political freedoms in the media and academia. The cartographical subversion of the Northern ideological construct of the South as redundant, backward, primitive, and philosophically bankrupt is also important as an ideological project of epistemic resistance. Hence, from this perspective, the Global South can be regarded as a transcendentory counter hegemonic, revolutionary, subaltern, and liberatory concept that aims to liberate and re-humanize the subject across the North/South geographic divide. Because the oppressor and the oppressed both face the real threat of dehumanization, the task of the Global South epistemology is to restore an overriding sense of a collective humanity. To that extent, the Global South is a locus of enunciation against Euro-American global coloniality that is manifest through cultural, economic, and political life worlds of our existence. Let me now discuss both formulations in detail.

The Global South as a Geo-Politico Cultural Imaginary As a geo-political and cultural imaginary, the Global South is a concept that refers to what has become increasingly a ‘post-national’ and ‘deterritorialized’ ‘anti- capitalist struggle’ particularly by those who share the ‘experience of subjugation under contemporary [racial] global capitalism’ (Mahler 2018, p. 1). As a geo-political movement, the Global South is a form of political and cultural consciousness about the location and classification of non-Westerners in the hierarchical power structure of Western modernity. It is a consciousness that distinguishes between EuroAmerican modernity’s rhetoric and reality, racial selection and exclusion,

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home truths and global lies in the manifestation of its global imperial designs. Mignolo’s (2011) explanation below demonstrates why political and critical consciousness is a crucial part of what defines the Global South. He contends that ‘from the perspective of capitalism and [the] expansion of Western values, the “Global South” is the location to be developed economically and liberated from non-democratic regimes’ whereas ‘from the perspective of the emerging political society, the “Global South” is where liberation from Western democratic rhetoric to justify economic take over and cultural management is taking place’ (p. 165). The modern media, whether national or global, have been central in the obfuscation of the reality of the economic exploitation of the South by the North and South in the North. The task for Southern media theory is to unmask the role of the conservative capitalist media monopolies in advancing the project of global coloniality. The Global South rejects modernity’s socio-economic hierarchies that ascribe a Third World status to it. It also rejects the view that it can ‘only be understood in relation [to the technological, industrial, and cultural progress of the] Global North’ (Levander and Mignolo 2011, p. 4). For example, as Willems (2014) observes, the West continues to analyse the cultures and cultural processes of the Global South from a Northern perspective: Instead of understanding the Global South on its own terms, scholarship frequently appreciates the role of media and communication only insofar as it emerges from, represents the negative imprint of, or features the active intervention of the Global North. Such accounts have failed to acknowledge the agency of the Global South in the production, consumption, and circulation of a much richer spectrum of media culture that is not a priori defined in opposition to or in conjunction with media from the Global North. (p. 7)

The Global South’s diverse cultures, identities, and institutions constitute its ontologies that do not derive their worth from the validation by the West. To that extent, the Global South in its geo-political and cultural sense is a social, cultural, and political resistance concept that rejects all negative and racist classifications and cultural stereotypes emanating from the North that are largely associated with colonial modernity. In media and communication studies, the debate on the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) initiated by the McBride

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Commission’s One World Many Voices report in 1980 represents one single historical moment when the so-called Third World unmasked the negative stereotypes as a product of capitalist media corporatization where media technologies privileged the expansion of capitalism and imperialism over ‘a more just world information and communication order’ (McBride 1980). However, in the age of digital networks the Global South is turning media technologies, the very ideological infrastructure of capitalist hegemony against the master. According to Mahler (2018), the antiglobalization movements that demanded globalization from below not only embodied and articulated an anti-capitalist position associated with the Global South, but further served as the praxis of an ‘internationalist vision of transformational solidarity’ through the ‘trans-affective framing of solidarity’ (p. 201). Thus, the new media technologies helped to crystallize the political identity and geo-political solidarities of the Global South, especially those of the South that exists within the North and the Souths of the Global South. The new media landscapes allow for greater networking, mobilization, and advocacy culminating in solidarities that transcend the artificial divides of the North-South binary. Hence, in the age of the empire that is both invisible and deterritorialized, new media technologies have been indispensable in unlocking the agency of the Global South for political and cultural resistance. At the media and communications level, the institutionalization of cultural resistance through vibrant and robust cultural institutions is important to create real geo-culturally centred agency for the Global South that contests not Euro-centred cultural order and its narratives that demonize cultural difference. In the film industry, for example, Bollywood (India) and Nollywood (Nigeria) offer examples of the kind of interventions in the cultural public sphere emerging at the level of the nation-state. However, the analysis of their influence on cultural identities and worldviews should go beyond the institutions to look at the kind of content they produce and whether it is decolonized in terms of not only cultural repertoires, but also the narrative codes and conventions of storytelling. For example, it can be argued that Nollywood and Bollywood would be rendered culturally irrelevant if they reproduced Hollywood media cultures that, while perhaps now familiar to African and Indian audiences, are neither psychologically liberating from the pervasive and pernicious Western stereotypes of the Orient and the

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African, nor deeply rooted in national cultures, worldviews, and aesthetics. This is not to suggest a film industry that is based on a homogenous national culture, but one that thrives from the multiplicity of cultures that translate the word and the world from their centres. Keyan Tomaselli (2003), writing about the problem of homogenizing national culture, addresses this problem in a fairly nuanced way: ‘Culture is a concept which can be manipulated to mean anything essentialist, and the result is that [we] begin tilting at windmills with all sorts of vague charges, cultural prescriptions and high degrees of moralizing. The early anthropological definition[s] used lack specificity, and tend to suggest that cultures are bounded, singular and homogeneous. The term “culture”, used in a static, overgeneralized way becomes essentialistic and something of a dog’s breakfast’ (p. 436). Indeed, following Homi Bhabha the homogenizing of culture means that it is a concept that ‘emerges as a problem, or a problematic, at the point at which there is a loss of meaning in the contestation and articulation of everyday life, between classes, genders, races, nations’ (1994, p. 34). He argues in favour of culture as ‘porous array of intersections’ instead of ‘coherent patterns’ (ibid., p. 34). However, accusations of cultural essentialism must not be used to deny the African, Asian, and Latin American ex/colonial subjects a voice about what they see as a common cultural heritage that unites them in their struggle for cultural freedoms. This is because those kinds of accusations do not only have an undemocratic ring of European or White patronization to them, but are also sometimes unwittingly in service of cultural commodication, global mass culture and global imperial designs and must therefore be rejected by the Global South. In the broadcasting sector, channels such as Aljazeera (Qatar), CCTV (China), and Russia Today (Russia) also produce news and current affairs programmes that provide alternative views to the dominant Western news media and their news frames. These broadcasting interventions are often funded by the state and may work to advance a national interest that may or may not be in sync with the interests of the Global South. It is also important to note that despite a growing awareness of the existence of the Global South from the Global South itself, the nation-state continues to be a central marker of how culture and identity are imagined. As TsanKuo Chang observes: Since the mid-1990s, the proliferation of nation-state-based 24/7 TV news channels has reconfigured the world of global media terrain beyond recognition. Along with such well-established traditional channels as BBC and

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CNN, the rise of Al Jazeera as a formidable voice from the Middle East has been followed by a rush of countries to establish global channels through satellites to present the news from their own national perspectives: China’s CCTV-9 (2000), Russia Today (2005), Iran’s Press TV (2007), Japan’s NHK World TV (2009), Venezuela’s TeleSur (2010), and the CNC World (2010) of China’s Xinhua News Agency. Ranging from the democratic to authoritarian countries, these channels compete at the global level to serve as the voice of the host country and to report the world from its own vantage point. (Chang 2015, p. 32)

The nationalistic broadcasting systems in the geographic South are obviously an important response to the Western domination in international communication and its hegemonic normative characterizations within the field. However, this nationalistic model must transcend the ephemeral jingoistic propaganda models and create a coherent Global South voice based on the internal and organic push for the institutionalization of democracy and human rights in individual countries while at the same time providing resistance to the new modes of cultural and economic imperialism from the Global North. At the level of Southern economic resistance to the Bretton Woods global economic order, the BRICS, albeit a top-down interstate model, offers a good example of the much-needed strategic economic and cultural solidarity in the Global South. Indeed, this kind of South-South co-operation at economic level must not be viewed in isolation from cultural exchanges that build on the already existing cultural flows between, for example, Asia and Africa, Latin America; and between South America and North America as seen from Afro-Latin American or Black Latin American cultural inheritance. BRICS embodies the kind of transcontinental economic solidarity that is also needed in cultural institutions, especially in the media industry so as to create contraflow fortresses for cultural and ideological resistance to the symbolic and colonizing power of Euro-American modernity. However, cultural and economic ‘transformation will not [only] come through the initiatives of the South from above, but… [most favourably from] the South from below’ (Prashad 2012, p. 52). In Africa, for example, this potential for South-South cultural exchange already exists in the often-overlooked Asian cultural and religious influences in many countries North, East, West, and Southern Africa. I have focused a lot on the role of the media technologies and their constitutive role in the Global South. However, this is not to suggest

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that the Global South as a geo-political imaginary is defined by the infrastructure of media technologies. While the Global South is obviously multidimensional, it is first and foremost an ideological and not a technological concept. As Prashad (2012, p. 302) reminds us, the Global South is not a place, it is a project. The Global South is a counterhegemonic project that is ideologically constituted and technologically mediated through new media technologies. It fights against the systemic cultural and socio-economic domination by the Global North, the metropolis of modernity and global coloniality (Altinas 2013). Its centrepiece is not media technologies, but a decolonial epistemology of resistance which stands obstinately counterposed to all matrices of coloniality and imperial designs. If new media technologies have given it a global profile, presence, and mobility, ideology has always constituted it as a geo-political body, a resistance project, a mindset, or an attitude. Those definitions of the Global South that overemphasize the role of media technologies as the heart and soul of the new geo-political imaginary, potentially render the concept analytically useless and meaningless. As Levander and Mignolo (2011) aptly put it, the ‘Global South is a place where decolonial emancipations are taking place and where new horizons of life are emerging’ (p. 5). It is a place where alternative modernities are being fashioned and new humanity and thinking created. Theoretically, the Global South is characterized by an overarching decolonial attitude that is anchored on decolonial love. Decolonial love is symbolized by the transformative struggle, a praxis for the rehumanization of the subject and the liberation of not just the oppressed, but the oppressor as well. This attitude and this love automatically set it at odds with modernity because modernity is a project of capitalist exploitation, dehumanization, dearth, and death (Mignolo 2011). Consequently, the Global South is ‘a place of struggles between, on the one hand, the rhetoric of modernity and modernisation together with the logic of coloniality and domination, and on the other hand, the struggle for independent thought and decolonial privilege’ (Levander and Mignolo 2011, p. 4). It is important to state where the Global South as a geo-political imaginary places the critical questions of colonial difference, history, and race in its resistance struggles and the new transnational solidarities. Do these factors fall away with the rise of virtual geographies and decentred localities in the struggle? I think these factors are still indispensable not just to the meaning of the Global South, but also the content and essence of its

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political and cultural struggles. The Global South is a product of strategic and historical alliances. Most of these alliances are born out of connected histories and shared experiences of slavery, colonial pain, disenfranchisement, and disillusionment not just with contemporary globalization, but coloniality as logic and driver of capitalism. As a geo-political configuration, the Global South partly emerges out of the tricontinentalist framework of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Tricontinentalism is historically rooted in the decolonization, anti-capitalist, and anti-cold war politics of the Non-Aligned Movement (1961), the Bandug Conference (1955), and Tricontinental Conference (1966) (Prashad 2012; Mahler 2018). This history and memory are not only foundational to the Global South, but also dovetail perfectly well with ‘efforts to revise prior antiimperialisms into a global vision of resistance’ (Mahler 2018, p. 200). As Mahler further argues the attempt of ‘erasure of tricontinentalism’ from the discourse of the Global South is an affront to the place of memory and history as resources that the Global South needs to maintain the old traditional alliances that are rooted in the reality of connected histories and a sense of a common fate and destiny in global coloniality. From this perspective, history puts us face to face with the stubborn questions of colonial difference, race and capitalist exploitation of the South that cannot suddenly disappear because of the new emerging strategic alliances that transcend social and geographical divides. While there is a temptation to romanticize the new transnational solidarities to the point of overlooking history, race, and colonial difference, the three live as enduring signposts of social experience and memory and indelible imprints of the brutalities of colonialism and capitalism in the South. The view that race and colonial difference do not matter in the new trans-affective solidarities in the Global South does not mean the end of history, colonial difference, and race in the oppressor-oppressed binary. While putting aside race as a biological trait in the new political imaginary is progressive, it does not mean discarding our understanding of race and racism as a fundamental and constitutive part of the hierarchies and classifications created by Western modernity. Similarly putting aside race and colonial difference does not, as Mignolo and Vazquez (2013) would probably advise, mean the same thing as forgetting the ‘colonial wound’ and by extension, the ‘colonial wounder’. Unless you are a mercenary, no struggle should be fought outside a people’s history and a people’ s memory. This is why in Decolonising the Mind, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (1987) reminds us that ‘if we [in the Global South] are to do anything

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about our individual and collective being today, then we have to coldly and consciously look at what imperialism has been doing to us and to our view of ourselves in the universe’ (p. 88). As a critical concept that restores the political agency of the oppressed, the North-South concept does not signify the rigid classifications of geography. Its strength lies in its fluidity and elasticity that allow the media scholar to see overlaps and entanglements of the North in the South and South in the North. The global dis/order has no distinct and well-structured cultural and epistemic centres and margins as such, but one increasingly a dynamic structure where the centres exist in the margins just as margins exist in the centres. Although the NorthSouth categories are observable within the geographic Global North and the geographic Global South, they exist in asymmetry, unequal footing, not on similar cityscapes, and are products of divergent histories of the conqueror and the conquered. At best, such fluidities and overlaps merely unmask ‘how power [in the deterritorialized empire] operates, how people experience it, and how it might be resisted or redirected’ (Trefzer et al. 2014, p. 2). The conceptual fluidity actually ‘[sharpens] and deepens…our understanding of the [framework] as responsive to the [variegated] nuances of place and history’ (pp. 1–5). In other words, the explanatory power of the North-South framework can be seen through its ability to connect seemingly disparate localities separated by time and space and critique their agency in cultural, political, and economic counterhegemonic struggles. The concept is good for tracking pervasive, but invisible power and domination in media and society in the age of the decentred empire (Hardt and Negri 2000). In that vein, the concept also helps media and communication studies to be able to transcend the parochial area studies approaches in the analysis of power. Power and domination are everywhere whether in the geographic North or South, but so is the impulse for resistance that is increasingly transnational and concerted.

The Global South as an Epistemic Angle or Worldview As a geo-political imaginary, the Global South is directly connected to the existence of the South as an epistemic position or angle. While the geo-political South represents a fluid, entangled, complex, and dynamic geo-cultural and political structure of resistance to Western centred and

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institutionalized global coloniality, the epistemological South represents its bedrock or ideological foundation that supports and legitimates the structure and its agency as a resistance imaginary. To that end, in media and communication studies, the Global South can be viewed as an epistemic angle for a kind of media analysis, cultural analysis, and critical theory that produces political and intellectual resources for subaltern resistance. It is an epistemology of resistance that provides for a continuous rethinking of the moral and philosophical foundations for a revolutionary praxis for the freedom of oppressed places and peoples that are held captive by colonial modernity. Beyond the social analysis, it is an episteme of resistance to the coloniality of bourgeoisie media systems and a re-imagining of media as spaces for cultural freedoms and not the commodification of culture. This counterhegemonic culture of resistance is predicated on alternate knowledges and alternate ways of knowing. As an epistemic angle and position, the Global South ‘is about the production and validation of knowledges [cultures, values, and histories], anchored in the experiences of resistance of all those…that have systematically suffered injustice, oppression, and destruction caused by capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy’ (Santos 2018, p. 1). It is an epistemology that not only provides moral and ideological justification to the diverse struggles of the colonial subaltern, but also brings clarity to the North-South geo-political entanglements. It must show that despite the North-South geo-political and cultural entanglements, ‘knowledge is [still] controlled by history, actors, and institutions located in the North and in the West’ (Levander and Mignolo 2011, p. 4). This is the essence of the Southern epistemology, the ability to use ‘power conscious readings of time and space’ (Tefzer et al. 2014, p. 1). It is characterized by a constant reflection on the dominant knowledge and cultural order and its ever-changing chameleon-like character. As a epistemology, the Global South represents the return of the ontologies of the peripheralized knowledge bodies of Africa, Asia, and Latin America in media and communication studies. This means the advent of a new, geographically, socially, and historically grounded kind of Southern scholarship that thinks about the self, first and foremost, from the South as its locus of enunciation. Indeed, ‘despite its limitations, the term the “Global South” offers [a] great potential to relocate debates [and theory] from the centre to the periphery, and from deified

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white bodies of the North to the dismembered and discounted bodies of the South’ (Willems 2014, p. 7, emphasis added). Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (1993) raised a similar view more than two decades ago in his book Moving the Centre. He argued that Africa, Asia, and Latin America must move their centres of culture, knowledge, and worldviews from the North to the South. Following Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, media and communication studies ‘must move the centre from its assumed location in the West to a multiplicity of spheres in all the cultures of the world’ (p. 17). However, this cannot be easy to achieve with a very Westernized Global South academy that engages in recitational and regurgitative scholarship of apemanship. As Valentin Mudimbe usefully reminded us years ago, ‘Some Africans… have been forcibly domesticated, intellectually speaking. In principle they…easily function in an orthodox manner within the consecrated field of [Western] normative discourses of the [colonial social sciences]’ (1988, p. 40). Those that have recovered their agency to critique Eurocentrism have done so not because of, but in spite of the domesticating and colonizing power of the Western education they received. They have relied on ‘a kind of intellectual reflex [that] began to question [the self] and challenge the evaluative scale of both scientific processes of examination and the ideological presuppositions of tasks in the social sciences’ (p. 40). As an epistemology of resistance, the Global South requires a robust, creative, organic, and revolutionary scholarship that can keep pace with the ever-changing nature of coloniality, even in the humanities and social sciences where media and communication studies are deeply rooted. Hence, Santos (2018) argues that the Global South as an epistemic position emerges from and is defined and shaped by resistance and struggle. As long as the everyday structural conditions of struggle persist, so must the southern decolonial academic project that interprets struggle and provides insight to the changing terrain of coloniality not only in the media and cultural domains, but also other spheres of social life. As such, we can also think of the Global South as an ‘experiential epistemology’ in the sense that ‘its aim is not to study knowledge as defined and prescribed by the West ’ but ‘to identify and valorize that which often does not count as knowledge in the light of dominant epistemologies of the West’ (p. 2, emphasis added). In other words, the Global South denotes struggle and resistance epistemologies that are also produced by

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suppressed subaltern knowledge systems that refuse to die because colonial modernity lives. These are epistemologies of defiance that exist in direct and deliberate resistance to those imposed by the West. The Global South epistemology therefore not only rejects the false Eurocentric intellectual hierarchies, but also is a vantage point to recalibrate and formulate Southern media and cultural theories and re-awaken a radical cultural critique against misrepresentations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. These representations are not attributable to bad journalism practices by Western journalists, but are confirmative of a ready-made or pre-existing psycho-cultural frame for demonizing the non-West as the West’s way of self-idolatry and moral justification.

What Are Epistemic and Ideological Turns in Media and Communication Studies? It is important to address conceptual issues about turns since this is also a central concept of this book. What exactly are turns and how can we characterize them in this field? What is the relationship between turns and paradigms? Closely interwoven with that is the question of ideological turns versus epistemic turns in media and communication studies. Are the two different or similar? What constitutes the differences or similarities, if any? While there is need for clarity around these questions, there is something inherently foolish in trying to characterize turns in academic disciplines. This is because in real life away from the pages of the books, turns are not rigid ideological or epistemic pathways with a clear beginning and ending. On the contrary, they tend to be fluid and sometimes have no clear breaking point or rapture. They can also be resurgent, iterative, overlapping, and sometimes there can be micro-turns within macro turns. What follows then is just an effort to shed light on conceptual issues than a prescription of rigid categories and classifications of turns. In the broad area of the humanities, the word turns has been used to refer to the ‘reconfigurations’, ‘transformations’ or ‘shifts in orientation’ in ‘critical thought’ and ‘modes of analysis’ of a discipline (Bonnell and Hunt 1999; Bachmann-Medick 2016). Turns tend to represent ‘new directions’ informed by new theoretical ideas and modes of analysis. Hence, it follows that turns can be methodological, ideological, or even epistemological. A new turn often comes bequeathed with its own ways of reading the word and the world encapsulated in its new way of

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doing things. Thomas Kunh (1972) draws important distinctions between turns and paradigms although these tend to be conflated in everyday language in academic corridors. Kuhn characterized paradigms as models of scientific explanation. He situated paradigms within the logic of natural sciences and argued that ‘accepted examples of actual scientific practice…include[d] law, theory, application, and instrumentation’ (p. 10). It is important to note that Kuhn regarded Marxism, classical economics, and the other so-called social science theories as constituting a ‘science’. They represented explanatory paradigms whose logic was not different from that of the natural and physical sciences because they ‘claimed for themselves a special purchase on understanding the mainsprings, if not the laws of social life’ (Bonnell and Hunt 1999, p. 1). Consequently, most of the epistemic/ideological turns in the humanities broke away from the positivist and historical materialist paradigms. These turns were generally hermeneutic and interpretive in nature. Let me now move to the definitions of the ideological turns and epistemic turns and their differences. Ideological turns can be understood as new directions in the interpretation of a social or academic problem based on the new modes of analysis that theorize problems in ways that are fundamentally revealing and refreshing. Ideological turns can be inspired by a new radical idea or theory or newer methods of analysis, although they tend to remain loyal and less disruptive to their epistemological base in terms of the underlying beliefs of a knowledge order or knowledge body. In other words, modes of analysis in ideological turns ‘might differ from what came before, but the ends and the presuppositions of enquiry [remain] much the same’ (Bonnell and Hunt 1999, p. 1). In a sense, ideological turns therefore represent some sort of a ‘dispute within an epistemic/academic community rather than a rupture within it’ (Chibber 2013, p. 7). This is why some scholars have sarcastically argued that ideological turns are sometimes mere ‘intellectual fashions’ or ‘intellectual trends’ (ibid., p. 2) that sometimes do not signal anything substantive apart from mere differences in ‘rhetorical trope’ ‘intellectual movement’ (Klein 2005) or ‘cognitive frames’ (Strydom 2009). Epistemic turns must be understood within the context of epistemology, knowledge order, or knowledge body. Since epistemology is about ‘knowledge: its nature, requirements, and limitations’ or its ‘source or basis’ (Bon Jour 2009, pp. 1–4), then epistemic turns tend to indicate new directions, or better still, ruptures in the theory of knowing,

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accepted truisms, or established ‘truths’ (Rescher 2003). Unlike ideological turns, epistemic turns symbolize a revolutionary break with an established theory of knowledge. They also tend to be epochal and iconic in the sense of giving birth to a paradigm shift in terms of the change of mindsets and worldviews. It follows therefore that epistemic turns are superior to ideological turns since they do not just contest the shades of emphasis in ideas, methods, or analysis, but actually question an entire knowledge order, resist it, tear it down, and reject it. Epistemic turns are by their very nature an invitation to unthink or unlearn a knowledge order or knowledge body. They are a form of ‘metaknowledge, the development of higherorder knowledge about [established] knowledge [systems]’ (Rescher 2003, p. 15). Epistemic turns actually form the base for ideological turns, an intellectual space where thinkers compete to think, but only within the ascribed rules in a field whose boundary has already been sanctioned by epistemology. Below, I discuss the epistemic and ideological terms from the epistemic North and this is followed by those that I have characterized as merging from the epistemic South. I described them as turns centred in the epistemic North or South for the simple reasons that epistemologies, like theories and ideas do travel. This has certainly intensified with the advent of globalization. However, in the discoursal entanglement of epistemologies, a mosaic of sorts, epistemologies still have a home, their geo-cultural roots that we can describe as their locus of enunciation. At their home or base, epistemologies can still be traceable to micro-social and epistemic locations of race/ethnicity/class/gender/spatiality/sexuality, that form their bedrock. They are represented by social movements or intellectual movements that are located in a particular society, history, culture, and geography. As such to analyse these turns is to analyse the thinking of social movements of intellectuals of specific societies in the Global North or the Global South.

Epistemic/Ideological Turns Centred in the Global North Although media and communication studies are considered relatively young compared to other disciplines in the humanities, the field is a product of cross-disciplinary fertilization. It is located in the very fertile intersections of the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Consequently,

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all the theoretical and methodological turning points experienced in various disciplines in the humanities have also inevitably swept through the field because of its interdisciplinarity. There are obviously many turns in the humanities that have not only impacted media and communication studies, but have also constituted the building blocks in the development of Western critical theory in which the field is enmeshed. The turns that are of interest in this book are those that had a farreaching effect in the interdiscipline. These are the cultural/linguistic turn and ethnographic turn: the turns that not only turned the positivist and social-scientific approaches topsy-turvy, but also rendered them analytically blunt. It is important, however, to keep in mind that media and communication studies have experienced many other turns. These comprise, in no particular order, the performative turn, iconic turn, technological turn, creativity turn, and even the so-called post-human turn (Kubicki 2015; Gauntlett 2007). Some of these turns are by definition micro-turns because they offer very little variation from the major or macro epistemological or ideological turns in disciplines. However, before I discuss the cultural/linguistic and ethnographic turns, it is important to explain the collapse of the positivist and the historical-economistic paradigms that provided the context for the new turns. Positivism has always been anchored on the claim of scientific knowledge and facticity as the only sources of authoritative knowledge. In the humanities, the cultural/linguistic and ethnographic turns were informed by the historical and social changes of the Enlightenment period between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Enlightenment’s core ideological and social values comprised progress, emancipation, positivism, and reason. Thus, the epistemic and ideological turns developed from the social and historical contradictions of the epoch. For example, enlightenment gave birth to a knowing subject who believed in the progressive power of secular reason and unbridled positivism as a source of universal knowledge (Mignolo 2011). However, despite claims of rationality and progress, the knowing subject still found himself in doubt about the explanatory power of their newly found wisdom that was based on secular reasoning. That pessimism on the emancipatory power of rationality would later find expression in the 1950s in Western academy through such works as the Frankfurt School’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) and One-Dimensional Man (1964), among others. In academy, the natural sciences were also emasculated in spectacular ways. Social constructionism viewed sciences as a product of society

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and not the other way around. Sciences could be read simply as socially contingent and a knowledge system that is shaped by economic and political power relations in society. In the United States, for example, the Cold War more than corroborated such claims. The so-called natural sciences always followed the parochial military interests of the American state. Therefore, the claims of the progressive or emancipatory power of the sciences were simply ideological. As Margaret Jacobs (1999, p. 96) aptly sums it, the ‘social- not the natural- [controls the scientist’s] hand in the game of scientific inquiry’. This critique of the natural sciences not only exposed the hidden hands of the state and the market, but more significantly showed that the natural sciences were socially and historically shaped. Following the ‘effacement of nature’s role in science’, Jacobs further argues, ‘came a disinterest in trying to uncover, by comparative analysis, historical forces- the macro-narrative structure of larger structures, [such as] social systems and institutions’ (p. 97). The pessimism around the social-scientific paradigms was indeed unstoppable. In the United States, Hayden White’s Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973) was among the seminal texts that criticized societal explanations that overprivileged history and economy-based approaches. Generally, all turns therefore always epitomized deep pessimism and dilemmas in scientific thought. At best turns signalled an impending ideological crisis or at worst spawned a real ‘collapse of explanatory paradigms’ (Bonnell and Hunt 1999, p. 7). Doris Bachman-Medick (2016), a German literary and cultural theorist, also emphasizes this point: ‘As regards the historicizing and contextualization of the…turns, an important role was initially played by the fact that these turns came to replace scientistic, positivist and economistic explanations of the social world’ (p. 7). Where Enlightenment’s orthodox explanations of science, positivism, or analytic philosophy failed to explain away problems that constituted the ever-shifting and evolving question of the social, turns were born as a response to a crisis in the arena of ideas. Thus, the ethnographic, cultural, linguistic turns emerged as oppositional ideologies that imagined a culture-centric theoretical and methodological cannon for social analysis. They were ideological in the sense that while they contested positivism, they did not necessarily amount to an epistemic rapture but a mere shift from the social-scientific explanatory paradigms to hermeneutics and interpretivism. Two points are particularly

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important in the discussion of the turns especially in the context of the Global South. First, all the three turns are rooted in the Global North in terms of their ontological and epistemological foundation. Their subsequent theories travelled to the Global South via colonial and missionary education through some of the South’s oldest colonial universities like Popayan, Columbia (1774), Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone (1827), and Imperial Capital University, China (1898). This observation is a very important point for media scholars whose locus of enunciation and identification is the Global South. Second, the positivist or empiricist paradigm as a Northern epistemology still remains dominant in the academies of the North and the South. Although there is a general consensus that it has been on the decline in society and academy since the twentieth century, it still remains very dominant as expressed through modernist, functionalist, utilitarian, and quantitative approaches to the study of media and society. As a dominant paradigm, positivism is characterized by the modernization thesis that advances the myths of the panacea of scientificism, technocentrism, and the evolutionary development of society. In media and communication studies, positivism is typified by an academic project that has a blind spot to the partisan nature of knowledge in pursuit of the ‘scientific’ truths derived from the empirical communication and sociological approaches. It is an epistemology that has produced a kind of media and communication studies that represents an ‘atheoretical, ossified, system of delivering functional communication in the interests of dominant social and economic powers’ (Hardt 1992, p. xv). In North America, for example, early communication research was embedded on corporate interests and government interests as scholars often researched the psychological behaviour of audiences in relation to the effects of propaganda films and advertisements. Hardt further observes that ‘by succumbing to a scientific approach, the identity of communication research merged into a dominant structure of society where it was absorbed in the reproduction of power and the maintenance of the economic system and in the language of domination and lost its ability to recognise history’ (p. 7). Indeed, scholars such as Everett Rogers and Wilbur Schramm believed that media and communication are central to the modernization agenda (Lee 2015; Willems 2014). This influence was not just limited to the North, it also spread to the South where today it finds unfettered expression in programmes that still identify using the antiquated and anachronistic disciplinary tags of Mass communication

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and Communication science. Thus, the positivist paradigm perpetuated an empiricist, utilitarian, and functionalist conceptualization of the interdiscipline in a way that always advanced market and state interests in the field on both sides of the North-South divide. However, there was always some resistance from culturalist epistemologies. While this tended to be rather erratic in the Global South because of a myriad of factors, in the Global North resistance formations to the paradigm were more robust and crystallized in the form of the cultural, linguistic turn and ethnographic turn.

The Cultural/Linguistic Turn The cultural/linguistic turn, a shift that threw culture and language right into the centre of critical analysis, apparently became more visible in the late twentieth century. In media and communication studies, scholars have equated the cultural/linguistic turn with the return of resistance agency because it represented a break from the structuralist approaches of positivism and other explanatory paradigms that privileged the superiority of social structure (Schechner 1987; Kubicki 2015). In sociological analysis, the pervasiveness of structure in society was succinctly captured through the Weberian metaphor of the ‘iron cage’ which pointed to the nightmares of social stratification and bureaucratization by modernity and capitalism. These had a trampling effect on the individual or subject culminating in a deep-seated sense of disenfranchisement. The structuralist approaches also characterized the approaches of the Frankfurt school in their critique of cultural commodification and the rise of mass cultures. The Frankfurt School also created an overbearing sense of hopelessness and entrapment of the subject in structure. The mass society was itself a space of alienation of the subject characterized by the collapse of traditional cultures that epitomized phatic communion and bonds. The cultural linguistic turn subverted this assumed omnipotence and omnipresence of structure from structuralist approaches. Buoyed by the struggles of civil rights movement and feminist movement especially in America, the cultural/linguistic turn represented a quest for a more nuanced and better understanding of resistance agencies that could counter the essentialist and apocalyptic prophecies of the death of the conscious subject. Nowhere was the cultural/linguistic turn so well captured than in the groundbreaking book by Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). In the irresistible popular quote that is cited almost by every reader of his book, the cultural anthropologist

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argued that ‘man [was] an animal suspended in the webs of significance he himself span’ and that he (i.e. Clifford) ‘took culture to be those webs, and analysis of it to be there not as an experimental science in search of a law, but an interpretive one in serve of a meaning’ (Geertz 1973, p. 5). This statement symbolized the fall of the paradigms, the opening up of the spaces for meaning-making, and the subsequent re-awakening of popular agency. For media and communication studies, the cultural/linguistic turn became essentially a cultural and interpretive turn because language and culture became the epicentre of social analysis. The turn to language and culture was in-itself, a historic turn from the grand or master narratives of Marxism and other structuralist approaches. Perhaps better still, it represented an epistemic rapture of sorts that signalled the rise of a new analytic turn based on cultural analysis and semiology. Here, ‘symbols, rituals, events, historical artefacts, social arrangements, and belief systems were designated as texts to be interrogated for their semiotic structure, that is, their internal consistency as part of meaning’ (Bonnell and Hunt 1999, p. 3). Yet the cultural/linguistic turn was also a performative turn in the sense that ‘the importance of the expressive dimension of actions and events that are actions…[was perceived to be] the practical aspect of the production of cultural meanings and experiences’ (Kubicki 2015, p. 13). Unlike structure, language and culture were perceived as an open-ended and ‘change-oriented process[es]’, of the discovery and regeneration of society and the self (see Schechner 1987, p. 66). The superficiality of the North-South dichotomy also played itself out during the cultural/linguistic turn. For example, the civil rights movement and women’s movements waged the anti-racist struggles of the Global South within the Global North. Later, the seeds of transnational solidarity between the South in the North and the Souths of the geographic South found expression in the visits to Africa by some of the radical civil rights movement leaders like William DuBois, Martin Luther (Junior), and Malcom X, who admired the decolonialization processes there. In media and communication studies, the cultural/linguistic turn became even more grounded with the advent of poststructuralism which regarded language as mediating both culture and knowledge. Following postmodernists like Foucault and Derrida ‘poststructuralists… insisted that shared discourses (or cultures) so utterly permeate our perception of reality as to make any supposed scientific explanation of social life simply

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an exercise in collective fictionalization or mythmaking: we can only elaborate on our presuppositions, in this view; [but] we cannot arrive at any objective, freestanding truth’ (Bonnell and Hunt 1999, p. 9). In other words, social structure did not and could not precede culture and critical consciousness and awareness. Instead, ‘social categories came into being through [cultural and linguistic] expressions and representations’ (p. 9). If there was one major thing the cultural/linguistic turn had done through the spread of its new ideas, it was the restoration of the human agency for political and cultural resistance.

The Ethnographic Turn In media and communication studies, the ethnographic turn is largely associated with the discipline of anthropology. As a young scholar in media and communication studies in Africa, I remember reading the very unflattering works of Bronislaw Malinowski about his fieldwork mostly conducted in the so-called ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ communities in the continent. Indeed, the history of anthropology does conjure up the sad memories of the dehumanizing colonial discourses about the South. However, historically speaking, within the interdiscipline, the ethnographic turn was occasioned by a dissatisfaction with the media effects tradition that viewed audiences as ‘passive cultural dupes’. At the peak of the effects theories in the 1930s, the Chicago School in the United States was among the early leading critics of the effects tradition. Using symbolic interactionism, they regarded meaning as not necessarily embedded in the signal, but ‘as arising in the process of interaction between people’ and ‘as social products [or] creations that are formed in and through the defining activities of people as they interact’ (Blumer 1986, pp. 4–5). Laying the paradigmatic foundation for ethnographic studies, the Chicago School explored the interactive contexts of meaning-making using film audiences in the United States. Symbolic interactionism not only had a profound impact on the development of ethnography as we know it, but also influenced the new directions towards a semiotic shift leading to the birth of symbolic ethnography several decades later (Geertz 1973). The 1940s were characterized by a deepening pessimism with the effects tradition. In media and communication studies, scholars like Denis McQuail and others rethink the media effects debates in terms of audience needs and their uses of the media. It was the audiences who impacted the media and not always the other way around. However, it was not

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until the 1960s that there was a clear ethnographic turn which reinforced the active audience thesis and advanced the view that audiences were always situated interpreters of media. Class, race, and gender were critical in the understanding of the complex relation between media and audiences. The ethnographic turn situated the audience and reception theory within cultural contexts of media consumption in which media like television were supposed to be studied in their natural contexts of family viewing (Morley 1980; Lull 1980; Lindlof 1988). In so doing, the ethnographic turn reconsidered the questions of cultural agency and interpretative capabilities of audiences. Here again, we see the end of structuralist and essentialist conceptions of the relationship between media and audiences, thus opening room for agency that would later not only typify media and communication studies, but ethnic studies, critical race studies, and gender and feminist studies. Indeed, ethnography developed from the fundamental shift and belief that the ‘social [was] always actively constructed by the living subjects’ (Radway 1988, p. 373). As such, the cultural contexts of meaning-making were very important in any communication processes. In the 1960s in Britain, the ethnographic turn enjoyed more nuanced expression through the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Stuart Hall’s popular Encoding/Decoding model in many ways modified earlier arguments to further demonstrate how the context and social backgrounds of audiences were critical cultural repertoires in meaning-making processes. In the 1980s, David Morley’s Nationwide project revisited the issue of social position. For example, he argued that even though class mattered, people in a similar class position could still interpret the same text differently because texts were inherently polysemous. Although ethnography in media and communication studies continues to change today, it remains anchored in the methods that prioritize interaction and conversations with audiences in their cultural contexts. The concepts of everyday culture and interpretive communities undergird ethnography. Both have acted as a ‘catalyst that has facilitated the “ethnographic turn” in media studies’ and they are now ‘threatening to write the media as the focus of research, out of existence’ (Schroder 1994, p. 338). The interpretive turn gave impetus to cultural studies and its reduction of everything to a text. The metaphor of culture as a text in media and critical communication studies was variously expressed through many of its sub-fields: ‘technology as text’ (media technology studies), ‘landscapes as texts’ (cultural geography studies), and ‘organisations as texts’ (institutional

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studies of the media). Ethnography did not just mean the rise in interpretive methodologies, but also the return of ontology in critical media and communication studies. Methodologically, ethnographic fieldwork with its popular ‘thick descriptions’ gained credence. Yet present-day ethnography in other fields of cultural analysis such as ethnic studies, gender studies, and critical race studies has been strategic in the re-awakening of the previously silenced voices that have only been read through the prism of rigid social structures. In these disciplines it is increasingly used in the study of the ‘indigenous…the subaltern, the disadvantaged’ or ‘people who [stand] as some sort of the ‘other’ to the well-educated and well-resourced Westerners’ (Madden 2010, p. 1). Just as I argued about the cultural/linguistic turn, ethnography also amounted to the recognition and restoration of subaltern agency. It continued the contestation of structuralist paradigms in the humanities.

Turns from the Global South The epistemic and ideological turns from the Global South are by definition resistance epistemologies because they emerge out of histories of struggle. On the one hand, they help the Global South to unthink the North’s dehumanizing racial and cultural stereotypes and unlearn its pernicious ideological prescriptions that have kept the South in subservience. On the other hand, these epistemologies empower the South to rethink the strategic ideological and political alternatives to a kaleidoscopic modernity and mutating capitalism. It’s a struggle of simultaneity: a praxis that constantly requires interpretation and reinterpretation, formulation and re-formulation. We ‘must change the world while constantly reinterpreting it; as much as change itself’ and ‘the constant reinterpretation of the world can only be possible in the context of struggle’ (Santos 2018, p. viii). Indeed, from slavery, colonialism, and other newer forms of colonialism that are embedded in neoliberal fundamentalism, the Global South has always struggled to wrestle free from modernity’s deathly albatross and the epistemic, cultural, political, and economic noose. The epistemologies of the South are deeply ideological but also experiential. They are socially and historical shaped and arise from the lived experiences of political, economic, somatic, and spiritual dismembering of the oppressed. They epitomize the natural human survival impulse to resist

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domination and oppression. To that end, the ideological and epistemological turns of the South ‘are knowledges that emerge from social and political struggles and cannot be separated from such struggles. They are not therefore epistemologies in the conventional sense of the word’ (Santos 2018, p. 2). Their ‘aim is not to study knowledge [as such]’ but ‘to identify and valorize that which often does not appear as knowledge in the light of dominant epistemologies ’ (p. 2, emphasis added). It is important to stress the substance of this statement. Santos is not saying that Southern epistemologies do not constitute knowledge, but that they don’t appear as knowledge primarily to the Global North. To the North, Southern epistemologies represent ‘some such turn of mind [that] is adamantly opposed to scientific thinking and technological orientation, [that] is only fit to wallow in magic’ (Kebede 2009, p. 3). Southern epistemologies are therefore deemed irrational and illogical by the North. This neurosis extends to the colonial subject in the Global South who begins to view local knowledge, culture, and wisdom as a ‘wasteland of none-achievement [that forces] them to want to distance themselves from that wasteland’ (Wa Thiong’o 1986, p. 3). Yet the reality is that Southern epistemologies actually comprise all the repressed and silenced knowledges of the Global South, including most significantly those that have been grotesquely dubbed ‘indigenous knowledges’ as if to imply a hyper-locality that is immobile, non-transcendental, and nontransferable. The valorization alluded to by Santos is, however, not a blind fundamentalist valorization of the local over the global, indigenous over the endogenous, traditional over the modern, but one that locates knowledge as a weapon of revolutionary struggle against domination. In the pursuit of human freedom, Southern epistemologies are trans-local and transdisciplinary seeking on the main, the freedom of the colonial subaltern from not just the empire, but also themselves. The epistemologies of the South are many and variegated. Some are in reality born out of the entangled histories of the North and the South. These epistemologies stand as an obstinate question mark to scholars who believe in the rigidity of the North-South binaries. In the entanglement of the North and the South, the silenced and oppressed South in the geographic North and the oppressed South in the geographic South have had to discover each other to give birth to the new Global South as a political and epistemic imaginary (see Wang 2011; Asante et al. 2008; Bush 2009).

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This is in spite of the ideological and geo-political walls of separation from global coloniality and imperialism. Here, we can talk about the Black Marxist thought as epitomized by W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Leopold Senghor, and others of Asian and Latin American extraction. Again, we can also talk about Garveyism, Negritudism, Black Feminism, Afrocentrism, Africanity, and Asiacentrism (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2015; Bardan and Orbe 2012). The North and the South are therefore not mutually exclusive. All this means there is need to move from the artificial and static binaries of the North-South, ‘to an understanding of the overlaps between centers and peripheries that goes beyond assumptions of fixed rigid differences’ (Bachmann-Medick 2016, p. 139). However, what characterizes all of the Southern epistemologies is their desire to resist the empire, to talk back to empire, and if needs be even to defy the empire in all its formations be they political, economic, technological, academic, cultural, and spiritual. From the rich basket of Southern epistemologies, I want to discuss the following ideological or epistemic turns that dovetail neatly into the decolonial arguments of this book. These are the Afrocentric turn, the Afropolitan turn, and the postcolonial turn. Most of these turns are epistemic strands of the resistance struggles that are now crystalizing around decoloniality. My discussion of the turns is not by any means exhaustive, but introductory seeking more to emphasize their social, cultural, and critical agencies as epistemologies of the South.

Afrocentric Turn Afrocentrism is a fairly well-known theory in the academic circles of the humanities in the Global South and the Global North, especially in North America. Although not to be conflated with Pan-Africanism, it is generally considered to be a Pan-Africanist theory that ‘provides a moral as well as an intellectual location that posits Africans as the subjects rather than as objects of history’ (Asante 1998a, p. xiii, also see Asante 1980; Hamlet 1998; Monteiro-Ferreira 2014). The theory arguably originated sometime between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries mainly from Black African intellectuals in Africa and the diaspora. However, there are scholars who view it as a more recent phenomenon (Bay 2000). Whatever the case is about the time of its origins, it is important to note that both its exponents and critics trace its origins to the cultural resistance struggles against Anglo-American cultural and ideological dominance of the

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Black people in Africa, North America, and the Caribbean. As a Southern episteme, it is a theory that seeks to restore the cultural agency of Black people that was broken by slavery, colonialism, and racism. In the age of globalization and the deification of consumerism as a pastime, that agency continues to be neutralized in various ways, including through a pervasive media and mass culture. While critics of Afrocentrism are quick to reduce it to moments of belligerent ‘black cultural nationalism’ or the parochial ‘epistemic counter racism’, and a strategic ‘counter mythology’ (see Mbembe and Balakrishman 2016), Afrocentricity is not only historically and culturally informed, but is also idealistic and transcendental in the sense of psycho-therapy and spirituality (Hamlet 1998; Myers 1998). It is holistic and offers no apologies about the cultural and spiritual inheritance of African values and beliefs by modern Africans. The theory implies that Africans must also Africanize modernity instead of modernity always modernizing Africans, which in reality amounts to their Westernization. It is argued that the African—whether local or diasporic—must sit at the national and global tables of multiculturalism not as a half European, but a ‘complete’ African who is a culturally conscious and centred being (Asante 1998a). As a counter mythology, Afrocentrism prioritizes decolonial healing especially for blacks as a people who have been wounded by history. As a mythology, its role is not necessarily to deliver compelling empirical and objective facts about the common universal traits of African cultures as implied by Mia Bay (2000). As a myth-making ideology, Afrocentrism serves to imagine, represent, and present cultural myths that conscientize and reawaken a sense of African subjectivity and African being. Afrocentrism is in pursuit of cultural agency and not cultural purity. Consequently, it has constructed a historically informed cultural alternative that represents the much-needed wellsprings of social hope and ideological resistance (Diop 1974). The Eurocentrism and Western values that have always served as universal standards for the life of the nonWestern subject are decentred and replaced with ‘African ideals [that are placed] at the centre of any analysis that involves African culture and behaviour’ (Asante 1998a, p. 2). In media and communication studies, this means a prioritization of theoretical and methodological strategies that take into account African ethnologies of a given people in a given space and time. The Afrocentric theory and method also studies how social ethnologies feed into a tapestry of diverse media cultures, folklore,

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rituals, and legends that are rooted in imagined commonalities in African culture. According to Asante (1998b, p. viii), a scholar who is the doyen of the theory, Afrocentric thinking rests on four major pillars that constitute its main areas of interest: the cosmological, axiological, epistemological, and aesthetics. The ‘cosmological deals with [the metaphysics of the universe, the relationship between the material and spiritual], and general fields of experience and behavior; the axiological answers the questions of values; the epistemological…concerns issues of proof and methods of knowing; and the aesthetic area of inquiry asks the questions that deal with the good and the beautiful’ (p. viii). Thus as a critical theory and a method, it is clear that Afrocentrism has diverse concerns that are underpinned by a culture-centric framework for societies and their symbolic or cultural production processes. It is by all accounts a cultural turn, which has a clear ideology and praxis for media and communication studies on storytelling, research, theory development, and pedagogy as cultural practices. Linda Myers (1998) argues that the four pillars of Afrocentrism constitute the ‘deep structure of culture’. These pillars can also be viewed as the scaffolds of the theory. They direct the strands of its theorization and give it a resilient structure against all manner of criticism. On the one hand, the structure manifests in ‘outward physical manifestations’, ‘surface meanings’, and ‘artefacts’ that are ‘symbolic’ and representational systems of everyday life (pp. 3–7). These are change-oriented and indeed keep changing in time and space. When we say culture is dynamic, it is to a certain degree an unconscious reference to this outward symbolic phenomenon of culture. On the other hand, the deep structure of culture is also made up of the enduring ‘sets of rules’, ‘forms’, and ‘conceptual systems’ (pp. 4–8). For example, many Afrocentric scholars have identified some of the universal and cross-cutting traits of traditional African cultures that include communality (as opposed to individuality), ontology as material and spiritual (as opposed to strictly physical and epistemological), the belief in ancestors and many gods (as opposed to one omnipotent and omnipresent Christian God), the blurring lines between object and subject (as in human beings versus environment) (see Myers 1998; Asante 1998a; Asante and Mazama 2009). Africans ‘of traditional culture apprehended a sense of self extended in time to include all of the ancestors, the yet unborn, all of nature, and the entire community’ (Myers 1998, p. 7).

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The African-American scholars have perhaps belaboured these issues, especially that of material/spiritual ontology which is otherwise an ‘obvious’ and inescapable reality, especially for older generations of black Africans in the village and the city in Africa. The modern and the traditional continue to coexist even in present-day Africa through the process of transculturation thus suggesting ‘that people [in the postcolony] can live biculturally- [and] that fundamental cultural positions [can] remain unchanged’ (Michaelsen 1997, p. 246, also see Appiah 1993). Understandably, the African-American school of thought on Afrocentrism speaks from a perspective of people who were violently uprooted from their cultural spaces during slavery. Understandably, these scholars are likely to feel obligated to document empirical facts of the cross-cutting values of African culture in defence of their culture since Eurocentrism simultaneously decimates and denies them that heritage. As an African scholar, I do not feel any pressure to prove this point or even contest accusations of cultural essentialism from local and foreign anthropologists who engage in academic tourism in African villages, pitch tents for a month or two beside the village compounds, share sweets with children and canned beef with adults, conduct ethnographic interviews with the ‘natives’, and then leave with a mistaken belief that they know everything about the Africans. I have lived all my life in Africa—sometimes as a participant, an observer, and also as a critic of those cultures in my capacity as a researcher. While accusations of essentialism can sometimes be legitimate, they tend to carry less weight when used by scholars of a colonial archive. These scholars emphasize difference when Afrocentrists discuss the uniting and decolonial healing possibilities through Pan-African agency and are silent on ‘cultural similarities’ created by the racialisation discourses through stereotypes and profiling. Here, we must be quick to do two things. First, deploy Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of ‘strategic essentialism’ to present Afrocentrism as an unapologetically ‘specific character of African-centered scholarship [that] accept[s] as fact, an unbreakable bond of culture between Africa and Africans…The essential relationship between Africa and African populations [can never be] deemed as problematic to those who find the discovery and presentation of knowledge to be culturally specific’ (Poe 2003, p. 9). Second, invoke the age-old questions from Valentin Mudimbe that reject the silencing of the ex-colonized African subject-based on empiricist-cum-colonist modes of scholarship that disregard that there is any other knowledge outside its epistemology and methodology. Mudimbe (1988) dutifully reminded us that in African

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gnosis, especially on the continued struggle for liberation by the African subject from mental colonization, it is important to ask: ‘Who is speaking about it? Who has the right and the credentials to produce it, describe it, comment upon it, or at least present opinions about it?’ (p. x). Afrocentrism seems to have had a few micro-turns. There is a school of thought that now explores what they refer to as Africanity. Asante (1998a, p. 19) makes an important distinction between the Afrocentrism and Africanity. He argues that while Afrocentrism is essentially about ‘agency and ‘self-conscious action’, Africanity refers ‘to all of the customs, traditions, and traits of people of Africa and the diaspora’. The study of Africanity across time and place is ‘Afrology’ and now also referred as ‘Africology’ (p. 20). In essence, one could argue that Africanity is historical and archival in orientation: it excavates the past and present rituals and examines African cultural practices. Afrocentrism, on the other hand, is epistemic, cognitive, agentive, futuristic, and a consciousness philosophy that applies to blacks and whites alike. In other words, it does not follow that because someone is black, they are therefore Afrocentric. Similarly, it does not follow that because someone is white, they therefore cannot be Afrocentric in outlook. Afrocentrism is a consciousness not a racial or cultural heritage. Drawing from the influential works of Cheik Anta Diop and Frantz Fanon, one could argue that Africanity is ‘Diopian’ in outlook’ while Afrocentrism is ‘Fanonian’.

Afropolitan Turn Afropolitanism is a fairly new turn that has far-reaching implications on the directions for media and cultural analysis for scholars in the Global South. With the advent of Afropolitanism, it is argued that Afrocentrism and Pan-Africanism have been consigned to the ‘annuls of history’ (Mbembe and Balakrishman 2016). Mbembe defines Afropolitanism as follows: Afropolitanism refers to a way, the many ways, in which Africans, or people of African origin, understand themselves as being part of the world rather than being apart. Historically, Africa has been defined in the Hegelian paradigm as out of history, as not belonging to the world, as being some region of the planet, which has no significance whatsoever in terms of the real history of the human in the world. But of course, that is not true. Afropolitanism is a name for undertaking a critical reflection on the many

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ways in which, in fact, there is no world without Africa and there is no Africa that is not part of it. So that’s the philosophical inflection of the term. (p. 29)

The genealogy of Afropolitanism is not particularly clear. It seems to be an offshoot of cosmopolitanism not just in the sense of its word structure Afro/cosmo- politanism, but also as a pointer to hybridity and cultural circulation within Africa. While Mbembe gestures to Afrocentrism in Afropolitanism, Afropolitanism does not appear to be rooted in centrist and spatiality discourses of Afrocentrism. However, if it is genealogically connected to Afrocentrism, then it represents a profound epistemological rapture because it is rooted in the postmodernism critique. Like postmodernism, Afropolitanism heralds the end of structure, collapse of metanarratives, the rise of unstable forms and hybridity, and a liquid modernity in Africa. Bauman (2005, p. 1) describes liquid modernity as ‘a society in which the conditions under which its members act change faster than it takes the ways of acting to consolidate into habits and routines’. It’s a condition of most contemporary society or sections of contemporary society in developing countries ‘where uncertainty, flux, change, conflict, and revolution are the permanent conditions of everyday life’ (Deuze 2008, p. 851) mainly because ‘all that is solid [is] melting into air’ (Bauman 2000, p. 7) due to, in part, ‘the diminishing role of spatial dimensions of social life’ (Priban 2013, p. 6). Indeed, Afropolitanism appears to point at the disappearance and melting of the deep structures of culture that as stated earlier constitute the essence of Afrocentrism. In its place, argues Mbembe and Balakrishman (2016), emerges a new reality of ‘geographies of circulation and mobility’, ‘networks’, ‘transnational cultural flows’, ‘the disappearance of territoriality’ (pp. 29–34). To a certain degree, one sees in Afropolitanism a shared epistemological base with postcolonial theory. The privileging of ‘histories from below’ and ‘struggles from below’ captures a pre-occupation with the masses and their everyday life. The so-called ‘anti-essentialist’ approach is at odds with structuralist approaches like Afrocentrism where the existence of a geo-political and cultural centre is seen as constituting a locus of identification and agency in all struggles. My criticism of Afropolitanism’s postmodernist thesis is that it produces a dangerously impressionistic ‘surface theory’ that acts like a centrifugal force that throws Africans into a cultural abyss of culturelessness. Afropolitanism takes us from somewhere (our centres) to nowhere (the flows). One can use the old adage of a

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rolling stone that gathers no moss. In the new geographies of circulation, it is not that the stone must not roll, but that it must roll with its moss while picking up what it needs along the way. Mbembe and Balakrishman’s position is that Afropolitanism rejects the Hegelian paradigm where Africa is stuck in a pariah and personae non grata frame. Using the benefit of the evidence of history, they rightly conclude ‘there is no world without Africa and there is no Africa that is not part of it’ (2016, p. 29). For example, Africa is in Europe, just as Europe is in Africa. Africa is in Asia just as Asia is in Africa. Indeed, the global flows of people into Africa and out of Africa are historical. However, they have now been heightened by globalization that has compressed space and time using, among others, media and telecommunications technologies. And so has the transnational/regional flows between states and regions within Africa itself. Admittedly, these changes have had profound and irreversible changes on society, culture, and identity. In the new landscape of mobility, cultural flows, and (virtual) networks, identities appear to be increasingly decentred and deterritorialized even within Africa itself. Race and nationality are constantly being negotiated and renegotiated in a myriad of ways. However, a closer analysis of the new geographies of circulation shows that centres do not really completely disappear because ‘culture [as] a whole way of life of a people is somewhat indestructible. As long as there are people, they will have a way of life, a [centre]’ (Myers 1998, p. 3). An enduring experience in both the North and the South in the new geographies of circulation is that cultural flows from the South tend to crystallize into new nodal points in the spatial margins of the metropolis when immigrants consciously create new diasporic communities. These become the new centres from which they navigate new cultural spaces and negotiate newer identities that do not negate their centres, but build on them. Therefore, it seems to me one can better surf and negotiate the waves of the new geographies of cultural flows if they have a centre—a perceived cultural home that offers an ideological campus to navigate the flows especially when turbulence strikes. Xenophobia, Afrophobia, racism, and nativism as primordial ways of defending perceived threats to the geo-cultural centres constitute the deep-seated turbulences of the new geographies. The problem with Afropolitanism is that it romanticizes the global changes and puts a positive spin to the race question in ways that perhaps downplay, if not conceal the enduring problem of the whiteness of power and the entrenched power structures of the imperial South

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in Africa. South Africa, which Mbembe argues inspired his ideas on the Afropolitan turn, is arguably the last post of the imperial South in the continent as evidenced by the dominance of white media concentrates, institutionalized racism, and the rise in sporadic everyday racism in public spaces despite the nation’s lofty constitutional and policy ideals that seek to promote social cohesion, multiracialism, and multiculturalism (Kamwangamalu 2003; Ndlovu 2008). Through the postmodern lens, the Afropolitan turn unwittingly speaks from the perspective that is amenable with the power of the imperial North and their captured elites in the imperial South. By so doing, its critical gaze is inadvertently fixated on the image of the geographies of circulation and not the substance and structures such geographies symbolize. The substance and structure of the geographies of circulation is in the analysis of the power behind the flows and its influence in the so-called new hybridized spaces where we are made to believe the networks are sovereign over the previous conceptions of African culture as centred. In arguing that ‘there is a moment when French, English, or even Portuguese [become] African languages’ (Mbembe and Balakrishman, 2016, p.34), Afropolitanism seems to emerge from a big blind spot on the underlying power relations that ultimately influence whose child loses their language and whose child doesn’t? Whose child grows up speaking Creole and Pidgin English and whose child doesn’t? In the geographies of circulation is hybridization an inevitability for some and an option for others? In the new geographies, whose centres collapse and whose remain? It seems to me; true multiculturalism dies right at the point where hybridization and creolization begin. Consequently, it is safe to conclude that the Afropolitan turn is impressionistic. I have called it ‘a surface theory’ because it fails to read the imprints of the structure on the image that it valorizes. Indeed, part of the hegemony of Eurocentrism has been to make sure that to protect global coloniality, Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans ‘confuse a rearrangement of reality with fundamental changes in reality’ (Harris 1998, p. 17). From a Southern perspective, the geographies of circulation is a superficial concept that conceals more that it reveals the reality of EuroAmerican centred social, political, and economic processes. Despite the over-celebrated transnational flows, world political and cultural hegemony is undoubtedly centred in the West.

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Postcolonial and the Decolonial Turns The postcolonial turn has traditionally been understood at two levels— first, as a historical category denoting historical changes in the relationship between the empire and the ex/colonial subject. For example, most countries in the Global South went through the chronological periods of colonization, decolonization, and then post-colonization. The historical category in postcoloniality is therefore simply about a periodization that outlines the flow of events until ‘the colonial aftermath’ (Gandhi 1998). An important distinction to make though is that postcolonialism is not synonymous with ‘post-independence’, but refers more precisely to ‘postinvasion’ and its concomitant social and cultural consequences on the colonized people (Zabus 2015, p. 1). The post-invasion thesis opens up postcolonial theory to study more broadly ‘the long-term structuring of global relations by colonialism, decolonization, and neocolonialist trends’ (Bachmann-Medick 2016, p. 131). In short, the study of the empire and neocolonial dependences of the Global South continues to be of central concern in postcolonial theory. From that perspective, ‘postindependence’ dissipates into meaninglessness except as an ideological descriptor of a political sham, a hoax, or a mirage. Second, the postcolonial turn is also more critically understood at the level of a cultural theory that critiques ‘the hegemonic Eurocentric imperial discourses’ and their ‘knowledge structures and representation systems’ (p. 131). Edward Said’s book Orientalism (1978) has been a defining text of not only the hegemonic role of Eurocentrism, but also the beginning of the postcolonial turn itself. Thus, the critique of AngloAmerican hegemony locates the postcolonial turn as a ‘specifically antior postcolonial discursive purchase in culture, one which begins in the moment [the] colonial power inscribes itself into the body and space of its Others and which continues as an often-occulted tradition onto the modern theatre of neocolonialist traditions’ (Slemon 1991, p. 3). This classic definition by Stephen Slemon converges neatly with the critical agenda of the decolonial turn, a turn that is largely preoccupied with ‘the decolonisation of knowledge, power, and being, including how institutions such as the [media and other cultural industries] are part of modernity’s capitalist edifice’ (Maldonado-Toress 2011, p. 3). According to Walter Mignolo (2007, p. 452), decoloniality is a major epistemological turn, which although enjoying a lot in common with

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postcolonial theory, goes ‘away and beyond the post-colonial’. Decoloniality is not new, but an old enduring Southern resistance epistemology that originated in the twentieth century. Most scholars often trace its origins to the Bandug Afro-Asian conference that took place in Indonesia in 1955 (Mignolo 2012; Prashad 2012). The Bandug conference was no ordinary event. It was a historical event of conceptual significance because it spawned a wave of decolonization and the birth of transcontinental solidarities among the oppressed countries of the Global South. At this conference, African and Asian countries came together to condemn imperial domination and support decolonization struggles for liberation. After the conference, several other decolonization initiatives took place, most notable the Tricontinental Conferences by liberation movements in Cuba and Egypt which brought the Latin Americans on board (Prashad 2012; Mahler 2018). This geo-political resistant imaginary also manifested itself at academic level through the works of scholars and organic intellectuals like as Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Leopold Senghor, Amilcar Cabral, and others. I will return the decolonial turn in the following chapter to discuss it in the context of the field of media and communication studies. What is of interest at this moment is to shine a spotlight over areas of convergence and divergence with postcolonial theory. Let me begin with the point of the origins and genealogies of both formations. Both postcolonial and decolonial theories trace their inspiration, in part, to the radical anti-colonial thought, especially from scholars such as Aime Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Leopold Senghor, Walter Rodney, and others. While the resistance ideology of these forerunners was sometimes informed by Marxian ideologies, they had managed to develop a form of Black Marxism that was critical of racial capitalist oppression and exploitation. Their creative genius was in their very act of turning Western epistemes into a weapon of theory that not only advanced a decolonial agenda, but also combated Western cultural hegemony. However, while the decolonial turn has remained loyal to the radical anti-colonial theory, postcolonial theory experienced a major ‘shift from its initial political-historical approaches to a cultural epistemological re-orientation shaped by poststructuralism [and postmodernism]’ (Bachmann-Medick 2016, p. 131, also see Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2015; Young 2012). Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994) is generally viewed as symbolic of this shift into postmodernism and poststructuralism. The

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shift is criticized by Ramon Grosfoguel (2007, p. 211) as a turn that signified postcolonial theory’s ‘failure to produce a truly radical and alternative knowledge’. This suggests that the revolutionary praxis in media and cultural analysis, especially of critical media theory, is by default always socially and historically contingent. Theory must ‘encompass bodies of knowledge and sets of…practices that actively grapple with central questions facing groups of people differently placed in specific political, social, and historical contexts characterized by injustice’ (Collins 1998, p. xiv). Grosfoguel (2007) argues that postcolonial theory’s shift into postmodernism ‘underestimated in their work ethnic/racial perspectives coming from the region, while giving privilege predominantly to Western thinkers’ (p. 211). Consequently, this culminates in the reproduction of the colonial model of Area Studies where theory is typically situated in the North while the subjects of study are located in the South. Therefore, contemporary postcolonial theory largely ‘draws from Western philosophy’ whereas ‘decoloniality does not claim a Western philosophical pedigree and heritage’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2015, p. 42). The decolonial turn ‘unfolds from disrupted and coerced cultures and civilizations [of the Global South’ (Mignolo 2014, p. 11). Although ‘the words coloniality and decoloniality are [now also] popular in Western Europe and the US, we should not forget that their point of origin is not inscribed in the Greco-Roman tradition of language, categories of thought, skin, and heart (p. 11). As such, decoloniality is a product of the Global South or the so-called Third World. It is an epistemology of struggle because it ‘was created by actors wanting liberation from Western Europe’ which ‘either then, or now…couldn’t offer at once to the rest of the world both oppression and liberation’ (ibid., p. 12). As Mignolo (2011) rightly observes elsewhere, decoloniality emerges from the geo-political and epistemic position of the ‘Darker side of Western modernity’. This ‘points to the colonial difference faced by those sitting on the oppressed side of modernity such as Africans, Latin Americans, and Asians as ex/colonized subjects’ because ‘while Western modernity largely occasioned prosperity for the Western subject, it brought slavery, colonialism, and neoliberal expropriation for the non-Western subject’ (Moyo and Mutsvairo 2018, p. 26). The critical project of the postcolonial turn is the study of colonialism and its multifarious legacies. Decoloniality focuses on the problem of coloniality and contends that coloniality and modernity are mutually constitutive. Consequently, the decolonial critique stretches as far

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back as 500 years ago to include Spanish and Portuguese colonization of South America. However, the postcolonial turn which traces its origins to the 1980s focuses mainly on the nineteenth-century British and French Empires. In ‘the process [it misses a good] 300 years of the unfolding of modernity/coloniality’ partly because of its futile ‘idea of try[ing] to decouple modernity and colonialism’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2015, p. 43). Therefore, the decolonial turn stands counterposed to any form of coloniality. As the counterhegemony of the colonial turn, ‘it marks a shift from colonial discourse to the decolonial tasks of decolonizing knowledge, power, and being’ (p. 43).

On the Politics of Recognition and Validation The decolonial turn is faced with major ideological resistance from the imperial North and the imperial South. The North is the heart of the empire and the natural custodian of the Northern archive, Western values, and Eurocentric universalist paradigms. According to Schudson among its values, ‘are the unspoken, but organic beliefs in. .. capitalism, [one] God, the West, Puritanism, the Law, the family, property, and perhaps most crucially, an unflinching belief in the ‘scientific’ reason and logic’ (1978, p. 184, emphasis added). The imperial North is ideologically conservative and enunciates itself, consciously and unconsciously, from the Euro-American global knowledge power structure. Then, there is the imperial South, those ‘epistemological little Europes that are to be found and are often dominant in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and Oceania’ (Santos 2018, p. 2). The imperial South is an ideological appendage of the North and works to oil and service the ideological machinery of the metaphysical empire in the geographic South. In Africa, South Africa and Namibia are good examples of the imperial South. Consequently, there are two ideological problems that face the Southern epistemologies like decoloniality and postcolonial theory. Firstly, there is the reality of ideological resistance that is waged through an established institutional culture of epistemic racism. This form of racism is often dressed in the dignified robes of academic criticism, yet in reality it advances a political objective as a policing mechanism. Secondly, there is also the ever-hovering possibility of domestication by co-option where the Euro-American global knowledge system maintains a certain degree of flexibility in order to co-opt and discipline resistance epistemologies from its exteriority. The systems give Southern epistemologies a

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language and a voice, although they inscribe their own ideological content and conservative cultural and political agenda. This appears to be what is happening in South Africa where some shrewd scholarship is trying to discipline decoloniality from being a radical epistemology of the South to being a lukewarm, conservative, and pussyfooted theory before they put it on its death bed. Resistance to decoloniality is often couched in the cow horn formation of attack, discredit, dismiss, or domesticate if the first three are not successful. For example, the North dismisses postcolonial and decolonial thought as ‘caricature[s] of Enlightenment reason; that [they] embrace nativism and identity politics; that [they] dress political resentments in academic language; that [they are] a watered-down, depoliticized form of anticolonial thinking; that [they are] a tool of self-promoting immigrant academics’ (Krishnan 2009, p. 265). After such attacks and discrediting often comes very spirited, but ideologically charged empiricist dismissals ironically based on the so-called scientific method. Postcolonial and decolonial epistemologies are lampooned as ‘irredeemably flawed’, ‘deeply shirkey’, ‘systematically misrepresent [modernity]’, and that they must be exposed for the ‘flimsiness of their case’ because they are built on ‘arguments that are mistaken’ (Chibber 2013, pp. 23–24). Decoloniality and postcolonial theories are accused of being all politics presented in the idiom of scholarship. Yet the irony is that all theory, even the so-called scientific theory, is political. As Grosfoguel (2009) says of decolonial thought: ‘All too often in the academic realm, the academic and existential position which I bring forth here is dismissed on the grounds that it is political. And indeed, [it] is a political text. But were we to dismiss all academic texts on the grounds of their political character, we would simply have no academic texts left!’ (p. 11). It is clear that the imperial North and imperial South wield immense ideological power that is often exercised through their hegemonic institutions like the media, schools, universities, and publishing companies. This power is always structured into the processes of knowledge validation and recognition. Compliance with the knowledge order is often rewarded through Book Prizes or Publishing Industry Awards while resistance is deliberately misrepresented, demonized, and silenced. If these strategies fail, then co-option and domestication are the last option. There is also the tried and tested label of essentialism that essentially works by implicitly casting doubt on the possibility for ‘formerly colonized or

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underdeveloped peoples to articulate a creative, textured, response to the institutions of modernity [through postcolonial, subaltern, and decolonial canon]’ (Krishnan 2009, p. 265). The essentialism tag is a shrewd political strategy: it is meant to disarm, neutralize, and dislodge critique. The ‘black man who dares to speak- as did Fanon…Leopold Sedar Senghor, and Aime Cesair- is called anything from passionate to angry, but never “reasonable” (Dabashi 2011, p. 29). He may have a point, he is repeatedly told, but he is so angry he defeats his own purpose. Reason and composure, of course, are white’ (p. 29). Of course, this is not true. It arises because, in trying to speak truth to power, the Global South intellectual becomes too immersed in the North-South binary to the point he or she forgets the primary target for revolutionary and transformative theory is the non-Western subject in the South who, in the words Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, needs to decolonize their mind. Grosfoguel (2007), however, counters the accusations of essentialism from the centre. He argues that decoloniality is ‘not an essentialist, fundamentalist, anti-European critique. It is a perspective that is critical of Eurocentric and Third World fundamentalisms, colonialism, and nationalism. What all fundamentalisms share (including Eurocentric one) is the premise that there is only one sole epistemic tradition from which to achieve Truth and Universality’ (p. 212). In reality, the cultural essentialism critiques are not only misplaced and preposterous, but are often informed by the imperial North’s neoliberal nightmares and supremacist hallucinations about the possibility of decentring the Western logic or knowledge power structure in the Global South particularly at a time when neoliberalism is facing an existential and epistemic crisis. The essentialism accusation is the empire’s holy grail of casting aspersions on the ability of the South to think logically and clearly for itself. In the labelling game, language drives the politics. For example, where the North produces ‘radical’ or ‘revolutionary’ theory, the South is by default, essentialist and angry. It often does not matter to the imperial North and imperial South that Southern epistemologies in general and decoloniality in particular are a liberatory epistemology. Its overarching purposes are not only to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor across the North-South divide, but also promote and advance the ethics a common humanity. Decoloniality does not seek to attack Europeans in the North or South, but merely seeks to decentre Northern theory in media and cultural analysis in the Global South and make Southern thinking , histories, cultures, and

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ontologies more central in the theory building projects of the Global South. This is a democratic and egalitarian exercise.

Conclusion It is clear that the concept of the Global South is very useful in media and communication studies as a resistance imaginary to global coloniality. In the age of transnational cultural flows, it is a concept that helps us not only to track how the empire deploys its cultural power and media monopolies inside and outside its boundaries. While the old-fashioned geo-cultural characterization of the world system as the centre and periphery is still relevant to a certain degree, the North-South apparatus helps us to understand that the Eurocentric world system and cultural order have not changed, but have merely been re-arranged. While geography is not a central category of classification in the modern system, race, colonial difference, class, and culture remain key factors of the dismemberment Southern populations. Western media monopolies are used to conceal the fact that Euro-American modernity continues to be deeply rooted in coloniality and racism. They do so by priming discourses of human rights and a social justice agenda targeting the non-West, especially violations that are perpetrated by enemy countries. The concept of the South in the North and North in the South while confirmative of the geographies of circulation and the ensuing cultural hybridities, is hardly convincing for arguing that we now live in a decentred world. The West by and large remains the geo-cultural and epistemic centre of the world although there is also likelihood of a multi-centric world due to the rise of the China and India. The Global South as a cultural framework is about self-reconstitution by moving the centre from Euro-American paradigms and cultural outlooks. If we understand culture as a constantly shifting, but also a “structured” whole involving a civilization’s self-image as seen through their knowledge, customs, beliefs, worldviews, philosophy, acquired over a period of time, then the Global South is as much an epistemic angle as it is a mobilizing concept based on transnational solidarities and horizontal comradeship. As an epistemology, the Global South is about critical/black/political consciousness, a locus of enunciation and identification that helps us to dig up our buried cultures and silenced knowledges as a pathway to a just multicultural global society and knowledge. In the age of false globalism like neoliberal globalization, the Global South is a necessary sociocultural resistance imaginary whose praxis is

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to be realized in the creation of alternative socio-economic and cultural centres that aim to fill the epistemic gap created by the disenfranchising Euro-American knowledges of coloniality and alienation. The Global South gestures towards the knowledges of decolonial self-healing such as indigenous and endogenous knowledges, resistance media methodologies, and anti-oppression media pedagogies that I discuss in Chapter 7. As Mignolo (2011) observes, the Global South is a place where resistance struggles for just decolonial global futures are being waged. Its ‘main target is the control of the enunciation, for it is from there that the colonial matrix can be eroded and that another world would be made possible’ (p. 184).

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CHAPTER 4

The Decolonial Turn: Towards a Southern Theory in Media Studies

How can the oppressed use the same theories as their oppressors ? Molefe Kete Asante (1998, p. 181) We don’t need another theory of revolution; we need rather to revolutionize theory. Boaventura Santos (2018, p. 2018, p. ix)

Introduction In the previous chapter, I argued that media and communication studies and the humanities have gone through numerous ideological and epistemic turns that mainly contested the positivist and economistic explanatory paradigms. However, it is imperative to note that notwithstanding the global cultural and educational flows due the internationalization of higher education, most if not all of the most influential turns and their subsequent theoretical and methodological cannon in media and communication studies were a product of the geo-cultural and historical contradictions from Euro-American ontologies, histories, and intellectual movements. Consequently, the roots of all media and communication theory, liberal or critical, continue to be deeply entrenched in the West. Theory building that is taken seriously in the interdiscipline in both the North and the South continues to be located in the Global North even for those research problems and knowledge gaps that are not only in the

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Global South, but are also researched by Southern media scholars themselves. This, once again, is not to suggest a rigid North-South binary, but to emphasize the importance of socio-historical contexts as the loci of enunciation for the development of organic and culturally relevant Southern media theory so as to attain cognitive justice in the field. Cognitive justice, a concept that has come to be largely associated with the Portuguese decolonial scholar Boaventura de Sousa Santos, is an important ideal for all well-meaning media intellectuals across geography, race, class, ethnicity, culture, and gender because it recasts the interdiscipline as a space where multiple forms of knowledge and ways of knowing can co-exist (Santos 2007b, 2017). Justice in the politics of knowledge is a product of a twin process comprising decoloniality on the one hand, and decolonization on the other. Generally speaking, decoloniality represents an epistemic intervention in the interdiscipline from the silenced knowledges from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, while decolonization refers to a process of the de-imperializing, de-Westernizing, de-hierarchization and de-patriarchalizing of Southern media theory by inoculating it against Eurocentrism and various kinds coloniality. This is why Santos is the support of decolonization argues that ‘We don’t need another theory of revolution; we need rather to revolutionize theory’ (2018, p. ix). By revolutionizing theory, Santos meant that we simply need to decolonize theory from Eurocentrism, patriarchy, racism, and imperialism so as to restore its critical sharpness and transformative power. Needless to say, Eurocentrism is not just embedded on media and communication theory in the Global South, culturally speaking it is as inescapable as the air we breathe due to the colonization of our cultures and the life worlds by its forces. Eurocentrism is ‘not simply out there in the West. It is also in here in the non-West in the church, the school, the family, the media, and the state. As a concept and a worldview, it has colonized the intellectuals in non-European societies’ (Sadar 1999, p. 45, emphasis added). In the final analysis, decoloniality is therefore an epistemic resistance project in media and communication studies against the hegemonic Euro-American paradigms in the field. Unsurprisingly, this epistemological resistance emanates from those marginalized alternative modernities and ways of knowing mainly from the Global South that clamour for a multiversal world and pluriversal cultural and knowledge order (Mignolo 2011). It is an epistemology for liberating border knowledges in the interdiscipline where the border is as much a place of constrainment and

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exclusion as it for alterity, resistance, difference, hybridity, and new horizons for intellectual and cultural possibilities. It is therefore not surprising that decoloniality as an underpinning epistemology for a Southern critical theory for media and communication studies should emerge from the border and the ex/colonial subalterns because ‘the continuities of colonial mechanisms of exclusion and oppression most often come from the subaltern groups, and not from established scholars in the academic world’ (Grosfoguel 2008, p. 12). Resistance comes from the conquered not the victors. However, the quest for cognitive justice in media and communication studies is largely acknowledged and in some way already underway, although the field’s transformation agenda is largely controlled by the West—the global power structure of knowledge in the politics of knowledge production. Granted, the calls for cognitive justice now reverberate in both the North and the South, ‘but the reality is that [the highly rated] global research is being conducted for the most part by the usual [Northern] suspects using the usual [Northern imperial] theories in the usual highly reputable international journals of the West ’ (Benson 2015, p. 258, Emphasis added). This has culminated in a disconnect between proffered theoretical solutions and the Southern problem in media and communication studies. For example, as argued in Chapter 2, internationalization and interculturality have been suggested as the solution to globalization’s homogenizing forces in the field. However, both are largely informed by the liberal-pluralist or Marxian critical diversity thinking from the Global North which are not radically transformative in the eyes of the Global South because they represent Anti-Eurocentric Eurocentrism. Furthermore, the internal criticism of the Euro-American social, economic, and cultural domination by the West has been largely a contradictory academic exercise. On the one hand, it seems to suggest embracing a multicultural critical media theory in the field, while on the other hand, it is struggling to unthink Eurocentrism as a hegemonic paradigm or epistemological hub for the entire interdiscipline. The North continues to view media systems, media cultures, and media epistemologies of the Global South through its Eurocentric and hegemonic lens (Willems 2014). It fails to decentre itself from its dominant cultural and epistemological worldviews when engaging with media cultures and systems from alternative modernities (Siebert et al. 1956; Hallin and Mancini 2004). In other words, while Western media theory

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travels to the Global South, its locus of enunciation—‘that is, the geopolitical and body-political location of the subject that speaks remains rigidly reverted in the West as a theory and a method’ (Grosfoguel 2008, p. 14, Emphasis added). There ‘seems to be a presumption in most cases that the [Global North] communication scholars have found the truth and the only thing left is the application of that truth to various cultures of the world’ (Asante 2008, p. 2). In practice, the failure to transcend its Eurocentrism and provincialism, amounts to a contradictory Euro-American intellectual gesture towards a multicultural theory in the interdiscipline while at the same time showing an uncanny discomfort with the existence of truly multicentric ontologies or a polycentric world. Indeed, to echo the words of the Boaventura Santos, ‘it looks as if colonialism has disabled the global North from learning in non-colonial terms, that is, in terms that allow for the existence of histories other than the universal history of the West’ (Santos 2016, p. 19). Following John Downing and Georgette Wang, the result of this Western contradiction in the Global North has been an unconscious, but very spirited ‘monologue’ within Western media and communication studies. This disciplinary ‘monologue’ is largely characterized by academic esotericism, the recycling of concepts, lack of new nouns, and a circulation of rehashed ideological clichés and high-sounding buzz words where deified concepts pass ‘into fetishism … and consequently into [meaningless] fog’ (Downing 2003, p. 497; also see Wang 2011). Downing further observed how media and communication studies in the West had become dogged by a problem of ‘concept fetishism’ as evidenced by what he called ‘replication studies’ (ibid., p. 502). The penchant for highsounding concepts fished from leading scholars in cognate disciplines like sociology, politics, and anthropology, he argued, had reduced media and communication studies to a discipline of buzzwords and not organic ideas which build living theories that animate the communication process, the interdiscipline, culture and society. Indeed, a ‘sense of exhaustion haunts the Western Eurocentric critical tradition in media and communication studies. It manifests itself in a peculiar and diffuse uneasiness expressed in multiple ways: irrelevance, inadequacy, impotence, stagnation and paralysis’ (Santos 2016, p. 19, emphasis added). Whereas buzzwords tend to be used for their trendiness and academic showmanship, ideas of originality are normally socially and historically grounded and enriching to the research agenda and theories of a discipline. Grounded concepts often develop from within

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disciplines in an organic manner and not through translating ready-made concepts or chopping and drilling them into speaking to the research agenda of the field. Downing also observed that, indeed, some of these concepts sometimes have ‘something to offer, some more than others’ and ‘the proposal here is not to junk them, but to ladle steaming heaps of derision on their all-to-frequent abuse, which typically takes the form of holding on to one of them as a master-idea, almost a religious mantra, that supposedly offers a uniquely privileged hermeneutic vantage point…The persistence of this fetishizing is no doubt due in part because of the ideological and epistemic crisis in the field which reflects the collapse of many of Euro-American explanatory paradigms ’ (p. 497, emphasis added). Indeed, the main wellsprings of Western critical theory in the humanities in general and media and communication studies in particular such as structuralism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism have reached their epistemic limit and concept fetishism and replication scholarship in the field partly reflects this crisis. For example, in the age of neoliberal globalization’s greatest corporate assault on our cultures and human rights especially in the Global South, Western critical media theory has turned intellectually blunt because of its affinity with power from whose perspective it unwittingly speaks. For example, since the collapse of the bipolar world order and rise of neoliberalism in the 1990s, there has been a shift in Western social and critical media theory to a more sympathetic critique of neoliberal globalization and cosmopolitanism at the expense of the poor majorities in the Global South (see Giddens 1991; Keane 2003; Habermas 1992). Indeed, as Pleasants (1999) noted, some Western critical theorists such as Habermas abdicated from the political economy critique to engage ‘exclusively…with abstract, transcendental social structures and individual competences, …rather than criticising currently existing social and political institutions’ (p. 154). Douglas Kellner advised that for Western critical theory to be saved from the systemic and epistemic crisis facing the West, it must open up itself to a more radical critique and also create space for other radical epistemologies involving other ways of reading the world: If Critical Theory is to remain on the cutting edge of social theory, then it must be subject to the sort of critique which it applies to traditional theories and must move beyond previous inadequate or obsolete positions. Similarly, it must promote the development of new theories to account for the newly emerging social conditions and changes within contemporary

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neo-capitalist…societies. This means that some of the ‘classical’ positions held by earlier generations of Critical Theorists must be modified or surrendered in the light of socio-historical transformations … which have called into question some of its past positions. (Kellner 1989, p. 2)

In media and communication studies, there seems to be a general retreat of the left in Western critical media theory culminating in the rise of libertarianism as a central and defining value for liberal-pluralist and critical theory in the field. In the process, this has reconnected theory with empire since ‘the idea of empire, [must be] nourished by a philosophical and cultural imaginary that [implicitly] justifies the political subjugation of distant territories’ (Allen 2016, p. 1). The Enlightenment ideas of progress, emancipation, and development do not just underpin Western media theory, they advance imperial values, culture, worldviews, and epistemologies in the Global South. The retreat by the left has deepened a crisis in which leftist critical and radical media theory is dying a slow death. The Western ‘post-isms’ as seen from poststructuralism, postmodernisms, postcolonialism, and now post-humanism indicates the lack of new critical imagination and a new vernacular for robust analytical currency (see Rehbein 2015; Santos 2016). Ultimately, this intellectual and epistemic dead end has meant that the generation and ‘use of theory and method should remain discretionary, and with the rise of the Global South, this recommendation has ceased being an intellectual exercise for detached academics but has instead become a central theme of theory and practice [in the South]’ (Rehbein 2015, p. 12). As long as the structural conditions that produce the Global South persist, they will ultimately produce a Southern critical theory in the field so that analysis goes beyond the cognitive closures and limitations of Western paradigms where ‘there seems to be a presumption in most cases that the communication scholars have found the truth and the only thing left is the application of that truth to various cultures of the world’ (Asante 2008, p. 2). The decolonial turn in media and communication studies emerges not only within the context of this spectre of disciplinary decade and epistemic closure in the Global North, but also an overarching epistemological crisis in the humanities and social sciences to answer some of the major sociocultural, political, and economic problems occasioned by Euro-American modernity (During 2010). Needless to say, media and communication studies shares in this collective failure not because of its interdisciplinarity,

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but because when all is said and done the study of media and communication must ultimately be informed by society’s struggles for social justice, social change, and egalitarianism. Yet a collective, conscious, and critical reflection about the interdiscipline by the Global North and the Global South has been sluggish perhaps due to the fact that the field considers itself young and explorative as opposed to old and retrospective. The result of this problem has been—apart from giving global coloniality and neoliberal fundamentalism a lifeline—the extension of an epistemological crisis that has spawned decolonial voices that are emerging from the margins of the filed in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. However, it is also fair to acknowledge some changes thus far within the field, although most of them are a product of trans-Atlantic conversations, and not the much-needed North-South dialogue. I say much needed because for ages the oppressed; those who live on the hellish conditions of the underside of Euro-American modernity, have been using theories from the North: that is, those who live on the upper side of Euro-American modernity—the former colonial masters of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. And to this we echo Molefi Asante’s question: ‘How can the oppressed use the same theories as their oppressors?’ (1998, p. 181). Can the oppressed ever liberate themselves using the theories and methods of their erstwhile colonial masters? In his reflective, but ever futuristic masterpiece, Critical Communication Studies (1992) Hanno Hardt, usefully reminded us that there was ‘a need to come to terms with the role of history in the definition of the field, as well as in the study of communication and media’ because ‘definitions of terms, areas of scholarly interest, dominations of theories or models of theories can only be understood in their historical substance’ (xiii). Indeed, some of the most powerful interventions and epistemic shifts beneficial to the critical media and critical communication agenda in the Global South emerged from the Global North and cascaded into the resistance epistemologies of the South due to the unavoidable global cultural and ideational flows between the North and the South. There can be no denying that decolonial thinking in media and communication studies has benefitted from some structuralist and poststructuralist paradigms, although these are essentially Western. Furthermore Hardt (1992), albeit still arguing within the context of the US Communication studies, foretold the epistemic decline of positivist-empiricist approaches and argued that they had no future in media and communication studies. Since then the field has undergone

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some kind of a cultural ferment that has pushed critical and cultural media approaches more to the centre of the interdiscipline globally. For several decades now, historical, cultural, and social-scientific analysis has undergirded approaches in media and communication studies across the world. Furthermore, Hardt (1992) foresaw that social and historical approaches ‘would help formulate [the field’s] political agenda, [because] these times require a type of communication research that addresses the definite conditions of social existence, including the need for change, and the potential contribution to building a better society’ (p. 9). He further observed that: ‘The preparation for alternative ways of looking at communication in society rests on a version of communication research that is able to conceive of differences and that appeals to the imagination which is rooted in historical consciousness’ (1992, p. 9). Indeed, for the progressives in the North and the South, Hanno Hardt was profoundly prophetic in this regard in terms of the subsequent resistance epistemologies that followed such as feminist media studies and more recently, the emerging decolonial media studies which some critics always deliberately want to reduce to Black Studies, Africana studies, or Critical Race Studies whose contours of distinction are so well defined by Asante and Mazama, Derrick Bell, Delgado, Richard and more recently by Rabaka, and others (Asante and Mazama 2005; Bell 2008; Delgado and Stefancic 1997; Rabaka 2009).

Decoloniality and Feminist Media Studies Feminist media studies, a turn that has been particularly inspiring to the decolonial turn in the field, argued against epistemic apartheid waged against women in the interdiscipline. Media and communication studies’ ‘themes, theories, and methodologies [were] male-biased in the sense that women’s problems have been ignored’ while ‘the particular experience of men has often been presented as having universal validity’ (Van Zoonen 1994, p. 14, also see Gallagher 2014). In turn, black feminists also pointed to the epistemic deficiency of mainstream feminism as they tried to navigate the intersectionality of gender, race, and class (Crenshaw 1997). Black women, they observed, had been treated as having ‘no valid independent interpretation of their own oppression’ and were perceived as being ‘less capable of articulating their own stand’ unless they framed their ‘ideas in the language that is familiar to and comfortable for the dominant groups inside and outside the movement ’ (Collins 2000, p. 7,

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emphasis added). Therefore, the decolonial critique in media and communication studies has also been largely invigorated by black feminism.

Decoloniality and Marxism Decoloniality has also developed in response to the cognitive limitations of Marxist historical materialism in the analysis of the questions of race, subjectivity, being, and consciousness in the Global South. However, for all its rigour on economic and class analysis, Du Bois (1904) long observed that Marxism inherently lacked the analytical impulse on the problem of racism in Western modernity. There ‘was no automatic power in [Marxism] to suppress race prejudice’ (Du Bois 1904, p. 38). The same problem has also cascaded into the critical political economy theory which is also epistemologically located in the West as its geo-cultural and epistemic frame. Its contemporary formulations as a critical media theory as seen from many scholars working within the Habermasian and the Frankfurt School critical theoretical traditions; are not only ‘stunningly silent on racist theory, anti- imperialist resistance, and oppositional practice in the empire’ but are also ‘deeply wedded to the idea that European, Enlightenment modernity… represents a developmental advance over premodern, nonmodern, or traditional forms of life’ (Allen 2016, pp. 1–3). In other words, just like the ethnocentric modernization theory that looked at the Global South as backward and primitive, political economy is also informed by the same normative values of progress and emancipation (see Rogers 2003; Schramm and Lerner 1976). Therefore, without its decolonization, political economy is automatically part of the reigning imperial epistemes that are ambivalent to the problems of race, coloniality, and colonial difference as focal points of analysis in the critique of African, Asian, and Latin American societies, cultures, and media systems. The treatment of economic power relations as epiphenomenal to all other power relations fails to capture the full hierarchies of power experienced by the ex/colonial subject in the Global South. The epistemic limits of political economy in theorizing the postcolonial conditions are due to its peripheralization of the role played by race, gender, sexuality, culture, and religion on the ex/colonial subject. Consequently, it is this blind spot that makes political economy fail to grasp the full spectrum of the hierarchies of power that are experienced by the colonial subaltern of Euro-American modernity in the imperial South and imperial North. In the field of media and communication studies, for example,

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the most dominant political economy approaches are Western, structuralist, and economistic in orientation. Vincent Mosco’s definition of political economy that emphasizes ‘power relations [in] the production, distribution, and consumption of resources, including communication resources’ enjoys a biblical status in most African university media and communication classrooms (see Mosco 1996, p. 2). In this mainstream media political economy theory, the privileging of the economic analysis in the processes of cultural production is encapsulated in concepts like commodification, corporatization, and mass culture that are informed by the social and economic conditions of the very industrialized countries of the Global North where advertising as a significant part of the capitalist edifice, has to drive the sales and profits for corporations. Meanwhile, even the alternative dependence theories associated with the so-called Third World theorists who were concerned about media imperialism and cultural imperialism were also based on the economic logic. Thus, decoloniality is an ontological as well as radical cultural turn, epistemologically located in the Global South calling for the understanding of the media and the society in the post-colony beyond structuralist political economy approaches. Hence, it dovetails perfectly well with post-political economy thinking that ‘different aspects of society possess their own internal logic and organizing principles and must be understood in their own terms. Consequently, the attempt [by political economy] to link [all] analysis …to the consideration of economic questions is seen as violating this specificity and as inevitably leading to a reductionist account, in which the economic is granted an unwarranted privilege as the cause of both theoretical and practical change’ (Browning and Kilmister 2006). As a cultural turn that represents the insurrection of modernity’s previously silenced cultures and worldviews, decoloniality seeks to locate media and cultural analysis more broadly, above and beyond economistic logic. Here, race, colonial difference, culture, gender, religion and sexuality are important individually and collectively in understanding the media in the modern/colonial/capitalist/ Euro-American and Christian centric world order. The rise of postmodernist approaches in media and communication studies globally have culminated in the re-emergence of decoloniality as an unintended and unforeseen disruptive force emerging from the exteriority and margins of colonial modernity. As we shall see, although decoloniality is not a postmodern critique it has benefitted from a postmodern spirit of the collapse of the universal paradigms. Ironically, Hanno

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Hardt had forewarned us that the future of media and communication studies ‘belonged to a generation of scholars whose…intellectual inclinations have moved them beyond technical expertise and disciplinary boundaries to considerations of culture and politics, and the definitions of society that benefit from multiple definitions explanations of reality’ (1992, p. xv). The decolonial turn represents a radical, ontological, cultural epistemic, and post-disciplinary turn whose locus of enunciation and identification is the Global South. Its primary occupation is the pursuit of psycho-cultural freedom of the ex/colonial subaltern from the stranglehold of the modern/colonial/capitalist world system. Decoloniality can help us to advance a global cultural politics that is based on liberation and to create public spheres that not only animate political and cultural citizenship, but also illuminate the histories, struggles, and cultures of those marginalized by modernity. In media and communication studies, decoloniality recasts new horizons for inclusivity, for a new world, and a new interdiscipline of dialogue and conversation between the centre and the periphery, East and West, and North and South. There is always ‘intellectual richness and originality in the considerations of cultures that have been marginalized, but maintain the possibility of rising against the dominant paradigms of communication research’ (Hardt 1992, p. xv). Thus, the decolonial turn emerges from the cultures that have been traditionally in the exteriority or fringes of the interdiscipline, but have constantly pushed for cultural dialogue in media and communication theory and epistemological recognition in critical reasoning (see Asante 1998; Curran and Park 2000; Thussu 2009; Wang 2011; Willems 2014; Lee 2015, Moyo and Mutsvairo 2018). These cultures seek a media and communication studies that transcends hegemonic Eurocentrism by recognizing that there are multiple centres for media and communication theory. As Wang beautifully put it ‘the purpose of going beyond Eurocentrism is to enrich, rather than to deny and reject Western methods and theories or their value and contribution’ (2011, p. 3).

The Decolonial Epistemology in Media and Communication Studies In the previous chapter, I touched on the genealogy of the decolonial theory, albeit in a quick, broad sweep that focused more on the history of the theory than its traditions, exponents, and their intellectual concerns. I want to revisit the issue of the origins briefly to flesh out

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a few issues in order to properly contextualize decoloniality within the field of media and communication studies. To begin with, the decolonial turn must be seen in the same light as any other turn in the humanities and social sciences: technically, it is not any different from what we mean by turning points in theory and method such as in the case of the ‘linguistic turn, pragmatic turn, discursive turn’ (Mignolo 2014, p. 1). However, what distinguishes the decolonial turn is that it ‘has long existed in different ways, opposing what could be called the colonizing turn in Western thought, [based on] the paradigm of discovery and newness that also included the gradual propagation of capitalism, racism, the modern/gender system, and the naturalization of the death ethics of war’ (Maldonado-Torres 2011, p. 1). Decoloniality always stands counterposed to global coloniality as embodied in and articulated by capitalism, neoliberalism, free-market fundamentalism, and racism as a discourse, system, structure, and behavioural attitude. I have to re-state for the purposes of emphasis that decoloniality is a media theory from the Global South not merely because it is traceable to the decolonization initiatives of the Bandug Conference (1955) in Indonesia, but because it emerges from the ‘Underside of Modernity’ (Dussel 1996) or ‘The Darker Side of Western Modernity’ (Mignolo 2011). In fact, Maldonado-Toress stresses that it is better not to view decoloniality as a singular theory, but a grouping of theories that attack coloniality as a defining characteristic of the underside or darker side of modernity. These two metaphors by Enrique Dussel and Walter Mignolo are very important because they capture the geo-cultural politics and positionality of media theory. In other words, the darker side of Western modernity cannot use the same media theories like the brighter side simple because they have different experiences of the world, socially, politically, and economically, including even in terms of media representations and symbolic power (Said 2003). For example, while the upper side of Euro-American modernity represents the apex, crest, crown, free, ethical, brighter and best side to live in, the underside represents the bottom, the underbelly, the colonized, darker, non-ethical, or simply the worst side to live in. It is the side that is often ‘invisible’ to those on the upper side who exploit it and is always constructed as alien, dark, impoverished, dependent, and primitive in Western minds and in their narratives of ex/colonized spaces in their media and other forms of visual culture (Mengara 2001; Gallagher 2015; Mudimbe 1988).

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It is a place that is under the grip of ‘coloniality’ defined by a ‘hellish existence’ that ‘carries with it both the racial and the gendered aspects of the naturalization of the non-ethics of war’ and ‘the extraordinary event of confronting mortality turns into an ordinary affair’ (Maldonado-Torres 2007, pp. 255–256). Death, rape, and human suffering are naturalized and normalized in the West master narrative here where media representations must fit the usual Eurocentric stereotypes where victims are framed as perpetrators. The underside of Western modernity exists primarily in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, but also in the dark, menacing death worlds of Euro-American modernity of the marginalized and impoverished South in the North, that is, those internal colonies, inhabited mainly by the African, Asian, and Mexican diasporas. This echoes Mignolo’s ‘darker side’ metaphor which apart from pointing to the regions occupied by those racially constructed as the ‘darker nations’ (Prashad 2012) of the world, more significantly points to the side of ‘dehumanization’, ‘a zone of none being’, ‘the wretched of the earth, ‘the damnes’ or the ex/colonial subaltern: those that have suffered the vagaries of slavery, colonialism, racial capitalism, neocolonialism, and other newer complex modes of enslavement and exploitation in both the South and the North (see Fanon 2004; Gordon 2000). Consequently, the ‘darker side of Western modernity’ or its ‘underside’, are metaphors that help to unmask the hidden monstrosity, criminality, cruelty, inhumanity, and savagery of those on the upper side, the brighter side that is occupied by those that are supposedly fully human and civilized. It is hidden in the in the open and in plain sight to its many black victims and white beneficiaries through the language of conceit and through powerful media misrepresentations particularly the global media as institutions that maintain modernity’s geo-cultural classifications and its hegemony. For example, as Messay Kebede pithily put it ‘…the Western attempt to degrade Africans has required the prior embellishment of the [West] and the “white man”. Grant that the notion of primitive Africa is a construct of Eurocentric concepts, and the logical precedence of the invention of the “white man” over the invention of Africa springs to mind, given that the inventors must first believe lies about themselves before they give credence to the demeaning descriptions of Africans’ (Kebede 2004, p. 1). Similarly, just as the Orient is the creation of the West, so is the Occident. As a theory that emerges from the conditions of colonial difference, the task of Southern critical media theory then is to unmask the media’s ideological colonial representations

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both from the centre and periphery predicated on a decolonial and liberatory epistemology. As Edward Said stated, we ‘cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to…produce the Orient politically, sociologically, ideologically, and scientifically’ (Said 2003, p. 3). Indeed, Western modernity works through a deceptive rhetoric machinery, from the media monopolies to the imperial university, that use ‘geographic racism [as] the logic of coloniality [for the] legitimization of [the] disregard of racialized places, cultures, peoples, ideas or theories ’ (Mignolo 2011, p. xix, emphasis added). As such, the decolonial media epistemology emerges from the oppressed, dark, silenced, and hidden underside of Euro-American modernity. As a liberation philosophy informed by the everyday experiences of the oppressed in the modern/colonial/capitalist system, decoloniality ‘commits itself to the reconstruction of a critical philosophical discourse that departs from the “exteriority” and assumes a practicopolitical “responsibility” in the “clarification” of the liberating praxis of the oppressed’ (Dussel 1996, p. xi). It is a theory of the South, for the South, and by the South seeking to create a Southern voice, epistemic resistance and liberation. As Asante potently puts it: ‘African, [Asian, and Latin American] scholars can never hope to achieve intellectual, cultural, or political liberation by following in eurocentric footsteps; this is the exacting truth of history. The foundations of eurocentric thought make Africans anti-African and Southerners anti-Southern. Neither can we expect to communicate if we refuse to use our own voice. Our own voice is the source of effective interaction with others’ (Asante 2008, p. 52, emphasis added). Following Connell (2007), Southern critical theory of the media, must constantly be reflexive of the knowledge politics and the histories, geographies, cultures, epistemologies, and indeed body politics within which it articulates its critical and liberatory agenda for modernity’s ex/colonial subject. Southern theory as used here is not strictly a geographic imperative, but an emphasis of epistemic positionality or locus of enunciation in the interdiscipline’s hierarchical global knowledge power structure. It is a product of a consciousness that must give birth to the new African, Asian, and Latin American media scholar who is not ambivalent of the questions of ‘authority, exclusion and inclusion, hegemony, partnership, sponsorship, appropriation between intellectuals and institutions in the metropole and those in the periphery’ (Connell 2007, p. iv). Decoloniality heralds

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the birth of a critically and culturally conscious media scholar whose worldview encapsulates all forms of domination experienced by the Other. To understand what the South means as the loci of enunciation for a Southern critical theory of the media, communication, and culture, I use Ramon Grosfoguel’s typology that he developed in criticism of postcolonial theory, although the criticism can apply to other theories such as de-Westernization that is increasingly recast within a postmodernist frame in the field of media and communication studies. Following Grosfoguel (2011), the privileging of Western structuralist and poststructuralist cannon of Marx, Weber, Gramsci, Foucault, Derrida, JeanFrançois Lyotard, Daniel Bell, Jean Baudrillard, and others to study capitalist media and society in the post-colonies of the Global South, automatically locates the locus of enunciation of Southern media theory in the Global North instead of the Global South. This can never produce a truly radical Southern critical theory of media and society, but merely a Western critical theory and postmodern critique that represents a Eurocentric critique of Euro-American modernity and its bourgeoisie media systems. But as Asante warned us earlier, the oppressed can never free themselves using the imperial theories from their oppressors? (Asante 1998). Southern critical media theory, as a deliberate departure from the epistemic colonization from Northern imperial media theory, is inherently counterhegemonic, decolonial, decentering, radical, emancipatory, against all kinds of coloniality. According to Mignolo (2011), ‘Coloniality is…the darker side of modernity and bio-politics that decolonial arguments unveil. Bio-politics enacts a postmodern critique of modernity [whereas] coloniality enacts a decolonial critique of modernity’ (p. 140). The inherent trap in situating a Southern media and communication critique entirely on Northern theory is that, instead of producing a radical critical theory for the Global South, this reproduces a colonial model of area studies where theory is from the Northern philosophers while the problem of study is in the Global South. This approach not only advances the coloniality of knowledge in the interdiscipline, but also fails to produce real transformative theory that is informed by the ontologies, histories, cultures, and conditions of oppression in the Global South. Therefore, we cannot ‘underestimate… in [our] work, ethnic/racial perspectives coming from the [Northern] region…By privileging Western thinkers as [our] central theoretical apparatus, we betray… [our] goal to produce a true radical theory for media and communication studies in the South’ (Grosfoguel 2011, p. 2, emphasis added). Consequently,

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decolonial media theory is considered a theory from the South because it privileges, first and foremost, those who study postcolonial media and ex/colonial subalternity ‘as a decolonial critique…which represents a critique of Eurocentrism from subalternized and silenced knowledges’ (Grosfoguel 2011, p. 2). Silenced knowledges include all discounted knowledges such as indigenous knowledge and other resilient Southern epistemologies such as, among others, Afrocentrity, Asiacentricity, Africology, Border studies, Africanity, postcolonialism, Black Marxism, Black feminism, Negritudism, Garveyism, Dependency theory, decolonial feminism, and Confucianism (see Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018; Rabaka 2009; Gordon 2000; Asante 1998; Cheng 1991; Anzaldua 1987). While decoloniality is open to the use of radical critical theory from the North, it, however, privileges African, Asian, Latin American, and other scholars who theorize modernity and cultural resistance agencies from the Southern perspective that gives priority to the liberation and freedom of the poor colonial subjects in the border as its agenda.

Decolonial Theory and Its Exponents The exponents of decolonial thought traverse geographic regions of the Global South. However, there are others who come from what we can refer to as the South in the North. Even in Northern theory itself, there is admittedly scholars who, while they cannot be categorized as decolonial theorists for one reason or another, the paths of their critical and normative reasoning enjoy a moral potency that draws them so close to decolonial and liberatory thinking in certain respects of media theory (see Hardt 1992; Downing 2003; Garnham 2000). In the West, these are the scholars that in many ways were seminal to the introspection and retrospection characterizing the interdiscipline today. Yet decoloniality is mainly associated with scholars from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. As a school of thought, the decolonial theory has enjoyed greater nuance from Latin American scholars like Anibal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Enrique Dussel, Ramón Grosfoguel, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Maria Lugones, Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, among others. From Africa and its diasporas, first-generation intellectuals in the anticolonial movement and civil rights movement such as W. DuBois (1868– 1963), Nkwame Nkrumah (1901–1972), Leopold Senghor (1906– 2001), Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), Amilcar

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Cabral (1924–1973), planted the decolonial mustard seed whose influence is visible even in the Latin American thought. This mustard seed continued to proliferate globally through a broad-based movement of second-generation intellectuals like Molefi Asante, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Chinweizu Ibekwe, Louis Gordon, Valentin Mudimbe, Achille Mbembe, Toyin Omoyeni Falola, Collins Patricia Hill, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Roderick Bush, and Steve Biko who wrote within and between ‘post-colonial and decolonial traditions, albeit without necessarily identifying themselves as decolonial scholars when compared with their Latin American counterparts’ (Moyo and Mutsvairo 2018, p. 24). The third generation of African scholars is in the making and slowly beginning to emerge in various disciplines, including media and communication studies. Asia and the Middle East have also immensely contributed to decolonial thought through scholars such as Edward Said, Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak although this is not to suggest a conflation of Subaltern Studies, postcolonial theory, and decolonial studies, but rather to acknowledge the confluences, intersections, and cross-fertilization of thought and ideas in the broad family of decolonial theories. More recently in the broader field of media and communication studies names such as Daya Thussu, MyungJin Park, James Curran, Georgette Wang, Chin-Chuan Lee, Yoshitaka Miike, and Jing Yin come to mind. These scholars have contributed to the media decolonization archive via tropes like de-Westernization and in some cases internationalization.

Building a Southern Critical Theory of Media and Communication Studies Boike Rehbein, a Professor of Society and Transformation in Asia and Africa at the German’s Humboldt-Universität observes that: ‘After the end of Euro-American hegemony and the return of the multicentric world, Eurocentrism in philosophy and the social sciences has come under attack. However, no real alternative has been proposed’ (2015, p. i). In the Global South, the lack of an alternative theory has been due to the fact that in spite of the rise in the awareness of the limits of Eurocentric theory in the twenty-first century, academic disciplines continue ‘to import theory from outside’ instead of developing a home-grown theory ‘to theorize [their] own reality’ (Mamdani 2016, p. 81). Indeed, no other description could be more fitting to the humanities in general

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and media and communication studies in particular than this. In media and communication studies, the feeling that the Global South cannot continue to import wholesale Northern theories if it truly needs a transformative theory for restoring agency to its cultures and societies is now fairly widespread and accepted by some scholars in the South and the North itself. However, that feeling is yet to crystallize into a critical theory of the Global South whose primary task is not only unlearning and unthinking the West’s colonial libraries in the field, but also constructing a new vernacular and tropes through which the silenced knowledges of the Global South can find expression. The building of a Southern critical theory in media and communication studies faces three major tasks that amount to a strong normative foundation for a grounded decolonial critique in the interdiscipline. Task one; the Southern critical theory must be built on a new epistemic and cultural centre as its locus of enunciation. These centres are a product of the realization of the decentring influences of Anglo-American paradigms that left our theorization everywhere and nowhere in particular in terms of geo-cultural and epistemic location. The new centres are also geosociocultural and historical. This means that African, Asian and Latin American cultures, histories, and struggles must always inform Southern critical media theory. Hence, the theory consciously tries to mend the rapture between ontology and epistemology, theory and practice, something that has characterized the Global South media and cultural studies scholarship during the 500 years of Euro-American world domination [and several] years of a Eurocentric tradition of thought’ (Rehbein 2015, p. 1). This relocating of the centres of our theorization from the North to the South is as much an intellectual task as it is also a moral and ethical task because ‘theory and practice are never distinct; rather they are constantly re-articulated by… struggle… They are at one and the same time means of thinking-and acting, acting through thinking and thinking through acting’ (Ascione 2016, p. 161). Put differently, the mending of the colonially induced rapture between theory and practice and ontology and epistemology in the Global South reanimates culture as the centrepiece of all media theorization in the South. After all, no media theory can ever fall from the holy heavens from the gods of wisdom: all theory is, in the first instance, a cultural artefact. Culture is central to all theory-building projects because it forms the epistemological roots of all thinking. Cabral (1973) saw the function of culture in Africa and the Global South as always to re-unite theory with practice and knowledge

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with ways of seeing. He argued that ‘culture is the vigorous manifestation on the ideological or idealist plane of the physical and historical reality of the society that is dominated or to be dominated. Culture is simultaneously the fruit of a people’s history and a determinant of [that] history’ (Cabral 1973, p. 21). In a psychologically, socially, and culturally dismembered or broken Global South, a recalibrated culture is a resource that restores confidence in the meaning of our everyday practices and the power of our myths, symbols, rituals, and worldviews. In the age of a false global economy of knowledge that is in reality a Western-centric colonial library, culture journeys us back to the self and to the centres we need while simultaneously demystifying the lie of a decentred global knowledge society, information society, and decentred Western theory. Task two; based on the self-evident point of colonial difference that unmasks modernity’s lie in the myths of advancing freedoms and liberties to all humanity, the Southern critical media theory must also be predicated on a normative foundation that rejects and develops an alternative thinking to the false, conceited, and self-serving liberal myths of the globalization, internationalization, and cosmopolitan processes in the Global South. A radical critical media theory of the South must emerge from the margins, if not the exteriority of globalization, internationalization, cosmopolitanism as offshoots of modernity. These three processes merely represent international world systems and orders for Euro-American economic, cultural, and political hegemony and academic colonialism. A border thinking attitude that is born out of border consciousness and border lived experiences about the Global South’s colonial subalternity in Euro-American modernity should provide both the normative foundation and locus of enunciation for a radical Southern media theory. Task three; Southern critical theory of the media must acknowledge the global coloniality of power not only as structure in service to EuroAmerican modernity, but also as a springboard for a counterhegemonic decolonial critical media theory that envisions media systems that are not captured by global capital or purveyors of cultural racisms. As I argue in this chapter, the colonial matrix of power essentially renders modernity a self-sustaining and self-propelling neocolonial system that assaults and neutralizes alterity and renders the being, subjectivity, culture and life of the non-West meaningless as it is emptied of meaning. Hence, the critical agenda for the Southern critical theory in the field is not only to unmask modernity’s ‘abyssal lines’ on being, subjectivity, race, geography,

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culture, cognitive abilities, but to also transcend them through a decolonial thinking and doing healing process that is based on re-humanizing the West and non-West, the colonizer and the colonized, the border intellectual and the metropolis intellectual (Santos 2007a). Rehbein (2015) argues that a new theory is born in the very act of critique of modernity as an overarching episteme and structure to which Southern theory must respond . Indeed, Southern critical media theory is born out of the critique of the unjust system of Western modernity, its constitutive social theories, and the subsequent liberal and critical media theories that are colonial in orientation. As such, Southern critical media theory must be informed by the fact that Euro-American modernity is colonially structured: it has been variously described as a ‘Euro-centered, capitalist, colonial world power structure’ (Quijano 2000), ‘modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system’ (Grosfoguel 2011) or ‘modern, colonial, gender system’ (Lugones 2007) or simply ‘colonial modernity’ (Mignolo 2011). The myth of modernity as an emancipatory project for the Global South ensnares the Southern critical theorist to write from Northern epistemologies and into the Northern archive and to produce what I call culture-blind media theory that is anachronistic to his social and historical conditions while also unconsciously working in alliance with the imperial theories of Western modernity. As Asante (2008) remind us, ‘the bulk of what Africans, [Asians, and Latin Americans] have written has added to the body of European literature. Even our criticism has been criticism from a European posture, that is, when we have been critical we have used foreign critical categories. Our research often begins with a review of the European literature on our subjects. What we need is a method to prevent the invisibility of our own scholars and history’ (p. 51). The lack of home-grown epistemes and methods produces blind theorization which in turn produces blunt theories that neither re-animate cultural imagination nor re-awaken the ex/colonial subject from the living dead of modernity’s death worlds. As such, the starting point for a truly transformative Southern critical media theory is to view modernity as a global systemic problem that has dehumanized the slave and the master, undermined reason and theory, tainted the soul of our media institutions as deep cultural resources, and finally destroyed the symbolic value of culture through capitalism and mass culture. Southern critical theory must view ‘modernity [as] both a structure of power, and a mode of power. As a structure of power, it is an

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ideology bounded to Western domination and white supremacy…As a mode of power it is implemented by multiple actors and subjectivities that are hierarchically distributed, [and] transversally positioned in front of meta-geographical dualisms such as Europe/Others, West/East, North/South, metropolis/colonies’ (Ascione 2016, p. 2). Southern critical media theory consciously speaks from a colonial subaltern position in this power structure. If it overlooks this and other foundational principles of the structuring effects of global coloniality and the indispensability of our geographies, histories, bodies and minds as the locus of enunciation, it simply becomes, by definition, aberrational, illogical, ambivalent, conservative, and a creator of a double consciousness that produces decentred analytical frameworks and neutralized cultural and political agency. It then might be complicit in the project of coloniality: those ‘long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that [continually] define culture, inter-subjective relations, and knowledge production between [the West and its Others]’ (Maldonado-Torres 2007, p. 247).

The Coloniality of Power: Counterhegemonic Impulses of the Southern Media Theory The concept of the coloniality of power was developed by Anibal Quijano, the late Peruvian decolonial sociologist who argued it was a central, fundamental, and indispensable part of Euro-American modernity. It is, if you like, cause and effect of the ‘emergence of the new Euro-centered, capitalist, colonial world power structure’ (Quijano 2000, p. 221). Since then, other scholars such as Walter Mignolo, Ramon Grosfoguel, and Maldonado-Torres have tried to develop it. There are also several African and Asian scholars who have contributed directly or indirectly to the concept in critique of capitalism and neocolonialism (Wa Thiong’o 1981; Samir 1990). The concept the coloniality of power basically rests on three pillars that are not mutually exclusive. First, Quijano (2000) observed that Euro-American modernity was predicated on a ‘a new pattern of power that was capitalist’ where everything revolved around ‘the axis of capital and world markets: slavery, serfdom, commodity production, and globalization and neocolonial expropriation’ (p. 216, emphasis added). In media and communication studies, Western Marxist political economy scholarship has contributed immensely in unmasking how the media

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and other cultural industries are part of this huge global capitalist edifice (see Croteau and Hoynes 2019; Hesmondhalgh 2013; Mosco 2009; Gurevitch et al. 2005). The global media in particular, together with the global advertising agencies, primarily drive the global capitalist economy that consists mainly of Western-based TNCs. However, the Western critique has always fallen short when it comes to addressing the articulation of colonial difference not only as a ‘condition of possibility of capitalist system and capitalist media moral decadence’ but also as ‘the legitimacy for the subalternization… and the subjugation of the [nonWestern] people’ (Mignolo 2000, p. 18, emphasis added). The free flow of information—a strategic media legal principle now enshrined in many international human rights instruments allowing broadcasting across frontiers—historically emerged within the context of the of global coloniality. The post-1945 information and communication order primarily sought to facilitate ease of communication between the colonial metropolis and the often-distant colonized peripheries in Asia and Africa. The information and communication infrastructure, then as now, is first and foremost for servicing the needs of the empire. Thus, from the vantage epistemic angle of the Global South, it seems barely adequate for political economy to show the entanglement of Western media corporations into global capitalism, without unmasking how these media corporations are the myth-makers of the narratives that hide, legitimize, and sanitize the continued economic exploitation of the darker populations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Southern media theory takes a post-democracy and post-developmentalist view that the media discourses on democracy, human rights, and development media are myth-makers for the global capitalist order. The Anglo-American global media cannot be separated from the web of global coloniality as they exist to justify Euro-American modernity’s paradigm of war be it in the oil-rich countries of the Middle East and Latin America or mineralrich countries in Africa or Asia. As such, Anibal Quijano (2000) helps us in the South to generate a media theory that recasts the media not only as part of an economic system, but a multilayered global system of modern/capitalist/colonial/racial/religious/cultural world system. Second, Quijano (2000) contended that Euro-American modernity was based on a paradigm of difference. In the Global South, it symbolized the advent of a ‘new mental category to codify the relations between the West and the rest of us ’ where ‘race was not meant just to explain the external or physiognomic differences between the West and the rest of us,

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but also the mental and cultural differences’ and ‘since both terms of such a relationship were considered by definition, superior and inferior, the associated cultural differences were codified, respectively, as superior and inferior’ (p. 216, also see Chinweizu 1975). In agreement with Quijano, Mignolo has argued that the concepts of culture and race are indispensable to Euro-American modernity’s ‘classification and reclassification of world populations’ where the media, ‘the church, the state apparatus’ function as a global ‘institutional structure [that] articulate[s] and manage[s] such classifications’ (Mignolo 2000, p. 18). Said (2004) developed the concept of ‘Othering’ to aptly capture how this institutional structure is Eurocentric in every bit of its grain and how characterizations of alterity fail to escape Eurocentrism’s ‘deep structural ways of thought and practices’ (Hostettler 2012, p. 2) that are based on ‘binaries of civilization/barbarism, modernity/tradition’ (ibid., p. 5). These underlying Western cultural beliefs constitute the paradigm of difference as a well spring of racist stereotypes in the media, local or foreign, Western or African because coloniality is a problem originating from the centre, but whose psycho-neurosis is more manifest in the peripheral. Indeed, ‘the dominant media constantly devalorize the lives of people of color while regarding Euro-American life as sacrosanct… The devalorization of life has as its corollary the media penchant for associating the Third World with violent, unnecessary, random death, or with disease and natural disaster’ (Shohat and Stam 2000, p. 24). As such, the Southern critique must not only seek to locate the problem of media representation within modernity’s enduring paradigm of cultural difference, but also expose the hollowness of the myths of cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism as normative theory. Third, Quijano (2000) argued that Euro-American modernity’s paradigm of difference also operated by defining geographical spaces as either civilized or barbaric as part of its cartographies of power. The geographic Global South populations—of course excluding the AngloSaxon axis in Australia, South Africa and New Zealand—represents the primitive geographies. For example, Mahmood Mamdani shows us how the geographical classification of world populations is reminiscent of the ‘nativization’ of Africans as colonialism’s strategy of ‘define and rule’ in the wake of ‘the rise of indirect rule’ by the empire (2012, pp. 1– 7). The management of geo-culturally defined differences was central to control: ‘if the settler was modern, the native was not; if history defined the settler, geography defined the native; if legislation…defined

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modern political society, habitual observance defined that of the native’. If continuous progress was the mark of settler civilization, culture was best thought of as part of nature, fixed and unchanging (p. 6). In Western modernity’s media frame, the non-Western geographies are defined by a primordial social stasis, the blood and soil identities that are caught up in a permanent time warp. Southern critical media theory argues that modernity’s geo-cultural classification and characterizations of world populations would not work effectively without an overarching hegemonic epistemology that naturalizes difference as commonsensical. According to Mignolo (2000), Euro-American modernity thus developed ‘an epistemological perspective from which to articulate meaning and…from which the new production of knowledge could be channeled’ (p. 18). This overarching epistemological perspective is Eurocentrism: in media and communications world it traverses news, films, soap operas, television, and books, sometimes even in media content made by our very own hands in the Global South. The coloniality of power finds its most effective practical manifestation through the ‘colonial matrix of power’ to which the automatic impulse of Southern critical media theory is counterhegemonic resistance (Mignolo 2011). According to Walter Mignolo, the colonial matrix is constitutive of the global coloniality of Euro-American modernity. It can be thought of as the heart and soul of Western modernity: ‘a logical structure that underlines the totality of Western civilization; it is a managerial logic that by now has gone beyond the actors who have created and managed it and, in a sense, it…has managed the actors and all of us. We are all in the matrix’ (Mignolo 2011, p. 16). Perhaps the best way to think of the colonial matrix is as essentially a mosaic of pernicious hegemonic ideologies and structures for the domination and exploitation of the Global South populations in time and space. Although the colonial matrix is rendered invisible, it targets everything in the South: being and personhood, their institutions of knowledge and cultural production, institutions of religious and cultural socialization, the state, politics, and economy. It stops at nothing. The Southern critical media theory is said to be counterhegemonic to Euro-American modernity’s hidden colonial agendas because it is decolonial in character. While ‘anti-coloniality’ suggests resistance to the colonial matrix as an end in and by itself, decoloniality recasts resistance as form of social re-ordering through decolonizing knowledge, being, and culture: it is a transformative theory that imagines just social and cultural systems

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and planetary systems. The decolonial attitude of Southern critical media theory is not an end, but a means to an end in the sense that decoloniality is not just analytic, but also programmatic. Decolonial ‘thinking and doing starts from the analysis of the levels and spheres in which it can be effective in the process of decolonization and liberation from the colonial matrix’ (Mignolo 2011, p. 17). Thus, the Southern critical media theory is not just a critique of Western modernity perse, but an attack of its colonial matrix and its dominant culture that are reflective of modernity’s monocentric and particularistic universalism. The decolonial imperative in the Southern critical media theory presents a multicentric pluriversal cultural order as a resource for a truly multicultural theory in the interdiscipline. As a decolonial epistemology, the Southern critical media theory is ultimately committed to a three-pronged critique: (a) the coloniality of knowledge in field and life world, and the struggle for epistemic freedoms (b) The coloniality of being and culture, and the struggle for social and cultural freedoms (c) The programme of decolonization and deprovincialization as a path to epistemological and cultural liberation in the Global South.

The Coloniality of Knowledge and the Struggle for Epistemic Freedoms in the South In order to unmask the problem of the coloniality of knowledge, the main tasks for the Southern critical theory are twofold. Number one, it must explain the manifestation of the coloniality of knowledge in the theories and disciplinary tropes of media and communication studies. One way of doing that is by examining the relationship between media and communication studies and Euro-American modernity on the one hand, and studying the influence of modernity’s constitutive social theories on the field, on the other hand. In other words, a simple analysis of the relationship between the interdiscipline and modernity should be able to show us the extent to which media and communication theory is in service of colonial modernity and vice versa, and whether or not, the field needs decolonization to allow for the growth of a multicultural theory and the emergence of border theories. Number two, Southern critical theory of the media must identify and explain forms of epistemicides that have undermined the Global South’s contribution in the interdiscipline, including different kinds of epistemic racism or epistemic apartheid that silence knowledges emanating from the margins of the Euro-American

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modernity. Ultimately, Southern critical media theory must advance the struggle for epistemic freedom in Southern media and communication studies. The coloniality of knowledge in media and communication studies is a product of the hegemonic Eurocentric paradigm that often presents itself as universal, omnipresent, transcendental, objective, neutral and a scientific perspective. A classic example of this is Siebert’s Four Theories of the Press (1956) which in reality reflected the manifestation of the deepseated Eurocentric cultural categories about the good, progressive West versus the ugly, backward, and primitive ‘Others’ that extended to theory. These ‘play a crucial role as a conception of otherness, they are templates as it were into which empirical material is forced to fit, whether it is accurate or not ’ (Hostettler 2012, p. 6, italics original). Since Siebert’s Four Theories of the Press, media and communication studies has struggled, perhaps without much success, to break away from Eurocentrism’s domineering centrist ideology that seeks to ‘explain everything in history, geography, [the media, culture], by placing Europe at the centre, through the eyes of Europe, and according to Europe’ (Sunar and Bulut 2016, p. 25). Why is it difficult for most Western media scholars to escape the mental grip the Eurocentrism? It is simply because Eurocentrism has constituted the knowledge order or power structure of the modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world system for the past 500 years. According to Grosfoguel (2009), this power structure is inescapable and we consciously or unconsciously speak from a particular social location and epistemic location in relation to it: ‘No one escapes the class, sexual, gender, spiritual, linguistic, geographical, and racial hierarchies of the ‘modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system’ (p. 13). However, what explains the pervasive problem of the coloniality of knowledge in media and communication studies in the Global South is that Western theory and method always hides its locus of enunciation. In Provincializing Europe (2000) Dipesh Chakrabarty’s, memories of the sedimentation of Marxism in Indian consciousness and academic culture has resonance with experiences of many scholars in Africa and the Global South. As Chakrabarty (2000) put it, it was always easy to forget that Karl Max was German and brought up by that society that fondly referred to him as the young Hegelian. This example reflects the extent to which the Northern archive in the humanities in general and media and communication studies in particular has been able to hide its locus and enunciation and identification. Unlike ‘other traditions of knowledge, the western is

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a point of view that does not assume itself as a point of view. In this way, it hides its epistemic location, paving the ground for its claims about universality, neutrality and objectivity’ (Grosfoguel 2009, p. 11). Here, we witness a peculiar situation where the ability of Western media theory to hide its locus of enunciation turns the average Western, African, and Asian media scholar into an unconscious agent of Eurocentrism and coloniality. Both the ‘oppressor’ and the ‘oppressed’ are in essence victims of a knowledge system that has gained the status of nature, normalcy, and common sense. Consequently, the task for Southern critical theory in media and communication studies is to unmask the problem of the hidden loci of enunciation of Northern media theory. Is it not ironic that even for those theories named after the Western theorists like, Marxism, the Habermasian public sphere, the Weberian model, and the Frankfurt School the theorist represents the visible- invisibility or the present- absence of the subject that speaks? This is because ‘in western philosophy and sciences the subject that speaks is always hidden, concealed, erased from the analysis. The ‘ego-politics of knowledge’ of western philosophy has always privileged the myth of a non-situated ego, ego meaning the conscious thinking subject. Ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location and the subject that speaks are always decoupled’ (Grosfoguel 2008, p. 14). The social location and the epistemic location of the subject are hidden because of delinking or decoupling of Western theorist from his/her ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location and ‘the geopolitical and body-political epistemic location in the structures of colonial power/knowledge’ (ibid., p. 14) The coloniality of knowledge imputes the universal value of truth to Eurocentrism so that the media contexts and ontologies of the Global South do not really matter to South. Based on Hegelian belief in the ‘cunning of reason’, Western media theory becomes not only immensely mobile, but also a subtle form of academic colonialism over alterity and its contexts. Hence, the ‘success of the modern/colonial world system consists precisely in making subjects that are socially located on the oppressed side of the colonial difference think epistemically like the ones in dominant positions’ (Grosfoguel 2008, p. 64). The coloniality of knowledge means our intellectual role as situated cultural thinkers in the South is either rendered useless or allowed significance only to the degree of providing descriptive case studies within Western orthodox.

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The coloniality of knowledge in media and communication studies simultaneously operates as the coloniality of culture and worldviews. For example, the poverty and epistemic closure of Western critical theory to the most pressing public communication questions of our time is partly because it is monocentric, colonial, and provincial in character. All Eurocentric theory—liberal or critical—is fundamentalist and essentialist. And ‘what all fundamentalisms share (including the Eurocentric one) is the premise that there is only one sole epistemic tradition from which to achieve Truth and Universality’ (Grosfoguel 2009, p. 11). In every heart of Eurocentric media theory lies the epistemic line, an offshoot of the DuBoisan colour line, that creates dualisms of reasoning between the West and its ‘Others’. Eurocentric media theory allows no space for a multicultural critical media theory because it has positioned itself as an allknowing episteme based on its false ‘non- situated, universal, God-eyed view knowledge’ (Grosfoguel 2009, p. 15). Put differently, other cultures have nothing to offer because they are deemed traditional, primitive, and unmodern thanks to modernity’s colonization of time where Africa, Asia, and Latin America always represent the past and obsolete knowledges of tradition and superstition (Shippen 2014). Molefe Asante has provided us with some examples that demonstrate the coloniality of knowledge, and by extension, theory in media and communication in the Global South. For example, Eurocentrism has failed to understand African orature and its diasporas as representative of ‘a total body of oral discourses, styles, and traditions of a people’ (Asante 1998, p. 26). Molefi uses the popular example of African speech where the codes and conventions of speech of that genre, particularly the folkloric storytelling genre, allows the audience to actively participate at given intervals. However, the Western view of speech ‘as an uninterrupted spoken discourse demonstrates either a disregard or ignorance of the African tradition of speech’ (p. 2). Epistemic colonization is by definition impervious to the cultural experiences of other people outside the Euro-American existence. Molefe brusquely puts it: ‘Often ignorant of African philosophy and culture, [Eurocentric] commentators have imposed Western constructs and values on material that grows out of coherent, albeit different traditions. The result has been the failure to understand or value that material as well as the inability to recognize and correct that failure’ (p. 26). This is how coloniality operates, what is said is as important as what is unsaid just as what it does is as important as what it does not: epistemic racism is not just extractivism and erasure,

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it also defines and rules what can or cannot be deemed knowledge. The task for Southern critical media theory is priming its epistemic disobedience by way of unmasking the epistemic line and rebuilding the South as an alternative epistemology for cognitive and cultural freedoms. Ngugi Wa Thiong’o talks about how colonialism amounted to the assault, destruction, and ‘dismembering’ of a people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America: their way of life and worldview. Wherever it went, colonialism committed genocides (physical mass murders), linguicides (destruction of indigenous languages), and epistemicides (the destruction of knowledge and worldviews). He argues ‘of course, colonialists did not literally cut off the heads of the colonized or physically bury them alive. Rather, they dismembered the colonized from memory, turning their heads upside down and burying all the memories they carried’ (Wa Thiong’o 2009, p. 7). While the dismembering of the African-Americans and the AfroCaribbeans came with enslavement and the total loss of their languages, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o argues that of Africans was succeeded by ‘linguistic famine’ (linguifam) as colonialism banned local languages at school and other official places. Linguifam has now transformed into linguicide and epistemicide due to neoliberal globalization and the dominance of English, French, and Portuguese in the media and other cultural institutions in most African countries. African languages are no longer carriers of knowledge because they have been reduced to the relics of the past and are now merely of sentimental value. The continued use of colonial languages in the post-colonies of the Global South reproduces the coloniality of knowledge and coloniality of being because to ‘assume a [ foreign language] and a [foreign] culture, is to support the weight of a foreign [civilization’ (Fanon 2008, p. 8). Similarly, to lose a language is to lose the self, a culture, and a social perspective to any question. Euro-American modernity has created a false binary between the body and language or the body and culture, yet as Mignolo intelligently argues ‘Languages are not something human beings have but they are part of what human beings are’ they ‘are embedded in the body and in the memories of each person’ (Mignolo 2006, p. 210). In the face of the continued linguicides, culturecides, and epistemicides, the task of Southern critical media theory is not to count the tombstones of the buried indigenous knowledge systems of the Global South, but to dig them up, polish and restore them through a deliberate psychotherapeutic process that recasts black consciousness, endogeneity, and indigeneity as

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a sites of cultural and epistemic struggle to recover the past and present, and forge decolonial futures of a liberated and free subject.

On the Problem of the Coloniality of Social Theory in the Field Media and communication studies lies at the centre of Euro-American modernity. There is no doubt that the interdiscipline is the bastion of the coloniality of knowledge and its decolonization is way overdue given the centrality of communication in the cultural and epistemic liberation of the non-Western subjects. As a field as well as a process, ‘mass communication was instrumental in the twentieth century crusade of modernity where it remained a key element in the unfolding of the future’ (Hardt 2004, p. 3). I have already alluded earlier to how the mass media guided by the works of media scholars like Everette Rogers, Wilbur Schrum, and many others advanced the ethnocentric modernization project amounting to the colonization of the cultures and knowledges of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Their media research was often administrative and policydriven in nature seeking on the one hand to modernize or civilize the non-Westerners, while on the other hand also being informed by and confirmative of the very stereotypes modernization that were racist and colonial. I want to elaborate this debate by focusing on the conundrum of theory in media and communication studies especially within the context of the coloniality of knowledge. To begin with, Euro-American modernity does not view itself as a temporality, but as a hegemonic history— and through Eurocentrism—a totalizing conceptual apparatus or what Gennaro Ascione calls ‘modernity as an episteme’ (2016, p. 80). Therefore, Southern critical theory of the media and communication must be able to reflect on the problematic affinity between media theory and the social theories of modernity. Can the Global South ever be able to think inside modernity? Can we be able to generate media and cultural theory within modernity? Following Immanuel Wallerstein’s advice, ‘we need to “unthink” nineteenth century social science, because many of its presumptions-which, in my view, are misleading and constrictivestill have far too strong a hold on our mentalities. These presumptions, once considered liberating of the spirit, serve today as the central intellectual barrier to useful analysis of the world’ (Wallerstein 2001, p. 1). A Southern critical theory must illuminate the pathway out of

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the entangled connections between coloniality, modernity, and Eurocentrism, or better still, ‘the indissoluble status of modernity-EurocentrismColoniality’ (Ascione 2016). Some European media scholars have already discussed some of the questions, albeit within the ambit of less radical postmodernist critique. For instance, in his very reflective and disciplinary introspective book about the media and the field titled Emancipation, the Media and Modernity, Nicholas Garnham (1992) places hope for transforming the media, society, and by implication the interdiscipline in the continuous project of the critique of Western modernity and its social theories. For the Global South intellectual, the field cannot be fully understood outside the overarching influence of modernity and its constitutive corpus of social theories that permeate the arts, humanities, and even social sciences. It is Western modernity that birthed the modern knowledge order entrenched through the hegemony of its social theory that wears a façade of universality while concealing its provincialism in so many disciplines. As a framework and a historical moment, Euro-American modernity gives us the insight to see how history, philosophy, and theory in media and communication studies have developed from the outset, and how the three are obdurately inseparable and connected. Indeed, it is Western social theory with its numerous ideological shifts and turns that lay the foundation for media and communication studies today. From the father of Western modernity Rene Descartes, to Immanuel Kant, to Friedrerick Hegel, to Karl Marx, to John Stuart Mill and many others that followed, the imprint of Western social philosophy in media and communication studies is as indelible as it is undeniable. Like the sea is to the fish, so is Western social thought to media and communication studies. Only a proverbial fool would remove the fish from the sea to study it on land in order to understand how it swims, twists, and turns in the sea waters. To study the media is to study Western modernity: its social orders, its history, its politics, its culture, its value systems, and its constitutive social theories. Similarly, to study the dominant epistemologies and social theories that underpin and define media and communication studies today is to open oneself to the sociology of knowledge of the West: its ideas, beliefs, attitudes, worldviews, and assumptions about the ‘Self’ and its ‘Others’. For example, sociologist, Julian Go, explains how Darwinist theories of evolution propelled a Western imperial belief in the self-gratifying myths of progress and difference used to justify colonialism. He observes that:

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‘Difference was the very structure of the new order. The rising empires created hierarchical social…divisions between metropole and colony… Along with these practical divisions came an explosion of difference talk at home and abroad; an unprecedented discursive proliferation about the “civilized” versus the “uncivilized,” the “superior” versus the “inferior”; and a new emphasis on racialized difference and biology, blood, and stock’ (p. 87). Sociological theories produced a culturally modelled Eurocentric public sphere as ‘Victorian middle-class readerships of new [ethnocentric] periodicals and literature expanded’ (ibid., p. 5). Indeed, Garnham (2000) paints a picture of the complex interconnection between media and communication studies, Western social theories, and Western modernity. He contends that ‘the study of the media is… part of, and must be [ultimately] grounded in the human sciences. We study [the media] because they give us a way into the general questions of social theory. The questions we ask about the media and the answers we give to those questions can only be understood within the context of social theory more generally’ (Garnham 2000, p. 5). Through the lens of social theory, we study the media, but the media too ‘raise…central questions about social theory’ because ultimately ‘questions about the media are questions about the kind of society we live in, and vice-versa’ (p. 5). From this perspective, it seems to me that the decolonization of media and communication studies or any other related discipline for that matter, is a mammoth task that requires a close interrogation of not only the relationship between history and ideas, but also how historical epochs and their defining social interactions ultimately shape concepts and theories. Hence, the task for the Southern critical media theory is to realign critique and ethics, theory and morality in the sense of developing ‘the praxis of liberation from the perspective of the victims, as they confront the effects of oppressive norms, acts, microstructures, institutions, or [un]ethical systems in the context of everyday life’ (Dussel and Vallega 2013, p. xxviii). It is theory that must conscientizes the ex/colonial subalterns in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to produce their own media and counter-narratives of resistance that are based on their cultures, worldviews, and cosmologies. Put differently, for the Global South to unmask the cultural politics, bio-politics, and geo-politics encapsulated in media and communication studies’ rich inventory of Western critical theories, it must confront modernity’s social theory project as the epistemological soil that feeds and nurtures the interdiscipline. That appears to me to be the primary task of

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the decolonial turn in its pursuit to reconfigure media and communication studies through the twin counter-strategies of decolonizing theory from the North and de-provincializing theory from the South.

The Coloniality of Being and the Struggle for Cultural Freedoms I have touched a bit on the colonial of being in my discussion of the coloniality of knowledge. This is because both are mutually constitutive. One is a direct consequence of another. Southern critical media theory must disentangle their connections to emphasize the indispensability of epistemic freedoms to cultural freedoms and that of cultural freedoms to epistemic freedoms. Only a decolonized mind is able to decipher the value of culture both as a repository of knowledge and site for a decolonized media theory. Maldonado-Torres (2007) has extended the concept of the coloniality of being beyond just the notion of hegemony of Euro-American modernity on non-White populations. Building on the concept of the colour line, he argues that the coloniality of being ‘indicates those aspects that produce exception from the order of Being [where Western modernity creates] …a non-human or rather an inhuman world [Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans]. The coloniality of Being refers not merely to the reduction of the particular to the generality of the concept or any given horizon of meaning, but to the violation of the meaning of human alterity to the point where the alter-ego becomes a sub-alter’ (Maldonado-Torres 2007, p. 257). The coloniality of being is synonymous with social death or a life of an incomplete death: you are neither living nor are dying at the same time. The coloniality of being ‘appears in historical projects and ideas of civilization which advance colonial projects of various kinds inspired or legitimized by the idea of race. [It] is therefore co-extensive with the production of the color-line in its different expressions and dimensions’ (p. 257). As Maldonado-Torres further argues coloniality always produces liminal subjects: those that suffer a reverting sense of double consciousness and schizophrenia. The production of a radical Southern media theory in the field can only be possible if the colonial subalterns of Euro-American modernity begin a self-emancipatory critique of this liminality and double consciousness because this denies them a centre, a vantage geo-cultural and epistemic location of theory,

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‘to think from where [they] stand’ (Mignolo 1999, p. 235). The popularity of Marxism in the field offers a good example since it has been used to conceptualize the variegated terrains of struggles for freedom in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. However, for all its rigour on economic and class analysis, Du Bois (1904) long observed that Marxism inherently lacked the analytical impulse for the problem of racism in Western modernity. Du Bois’ (1904, p. 38) argued, ‘there was no automatic power in [Marxism] to suppress race prejudice’. DuBois laid down the foundation for a Southern critical media theory by developing the concepts of the colour line and double consciousness that characterized liminal existence in Western modernity (Appelrouth and Edles 2012). The colour line points to racism as a discourse, structure, and institution of discrimination used to invent white supremacy as ‘a system that is historical, cultural, social, political, metaphysical, legal, extra-legal, epistemic, economic, global, and somatic’ (Rabaka 2010, p. 62). Indeed, Du Bois long observed that racism as a discourse sustained Euro-American modernity and all its modes of capitalist accumulation. As a decolonial theoretical ancestor, Du Bois must be to the colonial subalterns of Euro-American modernity what Marx is to the European class subalterns. The DuBoisan decolonial epistemology in Southern critical media theory is an indispensable tool for analysing the dehumanizing representations of the non-West as murderers, rapists, primitive, violent, and barbaric in the media and how those representations intersect with local and global white supremacist ideologies. For DuBois, the critique of race as a social construct of modernity provides a moral foundation for the struggle against racial and capitalist oppression. Euro-American modernity is ‘dependent on the co-operation of systemic racism…The system exists because of racism, not the other way round’ (Asante 1998, p. 5). Although this struggle against racial modernity intersects with class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, we must not conflate it with class struggle, nationalism, and feminism since it has its own distinct locus of identification: the colour line and its dehumanizing impulses. You cannot be a worker before you are a human being and neither can you be a woman before you are a human being. Humanity is at the centre of all decolonial struggles against colonial modernity and its colonial media systems. To stress the point of humanity, however, is not to deny the importance of simultaneity of struggle because of the reality of intersectionality. However, it is to emphasize that unless global coloniality is

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confronted the problem of colour line will continue to be the problem of the twenty-first century and beyond (Young and Braziel 2006).

Conclusion The contribution of decoloniality to critical thought on media goes beyond deconstructing racism, colonialism, and capitalism. The Duboisan colour line is increasingly seen as a metaphor for other lines that represent ideologies of domination such as the gender line, the tribal line, the sexuality line, and the nationality line (see Santos 2007a). In media studies, these lines are seen in the most chauvinist forms of representation that are deeply patriarchal, tribal, sexist, and xenophobic. Whereas European critical theorists saw capitalism as a mere colonization of the life world by the money system, decoloniality requires us to focus more on the ‘overlapping, interlocking, and intersecting systems of violence, exploitation, and oppression in the guileful guises of racism, sexism, and colonialism’ (Rabaka 2010, p. 7). The Southern critical theory demystifies claims of a post-racial dispensation by showing how racist, tribalistic, and sexist classifications continue to underpin media organizations, cultural production, representations in the metropolis as well as the periphery. It must attack all forms coloniality, including those that are reproduced in locally to advance the interests of African, Asian, and Latin American elites. Coloniality as modernity’s hidden objective is inseparable from modernity itself and in reality, works to advance a worldview that makes the non-Western subject view and judge himself relative to Whiteness. For example, the non-European, especially black Africans, have internalized racial inferiority in ways that could be described as schizophrenic. The African in the post-colony is characterized by a double consciousness that abhors and rejects African knowledge and culture, while constantly seeking acceptance from the White world. This neurosis has blacks unconsciously ‘rejecting blackness and embracing whiteness without realizing that what they are really rejecting are white supremacist anti-black racist constructions and misrepresentations’ (Rabaka 2010, p. 66). Rabaka’s observation is very important because it underscores the necessity of a critical theory of media and culture in the border that is rooted in the ethics of decolonial humanism. Africans are denied dignity even by the media they produce with their own hands because Euro-American modernity has produced ‘Whiteness as the [only] mode of humanness’ (Gordon 2000, p. 3). Therefore, decolonizing theory must represent a project of

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the humanization of the Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans. Humanization is not only about the reclaiming of African or Asian dignity, but also about ‘moving the centre from Eurocentrism, Afrocentrism, and Asian-centrism by ‘placing African ideals at the centre of [theory] and analysis that involves African culture, behaviour, and communication’ (Asante 1998, p. 2).

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CHAPTER 5

Academic and Epistemic Freedoms: Struggles of the Border Intellectual in Media Studies

All of us live in a society, and are members of a nationality with its own language, tradition, historical situation. To what extent are intellectuals’ servants of these actualities, to what extent enemies ? Edward Said (1994, p. 15) Art for art’s sake is just another piece of deodorized dog shit. Chinua Achebe (1975, p. 19) Every writer is a writer in politics. The only question is whose and what politics?. Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (1981, p. 1)

Introduction In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela says something that is very intriguing. He recollects how after 27 years of incarceration at Robin Island as a political prisoner, he began to appreciate the freedom to just take a walk in his garden in the yard. He explains that when you have been in prison for nearly three decades, you begin to appreciate the freedom to make even the smallest decisions about your life: to bath, to eat, to walk, or sleep without orders from anyone. The prison is a powerful institution of psychological conditioning, domination, and control. It is a ‘hard border’ characterised by

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highwalls, isolation, surveillance, and patrol. Hence, it makes you cherish that which is so mundane and ordinary to other people. This anecdotal story is so fitting particularly to the border intellectual in the universities of the imperial South and imperial North. As we shall see, it helps to unmask the invention of ‘transcultural elites’ and speaks directly to the complex processes of the formation of the border intellectuals and their social consciousness in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Goh 2008; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018; Nicholas 2013; Beckman and Adeoti 2006; Mkandawire 2005). According to Georgette Wang, this is important because it can help us to understand the present-day anatomy of the coloniality of knowledge in the South. She contends that while ‘an effort has been made to uncover Eurocentrism in communication theories and the negative consequences such a problem brings, little attention has been paid to academic communities outside the mainstream West’ (2011, p. 56). What is the condition of the border intellectual? In conditions of a pervasive coloniality in academic institutions, to what extent can the border intellectual be transcultural without losing his own cultural consciouness and agency? I have used the metaphor of the border here to capture Euro-American modernity’s constraining epistemic and intellectual boundaries over the so-called ‘darker nationalities’ (Prashad 2012) where blackness as a biopolitical concept is a ‘mediator of governmentality’ that automatically triggers ‘the [world of] racial surveillance and regulation into existence’ (Clough and Willse 2011, p. 5). In the imperial South and the imperial North university, the non-Western intellectual is a border intellectual, a border jumper, or border crosser of the race boundaries imposed by the Hegelian line on the intellectual capabilities of different races. In the postcolonies of the imperial South, the freedom of this intellectual supposedly came with the end of colonialism as a political order with an administrative structure. However, the metaphysical empire has kept him in an open prison for over 500 years through the unrelenting grip of the coloniality of knowledge and coloniality of being. Not realising that he is still in a prison thanks to the bio-politics of the new deterritorialized empire, he walks with a sense of freedom: a hollow freedom. It is the freedom to do as he likes in the university. He can teach, research, and publish as much as he likes to meet the increasingly quantitative demands of the corporatized imperial university. However, unbeknown to him, he can only do this within the rubric, mores, and norms of the neoliberal imperial university that long captured and disciplined his mind, body, and soul. Europe in the

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Asian and African university is not just an abstract figment of the border imagination: Europe is method, Europe is theory, Europe is episteme, and Europe is destiny literally and metaphorically. Every day, the border intellectual has to deal with ‘the silent and everyday presence of European [method] and thought’ (Chakrabarty 2000 p. 11). Indeed, the grip of the imperial university’s overarching logic of coloniality is inescapable, save to a few black and white intellectuals who still sit and think outside the ‘neoliberal choruses that echo the prevailing policy view of the global business and political elites who long occupied the universities ’ (Said 1994, p. 32, emphasis added). In the imperial North and imperial South, the university is a place of academic illusions for the border intellectual. The illusions of academic freedom, academic choice, academic institutional culture, and intellectual sovereignty run really deep. The reality, however, is often poignantly different. In South Africa, for example, the human survival instinct against the psychic and moral violence of these illusions triggered the Rhodes Must Fall protests in 2015. The protests were not from the university professors, but students. Black students, ironically the majority in South Africa’s top universities like the University of Cape Town, University of Witwatersrand, and University of Rhodes, felt that they were culturally invisible and epistemologically disenfranchised by a heavily Eurocentric curricular in the universities. Consequently, their resistance reverberated even in the metropolises of the North especially at some of the British universities. In some South African universities, student resistance spawned some cosmetic changes of renaming buildings usually from the apartheid names to the luminaries of the struggle against racism and discrimination. This could be perhaps because student resistance began as a response to colonial cartographies within the university where white statues from the apartheid era like that of Rhodes where defaced or removed by student movements. More recently, there has been a move to put black African intellectuals in the universities’ top management as Vice-Chancellors, create Centres and Institutes that study economic, political, and cultural possibilities of the BRICS formation (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), consolidate on South-South co-operation in internationalization and partnerships between universities, etc. While some of these symbolic acts are undeniably of strategic importance, the experience elsewhere in Africa or even Asia shows that the Africanization or Asianization of the university is not necessarily the same thing as its decolonization. Africanization and

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Asianization are not liberation concepts as such, but change paradigms that attend to the form, content, and aesthetics of the university and its academic project based on the indigenization and localization imperatives. In those circumstances, the university can be black in every sense, but still imperial. Its academic programmes such as media and communication can also be black and African, but still Eurocentric and colonial in character. At its most utopic level, decoloniality is about giving birth to a new man (or woman), black or white, who believes not only in a university as a pluriversity accommodating not only all ways on knowing, but also expressing the virtues of a common humanity as a basis of a decolonized university. Meanwhile, an untransformed imperial university continues to ‘operate as a space for the ongoing recruitment, management, and production of imperial violence against [the border intellectual and black] communities as it imagines, articulates, and arranges the spaces of symbolic and material necropolitics within and beyond the university’ (Durazo 2014, p. 191). Necropolitics, a concept that tries to go beyond Foucauldian bio-politics and governmentality as we know it, captures something akin to the ‘social death’ of an individual or a population (see Koljevi´c 2015; Clough and Willse 2011; Patterson 1982). It is about something above and beyond the disciplining power of bio-politics and how that is strategically ‘deployed [as a weapon] for…maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds [where] new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to the status of [the] living dead’ (Mbembe 2003, p. 40). Ernesto Velásquez rightly uses the metaphor of blood that insinuates culturally deadly institutions. He observes that ‘there is a lot of blood under these universities. Education is often broached in a way that forgets about the soil upon which these buildings rest’ (2016, p. ix). The emphasis is always on education’s ability for upward mobility in terms of class and not its praxis for a transformative liberation philosophy on global coloniality. Indeed, necropolitics is the imperial university’s strategic choice of the art of cultural war that is used to reduce the border intellectual, a permanent insider-outsider of the imperial university, into the walking dead. He may be a prolific media and communications scholar, but has been reduced to an intellectual zombi who only thinks and writes within the master frames of Western cultural and critical theory. Like a slave, his intellectual labour hopelessly tries to speak in and through an epistemology that is, in the final analysis, set to disown him

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and alienate his being. Indeed, even in theorizing his cultural condition, he is ‘blind to the role of [coloniality and the empire’s] capitalist “structure” and [racial] “order” in dominating and disciplining the border’ (Michaelsen and Johnson 1997, p. 3). This project of a slow social death rids him of his cultural worldview and inducts him as a permanent inhabitant of the zone of none-being. It re-orients his mindset into the institutional culture that is undergirded by Eurocentric academic recognition and validation systems. This control is so deep and invisible to its victim: it has percolated into the very grain of his individuality and essence of his being that he accepts it as commonsensical and natural. While the university in the South and its academic programmes are now on autopilot from the empire through the curriculum or offshore Euro-American educational programmes, the coloniality of knowledge is now also mostly self-administered through the ‘willful demeaning of indigenous intersections of life and learning by the locals’ (Wang 2011, p. 58). The border intellectual suffers from ‘a tendency to place greater value in ideas and things Western and treat them as axial to learning and research’ (p. 58). Hence, the imperial university of the South operates more like an open prison and academic freedom is its necropower: you can enjoy the freedom, but the very same freedom amounts to self-surveillance not to stray beyond the invisible prison walls of Eurocentrism. Thus, for ages the media scholar from the Global South has always celebrated academic freedom, a concept whose value has been useful only to the extent of dealing with state and sometimes market interference in teaching and research. As a concept, academic freedom has been effective in questioning kinds of interference from visible power structures like government, business, and donors. However, it does not question the pathologization and inferiorization of African, Asian, and Latin American thought by the West. It has a blind spot for epistemic racism because epistemic racism is hidden, systemic, and subtle: it is part of the very fabric or body politic of Euro-American modernity. While state interference with academic freedom is obviously dangerous even in the Global South, the pathologizing and inferiorizing of thought of the non-Western intellectual is even more dangerous because it is somatic, invisible, insidious, decimating, and necropolitical. Pathologization and inferiorization not only silence the border intellectual, but an entire population by giving it an epistemology and a conceptual worldview that amounts to a language that alienates and destroys the very subject that endeavours to master it.

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In the humanities and media studies, it produces decentred scholarship that speaks from everywhere, except its own geo-cultural and epistemic centre. This is not to suggest that academic freedom is not important or relevant to the border: it is and for a number of reasons. In fact, it would be foolhardy for the Global South to think that since the concept does not go far enough to deal with the deep-seated problem of epistemic freedom and virtue, it is therefore useless. Everyday threats to academic freedom are many, but that of the state is always hovering above the university in many countries of the Global South. Habib et al. (2008) remind us about the persistent problem of the state interference in Africa: ‘Often invited as a paying passenger, the state [always] end[s] up in the driving seat, to the discomfiture of many academics [who] become ever more closely monitored and controlled, an ironic result of moves to create universities intended to be more representative of the whole population’ (p. 142). In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, state interference in academic freedom often looms large. In fact, academic freedom is at a higher risk in most states of the Global South that are still grappling with the problem of institutionalizing democracy and human rights. However, the modes of censorship have shifted from the draconian strategies of the victimization, arrests, and detentions of intellectuals, cultural workers and political activists that characterized the socialist political systems of the cold war epoch especially in Africa. Now subtle forms of control are more pronounced through strategies like rewarding academics for political loyalty to the ruling party and the state, institutionalizing surveillance and control of online research platforms, and establishing gatekeeping systems against subversive and counterhegemonic literature by the national customs departments. In Zimbabwe, for example, the ruling party, Zanu PF, owns and controls Kingstons, the main national academic book retailor in the country. The failure of the state to embrace academic freedom in Africa and the Global South must be viewed within the broader context of the failure of general democratic reforms. As Dlamini (2002) observes of Africa ‘despite the shift by many African states from one-party systems to multi-party democracy, on the whole a culture of democracy and freedom cannot be said to have developed [in Africa]. If it is true that the indivisibility of human freedom means that autonomy and academic freedom thrive only in a free and democratic society, [then] it is clear that most of the African states cannot be expected to be defenders of university autonomy and

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academic freedom’ (p. 77). However, it is the shift of the geo-political centre of power from the West to the East that presents new challenges that call for a new and robust debate about academic freedom in different cultural and political contexts of the Global South. This is also because the shift to the East is not only geo-political and economic, but also considered to be epistemic and ideological by many. For example, China, a rising economic and political superpower of the twenty-first century, has always been guided by a completely different value system that is predicated on socialist ideologies about the role of intellectuals in society and their relation to the party and the state. Although the Chinese socialist market economy is now dominated by the mixed model of state and corporate capitalism, the reality is that politically the ideology of the Communist Party of China looms large over state policy. It is capitalism without neoliberal political values. Unlike the African elite hypocrisy of practising democracy by sunrise and authoritarianism by sunset in order to please Western donors and governments, China presents a real challenge to academic freedom globally and in turn to how the role of media and communication studies is conceptualized. In addition to vocational skills, can Chinese media and communication studies openly produce media graduates who are committed to social justice and critical of government as the higher-order ethics for the journalism profession? What about speaking truth to power by both the intellectual and the media? What about its gobal influence through its media programmes and its media systems existing within South-South frameworks? China ‘does not permit free and open critical inquiry in its higher education system’ and its ‘education and research systems are [seen as] arms of government and the Government is openly hostile to the idea of academic freedom’ (Fitzgerald 2016, p. 9). Yet the liberalization of the higher education landscape has witnessed a growing footprint of Western universities in China, including those that offer media and communication studies where a number of Western scholars have moved to teach. This melting pot creates an interesting dynamic. With the ever-growing geo-political and economic and cultural influence of China in the Global South and the systemic and epistemic crisis in the Global North, the previously silenced non-Western ontologies, histories, struggles, voices, and cultures may demand a rethinking, unthinking, unlearning or at the very best, a realignment of the Western idea of academic freedom with their realities. We are perhaps finally witnessing the clash not of civilizations as such, but the monotopic cultural view of the West and the Chinese

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cultural order, leading perhaps to the first real labour pains for a pluritopic view of the world as a multiverse of cultures, thinking, concepts, and worldviews.

Academic Freedom: History, Philosophy, and Border Reflections Academic freedom is a complex and multidimensional concept that not only deals with academic practice, but also institutional governance in universities. At its core in the liberal-pluralist formulation, academic freedom is about protecting the intellectual rights of academics and the integrity of the academic project (Karran 2009; Fish 2014; Aby and Kuhn 2000). It is ‘that freedom of members of the academic community, [disciplines and interdisciplines such as media and communication studies], assembled in colleges and universities, which underlines the effective performance of their functions of teaching, learning, [and] research’ (Fuchs 1963, p. 432). At the level of professional practice, academic freedom is physically expressed through the academics’ ‘desire to order [their] own affairs with minimum interference from outside’ (Fish 2014, p. 10). It is the academic who must decide what to teach, who to teach it to, how to teach it, why teach it, and when to teach based on the ethics of his community of practice. Here, the academic is very protective of their authority that is derived from their claim to expert knowledge and ‘will not willingly cede [that] sphere of control to others’ (p. 21). The question of institutional governance as a means of predicating academic freedom on the institutional autonomy is by no means an easy one. ‘Without institutional autonomy, academic freedom is not possible. The problem, therefore, is to propose an approach creating maximum space for academic freedom’ (Habib et al. 2008, p. 148). Institutional governance seeks to balance various contending interests comprising those of academics, students, administrators, and shareholders in the university. These competing interests, increasingly problematic due to the rise of managerialism and corporatism in the university, must be balanced in ways that create autonomy and the academic freedom in disciplines as sites of the production of kinds of theory that ‘repopulate the agora, re-animate critical citizenship, and emancipate the colonial subalterns ’ (Bauman 2001, p. 25, emphasis added). In other words, institutional governance is about who must govern the university and how this should

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be implemented to enhance the freedom of teaching and inquiry. Theoretically, the shared governance approach is often touted as the most preferred model although there are numerous bottlenecks in practice. It is informed by the perceived benefits of democratic participation as opposed to centralized control of the university by state technocrats, bureaucrats, or administrators. Faculty involvement in institutional governance mainly through committees is seen as indispensable in the protection of the academic freedom ideal. The participation of academics in key decisionmaking on the academic programme is also perceived as a guarantor of their academic freedom. In liberal theory, participation is a human right. However, as a human right, it is not an end in itself, but a means to an end, which in this case is the protection of intellectual freedom. As I argue later in this chapter, in order to develop an informed critique of academic participation in institutional frameworks, it must be contextualized within a political economy critique of the neoliberalism and free-market forces to unmask the power relations at play. These two ideologies have reduced universities to a corporate culture of managerialism rooted in the view of education as a service to the students who are increasingly seen as citizenconsumers (Bailey and Freedman 2011). In this new context, the power of academics to fend off interference by the twin forces of the neoliberal state and the market is increasingly feeble and vain, not only in the Global South but also the North itself. In essence, both practice-oriented and governance-oriented approaches to academic freedom seek to prevent and resist undue interference by the state, the market, the church, or the so-called philanthropic actors. Power must not be allowed to unduly influence the form and content of the curricular even if it enjoys funding or allocative control over the university. In discussing the ideological and structural aspects of academic freedom, I should however state that I am less interested in the modalities of achieving academic freedom as an ideal than critically evaluating it as an idea or philosophy. Indeed, the idea of academic freedom is latent in the big philosophical question of what is the role of the intellectual in society and what relationship, if any, must he or she have with the state, market, civil society, culture, and community? This question is often answered differently from society to society depending on the social context and exigences within which academic freedom is being negotiated (Said 1994; Jennings and Kemp-Welch 1997). In other words, academic freedom is not just an institutional concept, it is also largely a societal and historical concept that is subject to social shaping. If this premise is correct, this

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means that there is a possibility to rethink academic freedom not as a rigid liberal concept, but one that is socially and historical contingent. Perhaps it may even be more realistic to think of academic freedom as existing in a continuum or as a site of ideological struggle than as a static concept that you either have or not have. In more radical critiques, it should not even be surprising that academic freedom imagined as Olympian detachment may be nothing more than a Western myth and the claims of its universality a mere disregard of non-Western worldviews about the role of the intellectuals in their societies. Yet, the irony is that even ‘universities [in the West] are not, and never have been, pristine sites of autonomous intellectual labour- you only have to consider the close collaboration between many universities and the defence and security industries across the world’ (Bailey and Freedman 2011, p. 2). Although the concept of academic freedom now has a very long history and greater purchase even in the Global South, it is clear that as imagined in Western epistemology it fails to go far enough in the liberation of African, Asian, and Latin American reason. Many scholars contend that while academic freedom is certainly important for the academy in the Global South, the lack of epistemological freedom is the real main problem that has undermined most intellectual projects from the Global South (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018; Gordon 2011; Mahbubani 2009). In his book Can the Asians Think? the Singaporean intellectual, Kishore Mahbubani is confronted with the question of the significance of epistemic freedom over academic freedom in Asia just as Ngugi Wa Thiong’o is confronted with the same in Decolonizing the Mind. They all conclude in some fashion that academic freedom in an ‘epistemic prison’ is useless because it lacks transformative agency (Mahbubani 2009; Wa Thiong’o 1986). Whereas academic freedom implies a legalistic, democratic, and rightsbased approach to conceptualizing and protecting autonomous academic pursuit for truth and knowledge, epistemic freedom is principally about the ‘shift in the geography of reason [from the North to the South, Euro-American centres to African, Asian, and Latin American centres of thought]’ (de Allen 2012, p. 394). It is about ‘moving the centre’ (Wa Thiong’o 1993) to have a better and much clearer view of the self, our cultures, and the world as a global context within which we make sense of the self. As such, academic freedom and epistemic freedom are not only different, but they also emerge from radically different social struggles that are shaped by social pressures occurring in different social contexts.

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Historically, academic freedom is a Northern neoliberal concept that is informed by the ontologies and histories of the West. It is a EuroAmerican concept that was occasioned by Enlightenment as the age of secular reasoning. It ‘originated in Greece, [and] spread to Europe, especially under the impact of the Renaissance and came to maturity in the Age of Reason’ (Fuchs, p. 431, Also see Karran 2009). In North America, it received greater nuance in the twentieth century, especially through the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 1915. However, for both Europe and North America, academic freedom as the freedom of thought and enquiry was a product of a protracted struggle between religion and science. It was a struggle that ‘pitted the clerical against the scientific; the sectarian against the secular; the authoritarian against the empiricist; and the doctrinalist against the naturalist’ (Bilgrami and Stone 2015, p. 15). Clearly then, academic freedom evolved as part of the democracy and human rights paradigm that advanced the myths of freedom of thought and opinion. Bergan (2002), for example, argues, ‘a democratic society is hardly conceivable without … academic freedom’ (p. 9). Academic freedom is also perceived as ‘indicative of freedom within wider society such that where academic freedom is limited, other freedoms, like freedom of speech and expression are likely to be in jeopardy’ (Karran 2009, p. 3). Consequently, the globalization and internationalization of academic freedom is not any different from that of other Enlightenment values and may serve more to hide its locus of enunciation than truly advance the same rights to the border intellectual in the South. It therefore should not be surprising that in reality the meaning and practice of academic freedom for the average border intellectual in the imperial university has largely been vacuous amounting to sheer mimicry and parrotry of EuroAmerican critical and cultural reasoning models. It is the kind of freedom that has no political agency because it is exercised not in pursuit of cultural and epistemic freedoms and the freedom of being or subject, but to echo his master’s voice, worldviews, and reflect carefully choreographed and polished highbrow styles of the so-called international peer-reviewed and refereed top academic journals to which it is subjected for approval. While a decontextualized and ahistorical view of the principle of academic freedom may conceal its aetiology, in reality academic freedom reflects Enlightenment’s scientific paradigm that falsely presents ‘the search for the truth as a disinterested virtue when in fact it is a self-interested rationalization’ (Wallerstein 2003, p. 32).

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Thus, academic freedom can be understood as part of the broader matrix of the ‘Western code’ (Mignolo 2011), a mnemonic-like world where the words and concepts conceal more than they reveal the real motives of Euro-American modernity as a political, economic, and cultural system. As part of the Western code, academic freedom also helps to hide the positionality of Western media and cultural theory since they are presented not as products of specific cultures and contexts, but universally applicably motifs and standards. In this positivist-empiricist logic, the Western academic is portrayed as free from society and in pursuit of knowledge for nothing other than its own sake. This lie implies an ontological existence outside the social structures and strictures that shape worldviews, theories, and modes of analysis. Subsequently, in this mythologized scientific perspective ‘academic freedom is [presented as] a subset not of morality or philosophy, but of professionalism [where] professionalism [ironically represents] essentially a form of market monopoly. A successful profession is one that has, identified, or in some instances created, a need; developed mechanisms for producing the service that meets the need; persuaded the state, or some ruling elite, to award it an exclusive franchise for the delivery of the service’ (Fish 2014, p. 20). Yet in reality, the rhetoric and the reality of the scientific-empiricist perspective are contradictory. The market sees itself as a non-partisan and non-ideological concept. The reality, however, is that the market has a far-reaching material and ideological impact on academic freedom and freedom of inquiry through allocative decisions of what kind of media education to fund or not fund, and through what others have referred to as the ‘hidden curriculum’ (Carnoy 1989; Giroux 2011). The concept of the hidden curriculum refers to the underlying and invisible dominant interests and values that undergird an education system. For example, in media and communication studies in African countries such as South Africa and Nigeria, among others, this can be seen in the emphasis by the postcolonial neoliberal state and its market forces on vocational skills as a key deliverable for most universities. Sometimes, this market-driven support for instrumental rationality over substantive rationality is done at the expense of the much-needed critical thinking skills that students require to transform both the media industry and societies they live in. The marketization and instrumentalization of academy amount to a systemic flaw which undermines academic freedom at the level of the curriculum. In other words, the media scholar has academic

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freedom, but one that is by default often in service of the capitalist system and neoliberal thinking. The location of academic freedom within a professional and scientific discourse also attempts to dehistoricise and depoliticize the concept. However, it is important for the Southern scholar to understand its historicity so as to be able to situate it within the North-South moral and ideological contradictions of the time. The concept of freedom of thought, a precursor to academic freedom, emerged from the muddy moral and philosophical waters of the Renaissance and Enlightenment period. Indeed, the social systems that contributed to the conception of academic freedom in education were characterized by deep moral contradictions on the question of humanity as universal and uncontestably diverse and cosmopolitan. In The Darker Side of Renaissance (1995) and The Darker Side of Modernity (2011), Walter Mignolo portrays the Renaissance and the Enlightenment periods as two very dark and monstrous epochs in their contact with the Global South. For example, for the Western subject, the Renaissance was a period of humanism, rebirth, and a break from the savagery of the Middle Ages. However, for the Latin American subject, the very same system meant brutish invasions and murder at the hands of violent conquistadors. Similarly, while Enlightenment occasioned the values of emancipation, progress, and rationality for Europeans, it brought colonial pillage, dehumanization, and racism in Africa and Asia. While it is true that fifteenth-century Spanish and Portuguese imperialism in Latin America differed considerably from the nineteenth-century British, French, and German imperialism in Africa and Asia, what all imperialisms had in common was violent oppression and the denial of the humanity of the non-Western subject. In the eyes of all imperialists and colonialists, the African, Asian, and Latin Americans were not human beings. They could not think or reason logically, let alone enjoy the same benefits of the liberal value system occasioned by Western modernity for the Western subject. If the non-Western subject could not enjoy any of the human rights, then we have no reason to think he enjoyed that of the freedom of thought since it undergirds academic freedom. In the same vein under neoliberal and racial capitalism, academic freedom has been largely kaleidoscopic and un-liberating for South: it leads to a dead end of reason without autonomy, knowledge without wisdom, reason without intellectual freedom, and a perpetual servitude culture of the non-Western

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subject ingrained through the Whiteness of knowledge and scholarship in the imperial university and society. The big irony of Enlightenment is that the celebrated, free, literate, conscious, and reasoning Western subject birthed by the supposedly redeeming powers of the Renaissance and Enlightenment projects and their accompanying freedoms from ignorance, is the very same subject who became an exploiter and an oppressor in the Global South. The Hegelian paradigm, a paradigm of racism, is the basis of the physical and symbolic annihilation of non-Western humanity together with its knowledge systems. As part of modernity’s pre-emptive power, the Hegelian paradigm is not necessarily a strategy of the past, but the future we are living. Bio-politics is always effective for its control not of what the body does now, but what it must never do in the future. Consequently, the South of media and communication studies cannot think or reason transformatively until it confronts the problem of epistemic freedom. Cultural, epistemic, and geographic racism divide the world into two, the ‘West and the Rest, and organizes everyday language into binaristic hierarchies implicitly flattering to Europe: our nations, their tribes; our religion, their superstition; [our knowledge, their beliefs; our science, their magic], our demonstrations, their riots’ (Shohat and Stam 2000, p. 2). Indeed, most of what is known about the non-Western subject, his philosophy and thought patterns, is a product of the Hegelian hierarchy that birthed Western-centric stereotypical characterizations of African, Asian, and Latin American cultures. As Brown (2004) reminds us in this quote: ‘Those characterizations emerged primarily from the perspectives of Western anthropologists… who interpreted and translated traditional African conceptual idioms into Western conceptual idioms. The process was…self-serving, and much of what was characterized as African thought [is] a Western invention. The cultures of sub-Saharan Africa were viewed by Western colonizers and missionaries as primitive, backward, and in need of radical reconstruction…Such sentiments were fostered by the racist perspectives of well-respected philosophers such as Georg Hegel, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant’ (p. 4). Nothing has changed much. Those who are denied humanity continue to belong to the zone of none-being occupied mainly by a ‘being who is able to see that he or she is seen as being without a point of view, and thought’ (Gordon 2006, p. 2). Logically, because their humanity is doubted, it follows that they are also denied a logic and mindset, and therefore cannot enjoy freedom of thought which is a right that belongs

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to those in the zone of being. Torres (2017) illuminates and reinforces this point when he questions the human rights discourse as it applies to the Global South: The universality of human rights is delimited by what is considered to effectively constitute the state of being human in the first place. In addition to a secular line that separated the divine from the human, the hegemonic modern Western concept of the human emerged in relation to an ontoManichean colonial line that often makes human rights discourse inefficient for addressing modern colonialism, or complicit with it. (p. 117)

Therefore, I think the problem of academic freedom as a human right must begin with the questioning of the Hegelian abyssal line of who is human and who is not? It is that line that has delivered ‘pseudohumanism: that for too long, it has diminished the rights of man, that its concept of those rights has been- and still is- narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased, and all things considered, is sordidly racist’ (Cesaire 2001, p. 38). The Renaissance and Enlightenment pseudohumanism defeated the goal of a common humanity that is united in its diversity of cultures, worldviews, and thought. Indeed, the Hegelian line is not only somatic and bio-political, but also epistemic because it determines who is a thinker/academic and who is not, and who ultimately must enjoy academic freedom in its fuller sense. Hence, the current struggle must be the struggle of decolonizing academic freedom as a false human right and an endeavour for the creation of a pathway to an epistemic turn that will restore epistemic freedom as a true foundation for a cultural consciousness that gestures to rooted critical thinking and agency in the South. Hegel rivetedly—almost with a sense of permanency—represented the non-Western subject as the lowest in the hierarchy of humanity and incapable of logic and scientific thinking. In essence, that which was deemed not human could not enjoy human rights just as that which could not think, could not enjoy the freedom of thought. In late modernity of globalization and greater connectedness through digital technologies, the demotic turn of the non-Western academic mainly epitomizes a rise of academic freedom that writes into the Northern archive and not against or in conversation with it. It is academic freedom in the colonial library, a freedom that often amounts in writing against the ‘self’ or in support of

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the ‘self’ in non-transformative ways. The only way out of this conundrum is academic freedom that is rooted in epistemic and cultural freedoms.

Academic Freedom as a Navigation of Political Economy Academic freedom must also be viewed from a political economy perspective. From this vantage point, it is not merely a moral or ethical imperative in the university, but also a product of power relations between social and forces that seek to inscribe their values and interests on university institutions and their disciplines. In these self-serving strategies that are often presented as neutral and student-centred policies, capitalism has been a major culprit in terms of ideological interference and dumbing down the curriculum. Across the world, neoliberal reforms in education have changed the idea of a university as an institution that is central to the democratic project, public culture, and the struggles for social justice. Everywhere you go, free-market fundamentalism has transformed the universities into ‘academic supermarkets’ and reconfigured them as ‘sites of service provision, consumer activity, and commodity exchange’ (Freedman 2011, p. 1). All these changes are tied to the political economy of academic freedom: the reality of the power relations between the competing forces consisting of the state, the market, university bureaucrats, the students, the North, and the South. Mahmood Mamdani captured the problem of the shifting power relations twelve years ago in his book Scholars in the Market Place: The Dilemmas of Neoliberal Reform at Makerere University. Although the book was essentially about Makerere University, it resonated profoundly with the experiences of the entire African continent in higher education from the 1990s to date (Mamdani 2007; Habib et al. 2008; Dlamini 2002). For most African countries, the market reforms specifically began in the early nineties following the end of the Cold War and the advent of the new unipolar order where capitalism romped to victory over socialism. The reforms in higher education came as part of the bigger national economic adjustment programme prescriptions from the Bretton Woods institutions, especially the World bank and the IMF. The Latin American experience was not any different. Reform ‘initiatives for higher education [also] began in the 1990s…and these policies [were also] attributed to the preeminence of a neoliberal agenda in public policy’ (Bernasconi and Celis 2017, p. 4). The guinea pig for the market reforms was Chile in

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the 1980s, then followed by Argentina, Mexico, Peru, and others in the 1990s. The impact of these seismic neoliberal changes was the weakening of the state, particularly the welfare state that was almost indispensable in bargaining with the new rulers of the world in the face of the all-powerful global capital or Transnational Corporations (TNCs). The Chinese political economy presents a new challenge to neoliberalism, the free-market ideology, and academic freedom. The carefully managed state-driven market reforms in China under the Outline of National Plan for Medium and Long-term Education Reform and Development (2010–2020) have surely changed both society and the university. The change is deep, structural, but not so much ideological as the academic freedom remains largely curtailed. The gradual economic reforms from the centralized economy to market-oriented ones have also liberalized higher education where the market and other non-state actors are playing a leading role. Cai (2013) observes that the cumulative impact of the market reforms since ‘the past three decades [is] remarkable success, such as dramatic expansion of the scale of higher education, progress in faculty development, diversification of financing, privatisation of education provision, development of competitive universities, and advancement of internationalisation of higher education’ (p. 1). However, these changes have not gone as far as changing the heart and soul of the Chinese university in terms of how it is constituted ideologically, especially in terms of the role of the intellectual within and without the university. China, therefore, provides a sharp contrast to the neoliberal-driven market reforms especially as experience by African countries. In Africa, neoliberal reforms imposed sharp austerity measures on the state and principally comprised the following: (1) cuts in public funding to universities, (2) shifting the financial burden to students, and (3) commercialization/privatization of some strategic services. Unlike China that has a very strong development state, the African states are generally weak and have ultimately lost control of the policy arena to the neoliberal forces of the World Bank and IMF. In essence, although there are government ministries that are responsible for policy, higher education policy has effectively been privatized. At university level, commercialization and privatization have undermined academic freedom in several ways. Mamdani (2007) observed that privatization and commercialization at Makerere brought about a deluge of pessimism with the arts and humanities. Everywhere, the corporatization of the university creates a certain

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myth about the tastelessness, if not uselessness, of theory as universities shift into the service mode and skills mindset of capitalism. ‘The issue [is] what would one do after getting a degree in history, languages, literature, [media studies], and philosophy’ (Mamdani 2007, p. 43). At this level, the university bureaucrats become the biggest threat to academic freedom in the sense that they have the power to decide which programmes to prioritise and which ones to discard based on profit maximization. The obsession with skills begins not only to undermine the university’s role in providing critical pedagogy, but also in producing students who are critical thinkers not just in cultural analysis, and how the media are implicated in advancing or undermining the broader struggles for the liberation of the damnes, democracy and social justice. As a symbol of academic freedom, critical pedagogy must be about the university’s free will to ‘provide the conditions for students to be agents in a world that needs to be interrogated as part of a broader project of connecting the search for knowledge, truth, and justice to the ongoing tasks of democratizing both the university and the larger society’ (Giroux 2005, p. 31). Furthermore, the sum total of the seismic neoliberal changes on both the society and university in the Global South has been the rising levels of poverty for all, including faculty. Where there is poverty, there is no academic freedom. The ‘material conditions in Africa, [Asia and Latin America] weigh [heavily] on academics and intellectuals’ and poverty is ‘perhaps more insidious than direct oppression, because it tends to abort critical comment before it is even born’ because ‘economic necessity weighs heavily on academic and intellectual freedom and puts academics at the mercy of political and institutional authority’ (Habib et al. 2008, p. 145). In Africa and most of the geographic South, in the absence of a strong developmental state that can confidently meet its material and ethical responsibilities to the nation-state, the Western donors have moved in to determine the academic’s research agenda. In media and communication studies, the donor effect has set the research agenda on the questions of HIV/AIDS and health communication and development communication and other agendas that are implicitly still driven by modernization’s ethnocentric stereotypes and the overarching Western myth of progress and development. The border intellectual might appear free, but his academic freedom is no longer just negotiated with the state, capital, and bureaucrats, but the new problem of the donors who come with terms of reference in hand.

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Between Autonomy and Responsibility: Loyalty and Defiance of the Conscious Border Intellectual In the beginning of this chapter, I placed three epigraphs that directly and indirectly speak to the question of academic freedom. The three quotations can also be used to deal with the question: What is the role of the border intellectual in the struggles of the Global South? This, however, is not to suggest the existence of a homogenous South, but to point out one that is caught up in the cartographies of power in the imperial knowledge and cultural order created by and in service to Euro-American modernity. The three epigraphs present two variant theoretical positions in relation to academic freedom, its necessity in the border, and what function it must serve. Is academic freedom, especially one conceived from the Olympian detachment fantasy, a necessity or a luxury for the border intellectual? While the issue of the indispensability of academic freedom in the Global South is not contestable, the questions that now really beg for answers are: (a) What should the border intellectual be free to do or not do with his or her academic freedom? (b) Is it possible that in the struggle for cultural and other freedoms in the South, the border intellectual can have freedom without transformative agency or autonomy without an epistemic centre? The three epigraphs present two radically different schools of thought to the question of the freedom and autonomy of the border intellectual. On the one hand, the first quotation by Edward Said (1994) presents the role of the intellectual as a problematique or a dilemma, but one in which his ‘principal duty is the search for relative independence from [societal] pressures’ (p. xv). Hence, Said characterized ‘the [border] intellectual as exile and marginal…and as the author of a language that tries to speak the truth to power’ (p. xv). In his view, despite their membership in social and political community as cultural and political citizens, intellectuals must not have a rigid and predictable relationship to their national culture, traditions, and history. They can be friends or foe to all the social forces depending on what they consider to be the enduring truths of their social enquiry. In other words, Said regarded the ‘intellectuals as precisely those figures whose public performances can neither be predicted nor compelled into some slogan, orthodox party line, or fixed dogma’ (1994, p. xii). Therefore, he gave credence and room to the possibility of academic freedom as a practice, but more importantly

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he further theorized the fundamental question of to what effect should academic freedom be put to? Indeed, the concept of ‘autonomy, however relative, is inevitably to conjure up the classic image of the independent intellectual, not necessarily locked away in the ivory tower, but certainly enjoying sufficient freedom and authority to speak out on all issues’ while also having ‘a responsibility for truthfulness and towards truth’ (Jennings and Kemp-Welch, p. 12). That kind of freedom is not neoclassical, but deeply social and obligatory in the sense that it theorizes freedoms not only within the context of fidelity to the truth, but also responsibility to society. On the other hand, the epigraphs by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Chinua Achebe consider all intellectual labour to be ideological. They reject the myth of the freedom and autonomy of the intellectual since both the self and society are ideologically and culturally constituted. Put differently, the border intellectual can ‘border cross’ or ‘border jump’, but he or she can never fully escape the ‘racial border’ or the ‘colour line’ of Euro-American modernity. In other words, ‘the social and political conditions, the character of society and the political system within which the intellectual finds him or herself, [inevitably] affect their role’ (Jennings and KempWelch, p. 23). Africa has a lot of examples on this organic and activist intellectual in the persons of Leopold Senghor, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, among others. Nyerere himself once argued pointedly in favour of a societal intellectual when he stated that the ‘basis of human progress throughout history has been the existence of people who, regardless of the consequences to themselves, stood up when they believed it necessary and said ‘That is wrong; this is what we should do… African [intellectuals] must serve Africa as menials, collecting and disseminating the information we ought to want. At the same time, they must be torch bearers of our society, and the protectors of the flame should we, in our urgency, endanger’ (Nyerere 1963, p. 7). Here, Nyerere points to the centrality of social context, the fact that intellectuals, consciously or unconsciously, produce knowledge that has a locus of enunciation: a history, a politics, a culture, and worldview it advances. Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, a decolonial Marxist scholar, echoes this view that also gestures towards the Gramscian perspective which draws an ‘intimate link between knowledge and power, and [perceives] organic intellectuals as forming inevitably within the hegemonic or counter-hegemonic classes’ (Chongyi 2005, p. 5). According to

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Gramsci, intellectuals are a natural part of social class formations, social movements, political contestations, and hegemonic struggles in society. I want to use Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s and Edward Said’s somewhat differing positions to discuss the meaning and content of academic and epistemic freedoms of intellectuals in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as spaces for border thinking against the empire, its capitalist and global media systems, their seductive consumerism and mass culture. In the age of neoliberal global capitalism that is characterized by the continued exploitation of the Global South by the Global North, ‘border thinking or theorizing [is a necessary] response to the violence of imperial/territorial epistemology and the rhetoric of modernity (and globalization) of salvation that continues to be implemented on the assumption of the inferiority or devilish intentions of the Other and, therefore, continues to justify oppression and exploitation as well as eradication of the difference’ (Mignolo and Tlostanova 2006, p. 206). Indeed, at a time when the West is eclipsed by a multifaceted systemic and epistemic existential crisis that desperately calls for alternative solutions, border thinking as ‘thinking from the outside [of modernity], using alternative knowledge traditions, [cultures, cosmologies, worldviews] and alternative languages of expression has become more than necessary’ (p. 214, emphasis added). The question, however, is how far should the border intellectual go before he is captive to his culture, language, struggle, nation, continent, and indeed society? To begin my answer to this problem, let me discuss the three kind intellectuals in the racial and cultural borders of capitalist modernity in order to identify the one who is the vanguard of the struggle of liberation for the non-Western subject. There are three kinds of border intellectuals in the borders of the imperial South and imperial North. First is the pseudo-intellectual whom I described earlier as the walking dead or just a thinking zombie. This intellectual has lost all manner of cultural, political, and intellectual agency of the border as an epistemic angle or cartography of resistance. He wants freedom, but does not see it as a product of a painful struggle and sacrifice. His freedom lies in being closer to whiteness especially through carefully choreographed mannerisms, worldviews, and cultural tastes. Sitting in Cape Town, Brazil, Johannesburg, or Bridgetown in Barbados, he only watches and listens to the BBC and the CNN. He is not concerned with the news or information as a global citizen per se, but aims to demonstrate his highbrow English and American cultural tastes. Plagued by an irredeemable racial inferiority complex,

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he sees his salvation in being ‘elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the [empire’s] cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle’ (Fanon 2008, p. 9). He suffers an acute sense of double-consciousness, a schizophrenia that renders him culturally invisible. No longer an intellectual, he has ‘become only another professional or a figure in a social trend’ (Said 1994, p.11) because he is culturally decentred since he cannot stand for anything that is African, Asian, or Latin American. His ‘psychopathology has now transformed into career opportunism [and] has immersed [himself] in the white-identified culture’ (Dabashi 2011, p. 40). He is part of the growing numbers of the population of the black intellectuals who have resigned into careerism and have given up on black consciousness as a necessary interpretive lens of the twenty-first-century decolonization struggles. This intellectual is among the living, but his soul was long buried in the zone of none-being since he is socially and culturally dead. He is, in the enduring words of Fanon (1986), ‘a black skin white mask’ or those of Dabashi (2011) ‘brown skin white mask’. The second intellectual in the border shares most of the characteristics with the first, except the fact that he fully understands both worlds of the colour line and epistemic line. He, however, has consciously chosen to speak of the problems of the border with a forked tongue by locating his critique between neoliberal populism and critical pragmatism. On the surface of it, he appears like an objective postcolonial scholar, but in reality, he mediates the border problems from a Western perspective. He is what Kwame Appiah and Hamid Dabashi referred to as the ‘comprador intellectual’ because he works in service of the empire as a ‘native informer’: ‘The comprador intellectual is a cultural broker, a commissioned operator, a ‘ten-percenter’ paid to facilitate cultural domination and political pacification. He has some familiarity with the dominating culture, which he serves out of self-interest (not conviction), he speaks its language (with an accent), and by virtue of the proximity he seeks to power, becomes abusive of his own compatriots’ (Dabashi 2011, p. 40, also see Appiah 1992). Even though his critique may begin from a Southern epistemology, his heart and soul are not rooted in it. In the big neocolonial questions facing Africa, Asia and Latin America, his conclusions are quite often pragmatic and not revolutionary. The pragmatic turn within which he analyses the border is a misleading paradigm for rethinking the problems of coloniality in the Global South. His infatuation with pragmatism has

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actually been embraced by some among the Global South intelligentsia who have lost appetite for struggle or developed a thinking fatigue for a transcendental emancipatory theory that frees both the oppressor and the oppressed, the North and the South, and illuminates the increasingly invisible centres and peripheries of Euro-American modernity. In South Africa, for example, the neurosis of pragmatism has given birth to the rise of an intellectual who has simply ‘descended into the world of everyday political passions reminiscent of populist neoliberal activism as a politics of personal visibility and not transformation’ (Jennings and Kemp-Welch 1997, p. 24, emphasis added, Also see Benda 2007). They run with the neoliberal soundbites and buzz words of the time from the information society, global knowledge economy, to the fourth industrial revolution and enjoy favourable coverage from post-apartheid’s neoliberal media that also orbit any Euro-American master narratives of a given epoch. In the debates about the need for centred cultural and intellectual sovereignty, the comprador intellectual places the burden of cultural assimilation or the so-called hybridization on the Global South: an invitation to the non-Western subjects to live their lives in psycho-cultural defeat of parrot scholarship and mental slavery. The reality for the black, orient, and Latino, however, is that of the unrelenting grip of global coloniality and racial capitalism in the border on both sides of the NorthSouth divide. In his speeches, this comprador intellectual may appear to address the border publics, their pains, and their concerns, but in reality, he converses with the empire whose nod, validation, and payslip he can never put in jeopardy. This mercenary intellectual is a very dangerous border intellectual because he deceptively approaches Western modernity and its cultural politics from the language and epistemologies of the Global South, yet in reality the real constituency on whose behalf he speaks is Western. The last border intellectual is the one who informs my discussion of academic freedom and epistemic freedom in the Global South. He is independent, brave, and forthright and ‘is neither a pacifier nor a consensus-builder, but someone whose whole being is staked on a critical sense, a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas, or ready-made clichés, or the smooth, ever-so-accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do. Not just passively unwillingly, but actively willing to say so in public’ (Said 1994, p. 23). He might be an academic at a university, but his intellectual value and contributions to the cultural politics of the border are not defined by the

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university walls. This vanguard intellectual is not your everyday mediamade academic activist who trades in everyday colourful neoliberal policy soundbites about social justice issues, but has a deep moral and intellectual authority particularly in the public sphere of the silenced majority where ‘he speaks to, as well as for, a public, necessarily in public, and is properly on the side of the dispossessed, the unrepresented and the forgotten’ (Jennings and Kemp-Welch 1997, p. 2). To this intellectual, culture in the border is both a resource and a constraint, an answer and a problem. As a resource, culture is a fortress against the imperial and neocolonial onslaught on the border now predominantly executed through a powerful ideology consumerism, media corporatization, and the concomitant cultural commodification. Here, the global corporate media are not used just to promote AngloAmerican TNCs and their products in the Global South, but are essentially selling Western culture and lifestyles to ensure not just profit maximization, but sustainability. They do so through a need-creating cultural synchronization of the Global South that uses cross-cultural advertising to conflate consumerism with happiness, freedom, choice, and cultural and political agency while demonizing the memory of decolonization struggles that represents the power of histories from below, struggles from below, and real popular agency. While capitalism fights to have such histories of decolonial liberation by the poor majority forgotten, the task of the vanguard border intellectual is to re-awaken the masses from the slumber of the narcotizing capitalist lullabies and the pacifying grip of consumerism driven by the corporate media. He must reconnect liberation to the virtue of decolonial struggle and retrace national collective memory to its historical experience against a mutating global coloniality. He rejects the transplanting of our hopes and freedoms from the public sphere into the market and consumerism as a neoliberal lie. He equally rejects the recruitment into ‘corporate thinking [that] has not made intellectuals into the questioning and skeptical individual minds’ and avoids ‘chorus[es] that echo the prevailing policy view, hastening it along into…more and more into an irrational [culture that breeds] intolerance and fear rather than knowledge and community’ (Said 1994, p. 32). Resistance against the empire in the border for this intellectual does not mean resisting cultural change created by legitimate internal contradictions inherent in the national culture of any society, but it means fighting against Americanization or Westernization that is increasingly justified through the myth of globalization and the romanticization of

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transnational cultural flows while the objective reality actually shows a dominance of Western TNCs and a rise of mass cultures that are based on consumerism. The border intellectual draws a line between modernization and Westernization showing that in decolonial thinking it must be possible for Africa, Asia, and Latin American to modernize without necessarily being Westernized or Americanized. Modernization should not necessarily be the same thing as Westernization or Americanization. It must not lead to de-Africanization, de-Asianization, etc. He defends his culture. Again, as a resource to defend, ‘culture embodies those moral, ethical and aesthetic values, the set of spiritual eyeglasses, through which the [people] come to view themselves and their place in the universe. Values are the basis of a people’s identity, their sense of particularity as members of the human race’ (Wa Thiong’o 1987, pp. 14–15). Indeed, multiculturalism as an ideal for a plural, diverse, and rich global culture is not about the wilting and dying of some cultures that are considered disposable and the flourishing and survival of those that are considered worthwhile, but the cherishing of all cultures, big and small, powerful or weak, central or marginal, or what Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (1993) powerfully described as ‘creating the space for a hundred [cultural] flowers to bloom’ (p. 30). From this perspective, the cultural politics of the vanguard border intellectual is that which unmasks the coloniality of Western culture as an underlying problem of capitalist modernity. The politics of the border is that which tries ‘to produce a cultural politics of diversity and inclusion [where] exclusions [of the Other]- whether geographic, ethnic, [and] theoretical, [are condemned]’ (Michaelsen and Johnson 1997, p. 4). Therefore, in the context of colonial modernity, the vanguard intellectual uses his academic freedom to provide intellectual leadership and defend the border as ‘a place of politically exciting hybridity, intellectual creativity, moral possibility and… as the privileged locus of hope for a better world’ (p. 3). However, culture is not only a resource providing resistance agencies in the border. It can also be a source of intractable social problems and social constraints that cripple the agency of the border. When this happens, the border intellectual must attack any form of cultural dictatorship regardless of the unpleasant and embarrassing truths that may put him at odds with the national cultural elites who are often the beneficiaries of patriarchy, unfair religious practices, customs, and traditions. The border intellectual must not just engage with culture at the normative level of values that define a people, but also expose the fact that ‘culture [can also] emerge

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as a problem… at the point at which there is a loss of meaning in the contestation and articulation of everyday life, between classes, genders, races’ (Bhabha 1994, p. 34). To the extent that culture in the border does not only unite but also divides; does not only empower, but also disempowers; and does not only enlighten but also blinds its agents; it therefore must be criticized when its darker side shows its ugly head. In other words, the myth of the structurelessness of culture means that while culture is considered a liberating force for the border, it is also inherently constraining and problematic in the border and the metropolis. It is not always ‘a self-contained whole made up of coherent patterns, but can also arguably be conceived as a more porous array of intersections where distinct processes crisscross from within and beyond its borders’ (p. 35). Consequently, on the problem of culture in the border, the border intellectual must know when to be a ‘servant of actualities, [and when to be] enemies?’ (Said 1994, p. 15). However, in the final analysis, from the decolonial border epistemology, the view of culture as fragmented and hollow, will not and cannot render culture a useless concept since culture is indispensable to a people’s way of life in the border and their worldview of the self and others. More significantly, the ‘myriad modes of perceiving and organizing reality are culture-specific, not pan-human’ (Rosaldo 1993, p. 197). This means that while acknowledging the new transnational cultural flows associated with neoliberal globalization, the border intellectual still has a responsibility to produce culture-specific narratives of the Global South that are not only counterhegemonic to the main stereotypical discourses produced by the empire, but also seek to heal the continued postcolonial trauma of the neo-colonial wound. He must ‘break down [modernity’s] stereotypes and reductive categories of the border as emancipatory and paint it more as a dialectical space of freedom and unfreedom’ (Said 1994, p. xi, emphasis added). The progressive border intellectual must develop a reciprocal authority with the North since ‘much of what the north writes and reads about the South continues to derive its authority from the wellspring of colonial common sense’ (Larsen 1995, p. 2). Indeed, Larsen’s observations echoed many of the problems identified in the McBride Commission a decade earlier and still characterize the default frames of the Northern or Western gaze on Africa, Asia, and Latin America especially in the North’s news and travel media like the BBC, CNN, AFP, Reuters, the Discovery Channel, etc. Through border writing, the border intellectual must truly engage in ‘an oppositional discourse [and] battle tremendous

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odds, including multinational corporations, cultural imperialism, racial prejudice, and traditional patterns of gender identification’ and ‘by not settling down on either side of these divisions imposed by culture, [the border intellectual serves] to disturb rigid constellations of power and carve out spaces laden with possibilities of liberation’ (Castronovo 1997, p. 198). What about the loyalty to the nation-state and the national struggle for full decolonization? Does academic freedom extend into the realm of national political and democratic struggle? Stanley Fish, a liberal-pluralist philosopher of academic freedom, raises an interesting point of view on these issues. The problem, he argues, is in justifying any form of ‘democratic’ commitment because ‘rather than asking how a proposed project contributes to the furthering of knowledge, one asks how the project furthers the goals of [national] democracy. Sooner or later, that question will be seen as legitimizing any action taken by academics in the name of social justice’ (Fish 2014, p. 118). In the border critique of academic freedom, such concerns do not arise because while the liberalpluralist view pretends to be apolitical, the decolonial epistemology which informs the border theory interprets the world not just for the sake of it, but to change it. We ‘must change the world while constantly reinterpreting it; as much as change itself, the reinterpretation of the world is a collective endeavor…First, we don’t need alternatives; we need rather an alternative thinking of alternatives. Second, the constant reinterpretation of the world can only be possible in the context of struggle and, therefore, cannot be conducted as a separate task disengaged from the struggle. Third, as much as struggles mobilize multiple kinds of knowledge, reinterpretation cannot be provided by any single body of knowledge’ (Santos 2018, p. viii). Here, Boaventura de Sousa Santos struck the heart of the matter in relation to the place of national struggle for the border intellectual against modern imperialism’s new strategies and political propaganda for the continued expropriation of wealth at a global scale. However, the border intellectual contributes to the national struggle because of fidelity and commitment to truth, social justice, and the democratic project since ‘nothing disfigures the intellectual’s public performance as much as trimming, careful silence, patriotic bluster, and retrospective and selfdramatizing apostasy’ (Said 1994, p. xiii). His voice in the public sphere is that of an intellectual and not patriot; his insights are those of a servantly pundit and not power-seeking politician. In other words, ‘although there

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is inestimable value to what an intellectual does to ensure the community’s survival during periods of extreme national emergency, loyalty to the group’s fight for survival cannot draw in the intellectual so far as to narcotize the critical sense, or reduce its imperatives, which are always to go beyond survival to questions of political liberation, to critiques of the leadership, to presenting alternatives that are too often marginalized or pushed aside as irrelevant to the main battle at hand’ (Said 1994, p. 41). However, the border intellectual must not be limited to the horizons of the border in his struggle for justice because in theory he is a cosmopolitan who believes in universal humanist struggles and freedoms against central and peripheral domination. Indeed, the border must not be conceptualized as a hard iron cage that is inescapable, but a soft, porous, transparent epistemic space that offers social possibilities and social traps in equal measure (see Castronovo 1997).

Conclusion Epistemic freedom and academic freedom in media and communication studies must not be seen as mutually exclusive. Whereas both are anchored on the idea of the freedom of the intellectual, it is imperative to note that academic freedom is institutionally embedded and is a product of how the media scholar navigates the political economy of media research. As argued in this chapter, the state, donors, and corporate interests pose visible threats towards academic freedom in the border. In many countries of the Global South where the state has cut back on funding universities, the Western donors pose a serious threat to media and communications research by influencing not only the research agenda, but also dragging the interdiscipline back to positivism. Epistemic freedom in the field is ‘about the struggle for [the border intellectuals] to think, theorise, interpret the world and write from where they are located unencumbered by Eurocentrism’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018, p. 1). In essence, it is about decolonizing the mind and creating sovereign mental universes that are rooted in the cultures, histories, ontologies, and epistemologies of Africa, Asian, and Latin American people. Therefore, Eurocentrism constitutes an invisible threat to the Global South. As a discourse and practice in media and communications theory, Eurocentrism manifests itself as a form of epistemic racism (Grosfoguel 2013). Epistemic racism is about how Eurocentrism discriminates against

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media theory from non-Western critical traditions so as to promote the myth of Western superiority and universal validity. This discrimination is located in the bio-politics, geo-politics, and ego-politics of knowledge in Western modernity. It also follows the contours of race, geography, and gender where a few European white males determine the critical agenda of theory in the field. Epistemic racism also functions a form of surveillance and control on specific populations in space and time. For example, Rabaka argues that William Dubois has ‘not been accorded…one iota of the respect and the recognition he deserves in Western critical traditions despite his contributions to critical theory in sociology and media studies ’ (Rabaka 2010, p. 2, emphasis added). Similarly, in the border, many African, Asian, and Latin American postcolonial and decolonial scholars who have made immense contributions to a body of critical theory have suffered a similar fate. In effect, as far as the theoretical domination of African media and communication studies is concerned, the ‘real power of the West is not located in its economic muscle and technological might [as such], [but] in its power to define and rule’ (Sadar 1999, p. 44, emphasis added). Eurocentrism defines and determines what is rationality, a good scholar, and progressive theory.

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Wa Thiong’o, N. (1986). Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Carey. Wa Thiong’o, N. (1987). Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Carey. Wa Thiong’o, N. (1993). Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms. London: James Currey.

CHAPTER 6

Decolonial Research Methodologies: Resistance and Liberatory Approaches

Given a simple choice between being an oppressive and an anti-oppressive researcher, hopefully we would all choose the latter. However, the choice is not really that simple or straightforward. Being an anti-oppressive researcher means that there is political purpose and action to your research work. Karen Potts and Leslie Brown (2005, p. 250) At a time when the old common sense of research institutions, based on curiosity and disinterest, is being replaced by the new common sense that measures the relevance of knowledge by its market value, the methodological tasks called for by the epistemologies of the South will be either fiercely resisted or utterly discarded as not belonging. Boaventura Santos (2018, p. 120)

Introduction In Zimbabwe, a story is told of European media scholars who went to rural Matabeleland to conduct a research on development communication just after independence in 1980. Upon arrival at one of the villages, they were surrounded by the young boys and girls who were excited to see white people for the first time in their lives. The children jumped up and down in excitement unperturbed by their little dusty buttocks peeping through their torn ragged pants. Reaching for her rucksack, a bag of

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choice for most ‘academic tourists’ to Africa, one of the female ethnographers called the children to come close to her. Her hand brought out a packet of sweets to the delight of all the kids who, in the blink of an eye, had quickly knelt down around her cupping their hands in anticipation. ‘Here, take, just one please. I have one sweet per person please!’, said Charlotte swarmed by numerous cupped hands. She hesitantly dropped a few sweets in each of the six-little cupped ‘bowls’ wondering if she will be left with enough for her diabetes problem. The kids murmured something in their local language to which Charlotte also retorted with an inaudible voice. The children were thanking her heartily for the chocolate sweets. They last had tasted them a year ago when uncle Ben brought some from Salisbury for Christmas. ‘Poor little things, they must be very hungry’, Charlotte said to Janet who nodded thoughtfully. ‘They won’t even leave now. Funny, I only had one sweet for each one of them but how does one put one sweet into these big bowled little empty hands?’ wondered Charlotte looking at the children who by now were jumping up and down enjoying their delicacies. ‘They wanted to finish your whole packet’ giggled Janet Hill sarcastically as she thought of Jonathan Jones, their research methods professor at Cambridge who they always secretly called the research ethics pope. Unknown to Charlotte and Janet, the kneeling and cupping of hands in Matebele culture is a sign of gratitude and respect by a child when receiving something from an adult. To a greater extent, this tradition also applies to most cultures in the African continent, especially in the rural areas where traditions are still fairly intact. Accepting a gift from an adult with one hand and standing would be considered very rude and disrespectful. The import of this anecdote is a simple one: as media and communication scholars we are all socially and culturally situated researchers. In fact, ‘how a researcher perceives the world in which his or her research topic is located is inevitably, but complexly, influenced by the filters and frames of life experiences and social, cultural, economic, and personal identity location. The personal, political, cultural, and the academic become entwined’ (Walter and Andersen 2013, p. 86). The comments from Charlotte and Janet can probably be understood from the perspective of their social location and epistemic location as White European ethnographers. Euro-American modernity as a geo-cultural and epistemic structure locates every researcher in a particular social and epistemic position in relation to its hegemonic knowledge power structure based on the modern/colonial/capitalist world system. Hence, Potts and Brown

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argued that the choice of being an oppressive or anti-oppressive researcher was ‘not really that simple or straightforward’ (2005, p. 250). It is a difficult one and requires a consciousness that transcends one’s location in the knowledge and culture power structure. In her book Decolonizing Methodologies , Linda Tuhiwai Smith, a professor of indigenous education at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, paints a picture of deep entanglements between research and coloniality in the modern/colonial/capitalist world system. To her, Anglo-American research in the Global South amounts to a form of colonial discourse that reproduces the image of a primitive African and Asian subject for its own legitimization and gratification. It is a discourse that is based on the Western cultural gaze of difference that perceives alterity as inadequate, backward, primitive, and always in need of catching up with the West. She argues ‘from the vantage point of the colonized … the term ‘research’ is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism. The word itself…is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary. The ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world’s colonized peoples’ (Smith 1999, p. 1). Since all old and new colonialisms depend on hegemony, media and communication research has always been implicated in the projects of global coloniality especially as seen in the spread of the new ‘empires of the mind and’ global capitalism (see Gildea 2019).

The Darker Side of Media and Communications Research I have chosen to critique media and communications research methodology within the broader context of its sister disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. After all, as repeatedly argued in this book, media and communication studies are an interdiscipline: a coalescence of many disciplines like sociology, anthropology, politics, literary studies where each brings its own strengths and the ideological baggage of toxic colonialities. As such, the multidisciplinarity of media and communication studies means we in the Global South are confronted with multiple colonialities that have morphed into the interdiscipline’s epistemologies, ontologies, methods, and theories. The problem of coloniality must be at the centre of the interdiscipline’s critical reflection in order to build the field’s

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self-understanding in relation to its methodologies and data gathering techniques as the tools with which knowledge is produced. From the Global South vantage point, media and communication research have been deeply entrenched in global capitalism and the imperial projects of the Global North. The interdiscipline has not only been pivotal in the spread of Western capital into non-Western regions, but also promoting Western culture and its domineering epistemological outlooks including on the process of communication itself. For example, in Africa and Asia, what we research as communication today has a bias towards technocentric, institutionalized, and heavily capitalized media at the expense of the deep structure of oral traditions that are still prevalent for the everyday poor majority especially in rural areas. Embedded on these biases are deeper problems of epistemic colonization even on the basic issue of what does it mean to communicate? For instance, what ‘often goes for effective communication in the West is a linear, rational, militaristic approach to human relations that does not allow ambiguity and non-linearity. In fact, it seeks success and achievement of effect that serve as codes for conquest’ (Asante 2011, p. 22, Also see Lee 2015). This understanding of communication is dominant and constitutes what Molefi Asante has dubbed ‘communication imperialism’ (Asante 2008). Communication imperialism has colonized and erased from intellectual discourse the culture-centred and human-oriented understandings of communication emerging from the Global South. However, it is imperative to note that the epistemicide of non-Western knowledge systems always begins with what I will call ‘methodicide’: a term that I use to refer to the obliteration of African, Asian and Latin American indigenous and endogenous ways of knowing (methodology). Consequently, a people without a methodology can never have an epistemology (worldview) against which they interpret their world and change it. In effect, the lack of methodology renders them blind and they can only describe their lives, their culture, and their world from borrowed spectacles or ways of seeing. The Western capitalistic-cum-militaristic approaches to communication also set and limit the global research agenda to techno-capitalist media research focus even in the poor countries of the Global South where a more useful focus could be on the more dominant oral media and other small-scale media that constitute the mainstream for the majority of populations. As stated earlier, research that is taken seriously in media and communications departments of the South is that which probably focuses

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on big, institutionalized, heavily capitalized, and technological media and not on simple myths, allegories, legends, folklore, and other narratives associated with oral societies. This problem is perhaps better captured by Downing (2003, p. 500) who argues that ‘Media research [in the Global North and Global South] suffers dreadfully from galloping gigantism, the instinctive obsession with large audiences, mega-corporations, longrunning series, newspapers of record, global Internet portals’ (p. 500). He contends that good research can also be about the ‘the local, the small-scale, the evanescent, the ephemeral, the underfunded … the wacky’ (ibid., p. 500). By marginalizing or ignoring such research, media and communication research unwittingly exposes itself as too pre-occupied with pro and counter capitalist narratives born out of its obsessive capitalist gaze. Often, in the Global South’s postcolonial and indigenous communities, this happens at the expense of the rich tapestry of oral traditions folktales, myths, legends, proverbs, and riddles that are now academically sidelined to a cultural dumpsite. Historically, media and communication research have always been part of the pillars of capitalist modernity. In Critical Communication Studies, Hanno Hardt paints a picture of a discipline that is irrevocably wedded to the values of Enlightenment of innovation, science, progress, reason, and rationality. In its formative years especially in the United States, communication research was based on utilitarian, positivistic, and administrative approaches. Seen as enduring even to this day, utilitarianism and positivism in the field are traceable to the US imperialism and the need to control distant markets (Servaes 2008; Herman and McChesney 1997). Under the US global capitalist expansion, ‘the production and dissemination of ideologically charged messages of commercial advertising or political propaganda became of major concern. This perspective produced studies of messages and effects that privileged producers, the state, the market ’ (Hardt 1992, pp. 12–13, emphasis added). In fact, research was developed in line with the needs of Western imperial states and AngloAmerican capital to know the effects of media messages in the far-flung markets in Africa, Asia, and the South Americas. The unintended outcome of this obsession with the behaviourist and effects approaches centred on manipulation was one Joseph Goebbels, a man who excelled in using radio and film in anti-Semitism and the Holocaust where millions of Jews were murdered. As a propagandist, Goebbels reflected a much deeper Western problem of relocating communication from the paradigm of culture and social relations to the paradigm of war

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and capitalist conquest. In their media and society research on the Nazi’s uses of propaganda and Hitler’s killing of the Jews, the Frankfurt School’s Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno would later refer to this as ‘the dialectic of Enlightenment’, a statement which not only demonstrated Europe’s exceptionalism to atavistic primordialism and white on white atrocity, but also its hypocrisy of looking away at Europe’s white on black genocide in the colonies of Africa and Asia. This is not to single out the Frankfurt School deficiencies from the vantage point of the South, but rather to point out a problem of systemic epistemic apartheid in research. This epistemic apartheid often renders some Western scholars blind to the pain and the suffering of the Global South populations perpetrated by the West. Indeed, since the Berlin Conference of 1884, colonialism ravaged the African and Asian continents, producing its own Joseph Goebbels that sought to sanitize British, German, and French imperialism. Although apartheid South Africa and Southern Rhodesia were some of the most murderous colonial regimes, there are Western researchers in the broader fields of media and communication, and cultural studies who either openly supported them or engaged in some kind of tokenism to ease their own moral guilt. For example, among other humanities and social science groups in the West, the United Kingdom Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) resisted any form of punishment on apartheid South Africa including the banning of South African academics in Western conferences. They argued that the principle of free academic exchange overruled their opposition to apartheid’ (Academics and Apartheid, see, Critique of Anthropology, 1986, 6 (1), 109–115). Similarly, it would be interesting to study the position of Media and Communications Research Associations on the Palestinian and other related questions. The darker side of media and communications research has always been more pronounced in modernization, a process that can be described as the implementation arm of Euro-American modernity. Tuhiwai Smith, regards modernization research as very dehumanizing to the non-Western subject. As stated earlier, she argued that research was probably one of the dirtiest words in indigenous and postcolonial memory. ‘When mentioned in many indigenous contexts, it stirs up silence, it conjures up bad memories, it raises a smile that is knowing and distrustful… It [reminds us of] a history that still offends the deepest sense of our humanity’ (Smith 1999, p. 1). Indeed, in the Peruvian villages of Latin America, Everette Rogers remembers how the locals resisted modernization ‘researchers’ and the so-called change agents who they regarded as ‘dirt inspectors’ (Rogers

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1983, p. 42). While this resistance surprised Rogers, it is clear that it had a direct link to the dehumanization experiences implied in the diffusion of innovations model where non-Western cultures and beliefs were seen as inimical to social progress and development. For example, Talcott Parson’s cultural blockages model attacked non-Western cultures as antidevelopment because he deemed them to be communal, primitive, and backward. Similarly, Walt Rostow located non-Western subjects within a Darwinist-inspired evolution model where their cultures where pejoratively dubbed as unsophisticated, backward, and inadequate and needing to catch up with the Western cultures and mindset. In essence, the not so hidden agenda of these Western researchers was the erasure of indigenous local cultures on the pretext of scientific research that supplanted local cultures with Western culture, memory, and ways of knowing falsely represented as a panacea for development. What we see through modernization is the gross insensitivity by Western researchers when researching the Global South. Researching indigenous, colonial, and postcolonial contexts in the Global South requires sensitivity to the ‘transgenerational traumata’ of slavery, colonialism, and neocolonialism especially in continents like Africa and Asia (see Groh 2018). When conducting research in these contexts there is need to understand non-Western cultures as underpinning the way people communicate and their whole way of life in terms of values, beliefs, and worldviews. Yet as Arnold Groh conscientiously advises, in transgenerational traumata ‘there is also the burden of the past. We know that people from our culture have committed atrocities against indigenous peoples [and ex/colonial subjects], and [these] people also know that. Whereas for us this is a rather abstract issue, indigenous [and ex/colonial] persons often are [directly] affected …and they are familiar with first-hand information’ (Groh 2018, p. 15). The tragedy of the Eurocentric research is that the victims of the underside of Western modernity are often perceived as perpetrators or culprits. Western research methodologies do not allow them to tell their stories as victims of slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism, and neoliberal globalization. For example, whereas the concept of transgenerational trauma has always existed for the survivors of the Holocaust, it does not apply to deep psychological scars of the survivors of colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism in the Global South as their views are crosschecked against objectivity, empiricism, cultural essentialisms, and the victimhood mentality. In essence from the perspective of Northern theory

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and methodology, the Global South is a place of non-ethics in the sense of the higher-order ethics of humanity, human rights, the right to culture, empathy for transgenerational grief, etc. The pre-occupation of Western research is not so much about the ‘native perspective’ of the South on phenomena, but more about the scientific fact-checking and balancing which renders the West closer to its own ‘method’ than the problems of the Other. The cultural insensitivity is at many levels including intellectual dishonesty orchestrated through decontextualized forms of analysis of the Other. Human behaviour in the Global South is often viewed independent of the structure that shapes it. For example, Chin-Chuan Lee criticizes the modernization researchers for so many fallacies, chief of which is, ‘using psychological [and cultural] variables to explain the macrosocietal transformation to the exclusion of acute structural constraints, global domination, imperialism, and post- colonial conditions’ (2015, p. 30). This explains why post-development and decolonial theorists see modernization research as a double-edged sword that on the one hand attacks alterity, while on the other destroying culture as the basis of any development potential in the South (see Ziai 2007). However, a more significant point is that Western research’s paternalistic attitude—then and now and across disciplines—is a product of Eurocentrism that practically manifests through the coloniality of knowledge. In media and communication studies research, Eurocentrism has produced pedagogical and epistemological subject positions of the West as the teacher and the non-West as the student (see Asante 1998). For the non-Western media scholar, ‘there has been an implicit tendency to approach Western cultures from a student’s perspective’ whereas Western academics approach ‘non-Western cultures from a teacher’s perspective’ (Asante et al. 2008, p. 3). Eurocentric research presents itself as the ‘sole epistemic tradition from which to know the truth in media and communication studies ’ (Grosfoguel 2007, p. 55, emphasis added). This amounts to epistemic racism, a kind of academic discrimination process that is at once corporeal, systemic, and structural. The coloniality of knowledge in research specifically points to ‘the hegemony of Eurocentrism as an epistemological perspective’ where among other things, ‘dominated populations [are]…subjected to it as a worldview or way of knowing the world’ (Mignolo 2000, p. 54). Eurocentrism has produced the coloniality of methodology, that is, a ‘viral’ neutralization of the lens of inquiry that determine what one can see, how

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they can see it, and the praxis and social action that is required. Hence, decolonization in media and communication studies theory stands as a mandatory route to inoculating media research methodology against the double neurosis of Eurocentrism and coloniality.

Decolonial Research as Resistance Methodology What should be done to unleash decolonial agency in the research methods of media and communication studies? What is the pathway to unthinking and unlearning the Eurocentric and coloniality orthodox in methodology? How can we create research epistemologies that resist the peripheralization and pathologization of non-Western ways of knowing and the knowledges they produce? How do we move away from the quantitative and market-oriented evaluation of research impact? How do we save Western methodology from the coloniality of method? Decolonization—a process that puts Southern media and communications research in direct confrontation with the problem of the coloniality of methodology and the predicament of methodicide and alienative knowledges—is the mammoth task that faces the Global South in media studies. Alienative knowledges—a product of the mindless and wholesale application of Eurocentric methodology by African, Asian, and Latin American media scholars who are epistemologically colonized—has produced a Global South that is ‘saddled with irrelevant knowledge that disempowers rather than empowers individuals and communities’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013, p. 11). As such, the task of decolonization as a search for an antioppressive liberatory methodology must take place at two levels: first, at the level of epistemologies of methodology, and second, practices of method on the ground. As Moyo and Mutsvairo (2018) put it, the import of ‘the decolonial turn is the decolonization of the research epistemologies and practices in communication studies. How [we] think about research and practice it is fundamental to what kind of knowledge [we] produce, for whom, and for what purposes… and also fundamental to the broader struggle for liberation and social justice’ (p. 28). Ultimately, decolonization must attend to methodology and method. Although we tend to use both terms interchangeably in media and communication studies, they are actually different. Those differences are important in the nuances of unlocking resistance agency for a Southern research methodology. While the term method is fairly simple and normally used in reference to those mechanisms or techniques we use

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for gathering and analysing data in a research project such as interviews, content analysis, discourse analysis, or participant observation, methodology is a lot more complex. In the Global South, its complexity is further exacerbated by the fact that it is entangled in the ideologies of coloniality, empiricism, racism, and Eurocentrism—all of which are constitutive of Euro-American modernity as a research episteme or worldview. This entanglement is a major problem because research methodology is the ‘lens or worldview through which research is understood, designed, and conducted’ (Walter and Andersen 2013, p. 42). Methodology is an epistemic fabric or epistemic frame through which the methods of data gathering and analysis are tailored. It has a structuring effect on methods and the kind of value given or denied to data. Methodology is, if you like, the ‘theory that guides method, [since] methods are the techniques that a researcher uses’ (Kovach 2005, p. 29). The centrality of methodology can be seen in the invisible thread that joins method, data, concepts, theories, literature, and modes of analysis used in a research project. Maggie Walter and Chris Andersen put it even more compellingly that: [I]t is the methodologies within which data are collected, analyzed, and interpreted that shape the picture that the [analyses] produce, rather than the research method of…analysis itself. Methodology is the active element in constituting the portrait of the realities that [analytical] techniques eventually create; it determines why and how particular research questions are asked (and why others are not); how, when, and where the data are gathered; how they are explored; and how the resulting data are interpreted and, significantly, eventually used. (2013, p. 10)

The complexity of methodology goes much deeper. Generally speaking, methodology extends into the theoretical framework in the sense that it influences what theories a researcher must use. If methodology is about what we choose to see as researchers, theory is about how we choose to see it although how we choose to see phenomena is not mutually exclusive to what we choose to see. In fact, generally speaking, theory is inherently part of methodology in the same way methodology is also an inextricable part of theory. The researcher’s disciplinary, social, and cultural positionality influence their sense-making of the world (theory) which in turn influences their ways of knowing (methodology). Selecting a theory and

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method for a research is ‘thus an ontologically, axiologically, epistemologically, culturally and disciplinary driven task’ (Walter and Andersen 2013, p. 54). From the Global South perspective, the ideologies of coloniality, empiricism, and Eurocentrism in research automatically locate it within a cultural framework that privileges Western-centric ways of seeing and knowing. Ironically, the dominant Western cultural framework in research is often hidden and unseen because it is hegemonic: it has claimed and monopolized the truth-telling position for several centuries. I have already discussed at length in Chapter 4, how Western philosophy and sciences naturalize their position of truth-telling by hiding the geopolitical, cultural, social, and body politics of the Western subject that speaks. The same problem obtains in research methodology where it can also be argued that the Western researcher ‘is able to claim non-situated, universal, God-eyed view of knowledge: a ‘point zero’ perspective of Eurocentric philosophies ’ (Grosfoguel 2009, p. 15). According to Grosfoguel, ‘the point zero is the point of view that conceals itself; that is, it is the point of view that represents itself as being without a point of origin. It is this god-eye view that always hides its local and particular perspective under an abstract universalism. [It] privileges the ego politics of knowledge over the geopolitics of knowledge and the body-politics of knowledge’ (ibid., p. 15, emphasis added). It falsely presents itself as universal: without a geography, no culture, no world view, no locus of enunciation. Therefore, the cunning of reason in Western research methodology is not in its universality, but in the concealment of its epistemology (worldview) and axiology (standpoint/location) while simultaneously and tactfully labelling research in the Global South as provincial. In Western epistemology, references such as indigenous scholar, Ethnic Studies, African Studies, or Area Studies are used not only to provincialize disciplinary knowledge to the restrictive colonial model of Area Studies, but more fundamentally to locate Southern scholarship within a hierarchy of the Euro-American knowledge order. In this order, the Global North represents pure scientific research and the Global South represents unscientific cultural passions rooted on ideological bias. Only the African, Asian and Latin American researcher ‘is cultural and thus incapable of impartiality’ (Walter and Andersen 2013, p. 44). As such, the ‘question of how culture, race, gender, and socioeconomic background affect research methodology tends to arise only when the researcher is seen as somehow “other” and not when the researcher is part of the “unmarked,” dominant norm’

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(ibid., p. 44). However, it is important that Southern research as a resistance epistemology must continually unmask this Western lie as a basis of its normative claim to social justice, anti-oppression, and liberatory agenda in research. The positivist, empiricist, and historicist approaches in methodology present their false claim of neutrality and objectivity as their justification to universality, yet in reality, they are by default always in service to, and advancement of, the Enlightenment values of progress and a Western perspective of scientific and critical research. Maggie Walter and Chris Andersen beautifully put it: The quantitative methodologies that guide the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data about the [non-West] both reflect and constitute, in ways largely invisible to their producers and users, the dominant cultural framework … within which [the]… statistics operate. Although the statistical depictions used to summarize the social complexity of…communities are neither natural nor normal, the cultural weight and power of statistical techniques and the numerical summaries they generate speak a “truth” about the communities on which they shine their statistical light. But the way that they shine that light pushes out other ways of conceiving about and acting upon those communities. (2013, p. 9)

In essence, it is not just the fact that statistics are situated within an overarching Western culture that predetermines their value in a research project, but more importantly that they are often used in research to advance a Eurocentric world view. For example, in the discourses produced by research projects on modernization, development, and democracy, numbers have traditionally been used not just to advance Eurocentric values, but also to confirm Western cultural stereotypes of a povertystricken, human rights violating, and primitive Global South that has to catch up with the West. Quantitative content analysis, for example, maybe so effective for counting newspaper images of Africans and Asians sinking in the Mediterranean Sea while escaping war and poverty from their countries. However, it can be used to confirm Western stereotypes on ‘Third World’ poverty and conflict without explaining the real neoliberal, military, structural, problems caused by Euro-American neocolonial forces in those regions. Contrary to positivist claims, research statistics are never neutral because they are used to answer research questions which are value-laden and cannot fully escape cultural, racial, ethnic, and other Eurocentric biases. All researchers are ‘embedded members of their

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society, [and] researchers’ questions reflect the moral, political, racial, and cultural values that guide and frame their research’ (Walter and Andersen 2013, p. 50). Last but not least, the Global South must understand research as locked within the power structures of the Western knowledge order that shapes it through institutions of learning like the imperial and postcolonial university. To ‘discuss liberating research methodologies without critical reflection on the university’s role in research and producing knowledge is impossible. Universities have long claimed a monopoly in defining what counts as knowledge’ (Kovach 2005, p. 21). This means that research and the practices that define it is not a neutral activity, but political, ideological, and value-laden. We must see ‘research as a significant site of struggle between the interests and ways of knowing of the West and the interests and ways of resisting of the Other’ (Smith 1999, p. 2). Anti-capitalist, anti-neoliberal, anti-patriarchal, and anti-oppression research methods can only develop within institutions that allow for resistance research imagination to thrive. As such, the struggle for decolonizing research methodology must find nuanced articulation within an African continent and a Global South that embraces a moral and epistemic obligation to build Southern decolonized learning institutions. The imperial university advances an imperial research agenda and not a Southern liberatory agenda. In research terms, the coloniality of methodology speaks to the problem of how the imperial university institutionalizes research practices that advance the coloniality of knowledge. Euro-American modernity reproduces coloniality through strategic institutions like the university. This speaks to the problem of the structural domain of imperial power where the coloniality of knowledge is something that is held and exercised through institutions. Elsewhere, I have argued that ‘decolonizing research in communication studies as an act of deconstructing the coloniality of knowledge cannot happen without decolonizing our institutions of research and their prescribed Eurocentric rules of practice. The [Global South] university as a site of the necropolitical research has often emphasized the systems, values, and rules of the West that stifle radically transformative research in the South’ (Moyo and Mutsvairo 2018, p. 32, emphasis added). In both the North and the South, the imperial university always emphasizes the need to cite key scholars, a shorthand for Western scholars. It emphasizes publishing in top international refereed journals, another shorthand for Western journals. In media and communication studies more specifically, key scholars mean being widely read on

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the canonical works from the Northern archive: for example, just as the bible says you cannot go to God without passing through Jesus, similarly you cannot discuss discourse without Michel Foucault or discuss the public sphere without Jurgen Habermas. The mores and rubrics of publishing reflect research practices that stand on a scaffold of Eurocentric methodologies of the imperial knowledge order. The decolonial research methodologies are counterhegemonic. They seek to confront not only the colonial and Eurocentric mores and rubrics of research advanced by imperial institutions, but also to wrestle research practice from elitist, positivist, administrative, and capitalist paradigms and recast it as an activity that can be truly in service of everyday people in the sense of resistance, empowerment, cognitive justice, and the insurrection of silenced indigenous knowledges. For example, in the decolonial research framework, the masses or ex/colonial subjects are not gullible dupes or objects of history who live in total submission to global capitalism and its matrices of coloniality, they are active subjects of history engaged in everyday struggles of political and cultural redemption. They dig up and recover their silenced cultural knowledge embodied in orature, folklore, legends, and storytelling. By supporting the narratives of ordinary people emanating from the fringes and struggles from below and histories from below, the decolonial methodology redefines the relationship between knowledge, truth, and power. Knowledge is not just a product of the powerful elites and elite institutions like universities. Rather, knowledge is everywhere: the villages, the slums, and the ghettoes. It is not just the property of professors and pundits holding Western academic degrees, but knowledge also belongs to the peasants, the elderly, artisans, and women. Its medium is not just the voluminous books, journal articles, dissertations, or e-resources in libraries, but also includes folklore, myths, and legends. To that extent, the decolonial research approaches criticize Western methodology for being too logocentric, visualistic, and reducing all phenomena to a text. It concurs with James Clifford’s assertion that the rejection of visualism and logocentrism has raised awareness of the ‘ways in which the senses [may be] hierarchically ordered in different cultures and epochs’ and ‘that the truth of vision in Western, literate cultures has predominated over the evidences of sound and interlocution, of touch, smell, and taste’ (1986, p. 11, Also see Oyewumi 1997). Put differently, the fallacy of Western methodology

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is in its reduction, or better still, colonizing of world sensing as a multisensory experience to a mono-sensory activity based on the dictatorship of the eye. The decolonial critique of Western methodology does not mean that the Global South has to discard Western methodology in its entirety. Some scholars believe that there are progressive critical and interpretivist qualitative methodologies to breathe a decolonial liberatory spirit into (Chilisa 2012; Zavala 2013; Groh 2018). However, while it is easier to say what is not decolonial methodology, it is not equally easy to say what decolonial methodology is, simply because it is a research epistemology that is still nascent and under construction. Indeed, as Bruce Mutsvairo and I once reflected, ‘when we move away from Western research methodology, where do we go? How do we conduct research on the ground? If decolonizing research methodology is about the deconstruction of existing imperial epistemes on methods, how do we reconstruct new methods based on our decolonial imagination?’ (Moyo and Mutsvairo 2018, pp. 32–33). Is it possible to deconstruct methodologies taken from Western epistemologies and reconstruct them within Southern resistance epistemologies? Or better still, can Western methodology truly capture and convey the South’s yearning for cultural freedoms or its transformative politics without realigning the struggles of the exteriority with neoliberalism and a postmodern lingo? It is very difficult to say what the possibilities are outside a deliberate programmatic decolonization praxis and action. Suffice to say that whatever the experimentation on the dilemmas of decolonial praxis, what we must know is that ‘decolonized research practices go to the heart of the meaning of research itself, the power relations (overt and implied) between the researcher and the researched, the identities of players, the roles that each play, the end-goal of their actions, and the epistemologies within which those roles, practices, and identities are performed. These issues go far beyond the [quick fixes] in the politics of knowledge production in research methodology’ (ibid., p. 33). In the struggle to revolutionize research methods in media and communication studies, the Global South should not expect a walk in the park. There are vested interests that have inscribed their interests in knowledge production. Indeed, the marketization of research methods and the knowledge academics produce means, ‘the methodological tasks called for by the epistemologies of the South will be either fiercely resisted or utterly discarded as not belonging’ (Santos 2018, p. 120).

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The Participatory Action Research Methodology Participatory Action Research (PAR) appears to have many historical backgrounds depending on whether the historiography privileged is that of the critical or liberal tradition (see Freire 1970; McTaggart 1997; Smith 1999; Brydon-Miller 2001; Brydon-Miller et al. 2004; Chilisa 2012; Liamputtong 2010). From liberal, structuralist, poststructuralist, and now decolonial approaches, PAR has constantly evolved as a methodology. The way I use it here, however, is informed by the Freirean perspective that is located between the confluences of Marxism and decolonial epistemologies. Following Paulo Freire, Sara Kindon et al. (2007) define PAR as ‘a collaborative process of research, education and action explicitly oriented towards social transformation’ (p. 9). As a research methodology, it totally breaks away from Northern research epistemologies in the sense that it is collaborative, participatory, actionoriented, humanistic, and iterative. Therefore, PAR ‘represents a major epistemological challenge to mainstream research traditions in the social sciences and humanities’ (ibid., p. 9). At its best, PAR obtains within a decolonial research framework, including the transforming of the whole idea of what is research, who does what in it, how and to what effect? The transformative capacity of PAR lies in the claim that it is critical, reflexive, and action-oriented where the ex/colonial subject is conscientized through ‘a process of doing, reflecting on the action, drawing conclusions, and reflecting again on the process’ (Chilisa 2012, p. 227). For example, in development communication, instead of a researcher merely conducting interviews and publishing journal articles about problems of poverty in the slums of Johannesburg, Lagos, Mumbai, and Sao Palo as an end goal, the PAR approach requires that people work collaboratively with the researcher through all research stages in a non-hierarchical and lateral process underpinned by the equality of discussants. As Norman Denzin observes, the ‘participatory mode of knowing privileges storytelling, dialogue, listening, voice, and personal performance narratives. It is a performative ethic, grounded in the ritual, sacred spaces of family, community, and everyday moral life. It is not imposed by some external, bureaucratic agency’ (2009, p. 278). Ordinary people such as the peasants are directly involved in the research process as a self-revealing process. They eventually take communicative action to conscientize the self and the community about the nature of the problem and the necessary ameliorative interventions.

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The Laedza Batanani theatre for development case in Botswana in the 1980s has been used as a popular example of a research project of the community, by the community, and for the community acted through the model of a theatre for the oppressed to unleash the research’s transformative potential (Kidd and Byram 1982; Boal 1979; Mda 1993). In the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire argues that research must be transformative and liberating in terms of creating popular agency for social change. In a powerful quote that can also be said to be foundational to decolonial research methodology, Freire contends that: The investigator who, in the name of scientific objectivity, transforms the organic into something inorganic, what is becoming into what is, life into death, is a person who fears change. However, in making people the passive objects of investigation in order to arrive at rigid models, one betrays their own character as a killer of life. I cannot think for others or without others, nor can others think for me. Even if the people’s thinking is superstitious or naive, it is only as they rethink their assumptions in action that they can change. Producing and acting upon their own ideas-not consuming those of others-must constitute that process. (p. 108)

In the PAR methodology, research is a not a top-down, dehumanizing process caught up in the false hierarchies of the educated versus uneducated, but a re-humanizing process where the ex/colonial subject of Euro-American modernity is moved ‘from research object to directorfrom “known” to “knower”- [which] can, in itself, be methodologically transformative’ (Walter and Andersen 2013, p. 65). PAR is predicated on the notion of the plurality and diversity of knowledges in a multiplicity of spaces, especially those populations of the Global South that continue to suffer systemic epistemic apartheid and exclusion. PAR totally rejects the false Eurocentric claims about the researcher as the knower/expert who brings theoretical and policy interventions to the communities they research. The assumption that the researcher’s knowledge fills the knowledge gaps or policy gaps for the benefit of community is in-itself reminiscent of colonial and imperial discourses of civilizing mission. As Tuhwai Smith observes: ‘But [the] belief in the ideal that benefiting mankind is indeed a primary outcome of scientific research is as much a reflection of ideology as it is of academic training. It becomes so taken for granted that many researchers simply assume that they as

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individuals embody this ideal and are natural representatives of it when they work with other communities’ (1999, p. 3). According to Chilisa (2012), the shift from individualistic extractive methodologies to the decolonial, collaborative, reflexive, multi-narrative ones means that ‘the ex/colonized, the exploited, the poor, and the marginalized should participate as knowers in the entire research process, which includes defining the research issue, collecting data, analyzing, and interpreting data, writing the report, and disseminating the findings’ (p. 226). Freire used the concept of conscientization to point to critical consciousness both as a driver and outcome of such collaborate research processes where participation is not just a means to an end, but an end in itself because it is a human right. Collaborative processes produce collective authorship and communally driven models of knowledge production. Thus, decolonial research methodology goes ‘beyond the paradigm of authorial individualism privileged by the epistemologies of the North, which is characterized by such distinctions as subject/object, knower/known, mind/body, and theory/practice’ (Santos 2018, p. 54). Extractive methodologies epitomize capitalist individualism and greed in that they falsely claim originality and exclusive intellectual rights to knowledge that is, in reality, collectively produced. This is why the decolonial PAR challenges ‘the traditionally hierarchical relationships between research and action, and between researchers and ‘researched’. [It has] sought to replace an ‘extractive’, imperial model of social research with one in which the benefits of research accrue more directly to the communities involved’ (Kindon et al. 2007, p. 1). However, from the readings of Bagele Chilisa (2012), Kindon et al. (2007), Pranee Liamputtong (2010) and others it is apparent that decolonial epistemologies in PAR can also be used to positively transform Western methods of data gathering such as interviews, participant observation, and focus groups through a process of decolonization. Decolonization inoculates, these data gathering methods from their Eurocentric and colonial biases while at the same time domesticating them to be culturally sensitive to postcolonial and indigenous settings. In other words, these data gathering methods can be transformed and culturally aligned to work effectively in the producing of qualitative data that finally informs the transformative actions of the research project. In is important to give a few examples of how PAR can be used effectively in media, communication, and cultural studies. Marie Cieri and

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Robbie McCauley give us an interesting example of how they used PAR to address the problem of white supremacy and racism question in the United States. Their research project sought to bring artists, researchers, and communities to openly discuss the race question in their communities. They gathered qualitative data of people’s experiences of racism through storytelling, a central method of PAR that allows people to open up about their deep personal and intergenerational psychological traumas. The power of a story always transcends the individual experience of a storyteller to become a reflection of broader social justice issues in a given society. They concluded that indeed it was possible for people to come together through PAR to ‘to explore questions of importance to their communities and to initiate a process of dialogue and interaction that can effect change at a broader scale’ (Cieri and McCauley 2007, p. 140). Through PAR, they could comment on racism as subjective, structural, and symbolic violence in which questions of discourse and representation in mainstream media are investigated. Participatory theatre, a form of action research involving researchers and the broader community, was also central to conscientize people and galvanize social action on racism. If PAR can be used to research racism as a systemic and symbolic process, it surely can also be used to research gender stereotypes such as in Caitlin Cahill’s ‘Makes Me Mad: Stereotypes of Young Urban Women of Color’, collaboratively done with some women from New York City (2007, p. 181). In this project, women came together to write stories as a means of studying how they self-write and how women themselves can reproduce negative stereotypes about themselves. This echoes a personal experience in 1995 where, in my Senior Research and Practical Project class in Theatre Arts at the University of Zimbabwe, we focused on gender-based violence and poverty at Matapi hostels in Mbare, a very overpopulated and neglected township in Harare previously used as hostels for black migrant workers during the colonial epoch. Our research was framed as a PAR and the community was involved from research problem identification to policy recommendations. The community identified a number of problem issues comprising, inter alia, overdrinking of beer by men, unemployment, lack of budgeting and reckless expenditure of family income, poor communication and violence between married couples, husbands spending all the weekly wages by themselves, wives contracting sexually transmitted diseases from their husbands, etc. At the end, we (researchers and community) used theatre for development to conscientize the community about the problem of gender-based violence

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and other related problems. From this communication for development project, I noticed that although PAR was a critical and emancipatory method for the poor, there are a few limitations to reflect on. There is a tendency to romanticize participation, community, and local knowledge of the indigenous people. For example, while there was participation by the Matapi residents, men tended to be more opinionated and domineering whereas women seemed to cautiously navigate men’s views and sometimes self-censored. One also noticed the tendency by the community to think that the researchers knew better about the community since they were from a university. As such, while PAR can be a powerful decolonial research method, it is important that participation takes place within asymmetrical power relations. While participation is erroneously seen as synonymous with full engagement of the researched, it can still be top-down and elitist in the sense that it can unwittingly reproduce dominant patriarchal views or the researcher’s views as ‘expert’ views. Indeed, ‘acts and processes of participation-sharing knowledge, negotiating power relations, and political activism can still conceal and reinforce oppressions and injustices in their various manifestations’ (Kothari 2001, p. 24). The reification of participation and local/indigenous knowledge produces the myth of structurelessness in PAR which can mask the cultural male power embedded in patriarchy or expert opinion embedded in researcher-researched dynamic. Lastly, the question of community and community culture in PAR cannot be ignored. The question of who is the community in PAR determines who participates and who has a voice? (Tomaselli 2001). Decolonial PAR must be wary of systemic forms of inclusion and exclusion within community—the naturalized ingroups and out-groups—as communities are not amorphous collectivities. The ‘community’ in PAR is a site of an ideological power struggle between subgroupings like men, women, the youth, children, sexual minorities, the rich, the poor, etc. Similarly, the notion of communal knowledge no matter how sanitized and romanticized is also a space of ideological contestation and may also reproduce the dominant male view as a community view in PAR. Decolonial PAR researchers must be reflexive about the locus of power in communities and track it beyond the community hierarchy to enhance participation. They must know that power in communities extends to ‘social norms and practices that are practiced throughout society’ (Kothari 2001, p. 141).

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Indigenous Research Methodology The Indigenous Research Methodology (IRM) is increasingly taking the centre stage as the anti-oppressive and social justice method in many disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, and social work (Smith 1999; Brown and Strega 2005). Epistemologically, it cascades from PAR and black feminist approaches that emerged from the exteriority and margins of the West that ‘contend that that those who live their lives in marginal places of society experience silencing and injustice’ and that ‘within the realm of research and its relationship to the production of knowledge, this absence of voice is significant and disturbing’ (Kovach 2005, p. 21). Indeed, in its broadest sense the IRM is not limited to Aboriginal and First Nation peoples such as the Maori (New Zealand), the Khoisan (Southern Africa) and Inuit (Canada) as it can still be applied to all postcolonial black people that still endure the intergenerational psychological trauma and cultural disintegration due to the triple legacy of slavery, imperialism, and neocolonialism. Chilisa (2012) uses the phrase ‘indigenous and postcolonial methodologies’ not to suggest that they conflate, but perhaps to indicate their intersectionality. As scholars writing from the prism of traumatic histories and legacies, we are not convinced that the empire is dead and that cultural identities have metamorphosed from centred solidities to liquified flows. In the age of neoliberal globalization, we still hold that culture and identity are still very much solid and centred: the centre is the West and everyone else is culturally and mentally dominated by this metaphysical empire even on how to interpret their cultural condition in the so-called global village. To state otherwise would not only amount to speaking against our lived experience in the imperial South, but also an act of intellectual dishonesty so treasonous to one’s conscience and integrity as a border academic. As Tuhwai Smith warns us, the ‘language of imperialism may have changed [and] the specific targets of colonization may have shifted, but imperialism still exists’ (1999, p. 103). In short, the IRM as a social justice and resistance methodology must also include the post-colonies of Africa, Asia and Latin America. The indigenous methodology is not about the past, but histories of the future through liberating the previously silenced present so that it can develop its own ontological presence through the power of its own languages and worldviews. As such, the concepts of orature, orality, or oral traditions the IRM not only through retracing the value of storytelling within indigenous and postcolonial settings, but

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also as a means by which researchers can explore the cultural knowledge of indigenous people. Oral traditions offer one such trajectory for understanding local indigenous cultures and their epistemic value. Yet it must be noted that IRM do not aim to sanitize the bad and the ugly of indigenous cultures, but to identify and valorize the good, progressive, and socially relevant subjugated knowledges that have been sidelined for being ‘unscientific’ by the dominant Western positivist-empiricist paradigm. The IRM as an ‘emancipatory research seeks to counter the epistemic privilege of the scientific paradigm’ (Kovach 2005, p. 21). For example, Enlightenment’s obsession with rationality and the reasoning subject—as evidenced in media and communication studies by the Harbermasian public sphere and its Cartesian logic–has reduced communication, a culturally versatile and dynamic process, to mere rationality or reasoned conversations in society. Yet Peter Reviere and Ruth Finnegan use the concept of the ‘ethnography of speaking’ to re-inscribe emotion, culture, gesture, performance, and ritual back into conversation by way of ‘the reinstatement of the individual as a thinking and feeling subject who is the creator of his society and culture’ (Rivire 1989, p. 22; See Finnegan 1992). The ethnography of speaking recasts oral tradition as a broad and complex phenomenon: capturing folktales, myths, legends, proverbs, allegories riddles, ideas, action, and performance. While performance ‘expresses…moral ties to the community’ it simultaneously embodies ‘the performative, ritual view of meaning [that] serves to legitimate indigenous worldviews [because] meaning and resistance are embodied in the ritual act of performance itself’ (Denzin 2009, p. 279). As Denzin further observes the performative expresses political agency, it is the site of resistance and a space and ‘context for resisting attacks on the legitimacy of cultural practices of the Other or the indigenous people’ (p. 279). Oral tradition re-affirms our ‘special attention to the narrative character of cultural representations, to the stories built into the representational process itself’ (Clifford 1986, p. 98) while simultaneously rejecting the false scientification and quantification of cultural phenomena. According to Finnegan, oral tradition, implies ‘that the tradition in question is in some way, (1) verbal or (2), non-written (not necessarily the same thing), sometimes also or alternatively, (3) belonging to the ‘people’ or the ‘folk’, usually with the connotation of non-educated, non-elite, and/or (4) fundamental and valued, often supposedly transmitted over generations, perhaps by the community or

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‘folk’ rather than conscious individual action’ (1992, p. 15). Therefore, oral tradition often speaks to intergeneration cultural memory and history as conveyed through oral media or non-written forms. Oral media are not about poor literacy levels and poor cognitive skills of indigenous people, but a complex tradition that has acted as a repository for knowledge lasting for several centuries. That tradition sometimes co-exists with literacy. Why does the IRM depend on oral traditions for a local perspective? First, as Ngugi Wa Thiong’o advises, ‘the central taproot of [a people’s] cultural nourishment…lie[s] deep in [their] native soil’ (1981, p. 3). As argued in Chapter 4, the indigenous people and postcolonial societies have gone through linguicides and epistemicides and one way of recovering their lost and subjugated knowledges is through oral traditions that still contain nuggets of information and wisdom that go back many centuries. To understand a people, their culture, worldviews and indeed their knowledge and wisdom, you have to understand their language as a repository of stories that document and animate social experience. In Decolonizing the Mind, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o put it so beautifully: ‘Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature; the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world. How people perceive themselves affects how they look at their culture, at their politics and at the social production of wealth, at their entire relationship to nature and to other beings. Language is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world’ (1986, p. 16). Second, it is generally believed that the majority of indigenous communities and the post-colonies of Africa and Asia are semi-literate or illiterate because they are mainly oral societies. Most of the information in these social environments is generally conveyed through storytelling and folklore. Colonial historiography viewed non-Western oral traditions as primitive. They were viewed within the modernization framework, an ethnocentric critique that regarded African, Asian, and Latin American cultures as anti-developmental. Under the circumstances, it is very unlikely that the Western anthropologists would have been interested in non-Western oral traditions, apart from using them to confirm their racist stereotypes. The West viewed oral traditions as ‘really belonging [to]- some earlier stage of society [and] as somehow closer to ‘nature’, [and this] also fitted with nineteenth-century…preconceptions: the binary ‘us/them’

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opposition developed in both social theory and popular understanding’ (Finnegan 1992, p. 26). Therefore, the IRM frees non-Western folklore from the grip of Eurocentrism. The researcher can now approach the ontologies of African, Asian, and Latin American storytelling using a new liberating and empowering lens. As such, the IRM epistemology is an epistemology of re-orientation and black/critical consciousness: it does not dig up folklore and other narratives to confirm the purity of cultures, but to understand the centrality of storytelling in the social construction of meaning, cultural identities, and self-sense-making inquiries. While the Western method generally produced an unsympathetic critique of the cultures of the ‘Other’, the Southern method is sympathetic to the self because its locus of enunciation is first and foremost, the self in terms of the ego and body politics of knowledge.

Decolonial Ethnography Conventional ethnography has been central in media and communication studies particularly in researching audiences and the dynamics of media consumption (Morley 1980, 1992; Moores 1993; Morley and Brunsdon 1999). Although ethnography continues to be significant in audience and reception studies in the field, its uses in the interdiscipline have become wide and variegated within the intellectual movement of cultural description and critique. Broadly speaking, the practice of the ethnographic method comprises, inter alia, participant observation, focus group discussions, and a range of interviewing methods. Ethnographic methods are generally executed during fieldwork where the ethnographer—armed with his pen, notebook, and voice recorder—accesses his research subjects for the agreed period of time to conduct his study. The ethnographer produces very rich descriptive accounts of what she sees, hears, and feels about the cultural world in which she has immersed herself. These descriptions, supposedly done with curious disinterest and objectivity, are generally considered ‘scientific’ in mainstream professional ethnography. The positivist obsession with objectivity is seen in the elevation of the researcher’s ethnographic descriptions to a kind of science: an ‘ideology claiming transparency of representation and immediacy of experience’ where ‘writ-ing is reduced to method- keeping good field notes, remembering your people meter, making accurate maps, and writing up results’ (Clifford 1992, p. 2, emphasis added). As a critical ethnographer James

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Clifford further argues, the myth of scientific ethnographic studies places writing, perhaps perceived as fact taking of sorts, as central to everything ethnographers do during and after the fieldwork. Yet the ideology of the so-called scientific professional ethnography is severely battered by ferocious criticism from critical ethnographers and decolonial ethnographers who see it as a political, ahistorical, academic, and creative text-making process that only serves to unmask ‘the constructed, artificial nature of [ethnography’s] cultural accounts’ while also highlighting ‘ the fact that [ethnography] is always caught up in the invention, not the representation, of cultures’ (Clifford 1992, p. 2). This point was also stressed by the leading critical ethnographer Clifford Geertz who argued that beyond the routines of data collection, the so-called scientific professional ethnography was really about navigating ‘a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures many of them superimposed upon and knotted into one another’ (1977, p. 10). The ethnographer does not observe audiences, cultures, rituals, or indigenous minorities from an empty space of neutrality, but from a particular culture, geography, gender, sexuality, history: all these give him an epistemic angle of the subject, something that can be broadly summarized as a culture interpreting another culture. The myth of scientific ethnography is further demystified by the fact that the ethnographer’s thick descriptions are not factual accounts, but simply a mix of the poetic and the political, the creative and the factual, and that ultimately: ‘ethnographic writing is as trope-governed as any other discursive formation’ (Pratt 1992, p. 27). In the final analysis, conventional ethnography is as much a text as it is a genre that works mediates the cultural world through certain codes and conventions that fulfil mainly expectations of a Western cultural or academic audience. Decolonial ethnography unmasks conventional ethnography as value-laden acting as medium of not only Western ways of cultural representation, but also Eurocentric value systems that influence the relationship between the researcher and researched and their roles in knowledge production. In other words, despite its seemingly harmless descriptive nature the conventional ethnographic text and genre are not innocent media for the objective world out there brought to us through the so-called science of ethnography. They are active agents in how cultures of the Global South are invented and represented in the academic and popular coloniality projects of the Western archive. Indeed, theoretically speaking, texts represent the actual instances of discourse occurring

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in some concrete material form (Johnstone 2002, p. 19). They ‘simultaneously represent aspects of the physical world, the social world, the mental world’ and ‘enact social relations between cultures, worldviews, ingroups and outgroups, the West and the rest ’ (Fairclough 2003, p. 27, emphasis added). Similarly, conventional ethnographic genre arguably represents ‘conventionalised… schematically fixed use of language of a given culture and its ideological inflections of the Other’ (Wodak 2004, p. 66, emphasis added). If the conventional ethnographic genre reflects geo-culturally shaped ‘ways of interacting discoursally’ (Fairclough 2003, p. 216), then decolonial ethnography requires us to look beyond the text into its structural imprints that are reflected through its underlying ideologies, discourses, attitudes, and values. For example, Western ethnographic accounts on Africa and the Global South, whether academic or through channels like National Geographic, are usually shaped by cultural modelling: a process by which the ethnographer consciously or unconsciously incorporates in his descriptions, those elements consistent with cultural expectations of a European audience. Despite the claims of scientific and objective ethnography, the ethnographic text produced through the Western frame is never far away from the Western worldview and the Eurocentric framing of the ‘Other’. For example, if you look at most book covers for media and communication studies from Western publishers, the ethnographic gaze on Africa is not usually that of modern cities with skyscrapers, but that of either a ghetto with satellite dishes hanging precariously on rickety roofs or that of an old man sitting next to an old fashioned 1970s wireless radio. Indeed, as Clifford (1992) beautifully puts it, ethnographic ‘science is in, not above, [cultural] historical and linguistic processes’ (p. 2). He further advises that it is important to note that scientific professional ethnography, like all ethnographic studies is ‘actively situated between powerful systems of meaning. It poses its questions at the boundaries of civilizations, cultures, classes, races, and genders. Ethnography decodes and recodes. It describes processes of innovation and structuration and is itself part of these processes (ibid., pp. 2–3). The ability to reflect on the positionality or locus of enunciation of all ethnography has inspired the rise of both critical ethnography and decolonial ethnography. While both are inevitably informed by reflexive practice and the awareness of the structuring effects of power, ideology, language, gender, race, class, sexuality, genre, and textualization on ethnography, decolonial ethnography puts more emphasis of how Euro-American

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modernity uses ethnographic discourses—be they academic or creative— to invent the African, Orient, and Latin American in ways that remain deeply Eurocentric and colonial. Euro-American modernity’s ethnography is a space for colonially manufactured and narrativized ideologies of ‘Othering’ which are as much about as it is also about the demonization of alterity, and Europe’s self-redemption from the slavery and neo/colonial sin. As Couze Venn argues this ‘colonial and [neocolonial discourse] discourse [is] not just about the discursive construction of the colonized ‘other’ but [is also] intrinsic to European self-understanding, [that is], determining how Europe and Europeans could locate themselves as modern, as civilized, as superior, as developed and progressive only by reference to an other that [is] represented as the negation of everything that Europe imagine[s] or desire[s] itself to be’ (2001, p. 4). However, a major ethnographic counter-narrative against the inferiorization of Africa, Asia and Latin America is emerging through the rise of indigenous ethnography which not only gives a ‘native’ perspective of the researched culture, but also a liberatory view through decolonizing the ethnographic text, genre, and practices. Insiders ‘studying their own cultures offer new angles of vision and depths of understanding. Their accounts are empower[ing] and restricted in unique ways’ (Clifford, p. 9). In South Africa, for example, decolonial indigenous ethnography could be strategic in the re-theorizing of the cultural sensibilities of African audiences through a re-reading of Brett Murray’s The Spear: a painting that portrayed former President Zuma, an avowed traditionalist and polygamist, with his genitals explicitly exposed in ways that were seen by others as culturally insensitive. Although the painting was defaced by some angry viewers at the Goodman Art Gallery in Rosebank in Johannesburg, a German art collector eventually purchased it. Using The Spear in the study of African audiences and reception dynamics, it could be interesting to reflect on the following questions: (1) What would decolonial ethnography make of the spear, audience reception, and the question of race in South Africa? (2) What would it say about art, artistic freedom, cultural sensibilities, and ethics? (3) Who can best answer these questions—indigenous ethnographers, decolonial ethnographers, or conventional mainstream ethnographers? It is imperative to note that in indigenous ethnography, indigeneity does not necessarily mean that because one is geographically and culturally located in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, they therefore think from the epistemological perspective of the oppressed who belong to the

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wretched or darker side of Euro-American modernity. As such, decolonial ethnography is an ethnography that is predicated on a critical and black consciousness that has the ability to track power and domination and how they are reproduced through capitalism, neoliberalism, racism, sexism, and patriarchy. It is not descriptive, but critical in the sense that the ethnographer and researcher subjects are aware of how cultural power and capitalist hegemony operates. Its critical reflection on culture, knowledge, and action situates people as active agents for changing conditions of coloniality of being and capitalist bondage. In that sense, decolonial ethnography is built on the foundation of equality of researcher and the researched. It is reflective of the limitations of Western method in data gathering, taking into consideration ‘the personal, political and ethical considerations of [Western] research’ with a view to creating ‘more transparent and informed research accounts that recognise the lived experiences of those who have been marginalised in mainstream academic discourse’ (Manning 2018, p. 312). In the interviews, participant observation, and focus groups, decolonial ethnography negates the Western individualistic view of an ‘all-knowing’ ethnographer who interrogates the subjects and collects and collates the data in order to fill the existing knowledge gaps he or she long identified. In decolonial ethnography, knowledge is produced collectively within a framework that ‘privileges relational ways of knowing that volarize respect for relations people have with one another and with the environment’ (Chilisa 2012, p. 206). The relationship between the researcher and the researched is lateral and informed by the principle of the equality of discussants. The African principle of the ‘talking circle’ (Chilisa 2012) where people sit in a circle to discuss issues, means that everyone has an equal chance to speak, to contribute, to ask questions within a methodological paradigm that privileges knowledge that is produced in discursive contexts that are not top-down and unidirectional, but multidirectional, multivocal, and horizontal. As Manning (2018) contends, in decolonial ethnography ‘power is shared and knowledge is produced together with participants ’ and ‘this raises issues of representation and positionality: the researcher’s power in relation to knowledge production and the representations of participants and their knowledge. It highlights the position of researchers in enabling collaborative dialogue and equal power relations with participants’ (p. 314, Emphasis added). Similarly, decolonial ethnography openly acknowledges the contribution of participants by using their real names because ethically it is a

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method that foregrounds participatory knowledge production, its collective ownership, and the visibility and real voices of participants (Chilisa 2012; Groh 2018). The decolonial research epistemology is not about emancipation through mediated voice, but allows the previously subjugated voices to build their own voice and project it as a critical agenda undergirded by a liberatory philosophy and ethic. Consequently, in decolonial ethnography the concept of authorship for research is not individualistic but collective. As Santos (2018) explains in decolonial ethnography ‘the question of authorship is complex; it includes types of authorship that go beyond the paradigm of authorial individualism privileged by the epistemologies of the North, which is characterized by such distinctions as subject/object, knower/known, mind/body, and theory/practice’ (p. 54). Santos further criticizes Western concepts of research authorship as extractive and possessive by wrongly ascribing intellectual property rights of creativity and originality to one single author when in reality the knowledge was produced collectively.

Decolonizing Research Ethics The problem of Euro-American capitalist/modern/colonial world order is its duplicity on the moral and ethical questions facing humanity. It is centred on the ethics and morality of the colonial turn as the centrepiece of a capitalist world system and its ‘civilizing’ order. According to Tikly and Bond (2013), it’s a system built on the myth of Western humanism that is purportedly universal, yet in reality always remains particular to and in service to the West. They argue that Western humanism, an Enlightenment hoax to the Global South, developed a moral philosophy that is predicated on the principle of ethical rationalism whose function was to separate reason from emotion and process from outcome (Also see Dussel and Vallega 2013). Indeed, through ‘the coupling of an instrumentalist view of science and progress to a process of othering of non-Western cultures, Western humanism has been complicit not only in colonialism but in other barbarisms of the modernist era, including slavery, war and genocide, all in the cause of ‘progress’ (Tikly and Bond 2013, p. 424). In the age of neoliberal globalization, the market or capital (not the people) have become the focus of an overarching and totalizing ‘ethical discourse [that supports] the individual economic agent unfettered by the state, free to pursue his or her own economic interests’ (p. 425). This is normally in flagrant contradiction to the human rights discourse associated with

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globalization and research and educational institutions like UNESCO. The duplicity of the Euro-American capitalist/modern/colonial ethical and moral order can also be seen in the fidelity of its moral philosophy and ethics to professions, disciplines, and institutions instead of humanity. It is as if modernity’s ethics are in service of the protection of the reputations of capitalist institutions and professions and not humanity. They have a utilitarian or instrumentalist value to capital and not humanist value to eradicating human problems and suffering. Generally speaking, decolonial ethics aims to wrestle the value of morality and ethics from the grip of global coloniality for realignment with the resistance struggles of the oppressed, and the politics of social justice, hope, and freedom. As argued repeatedly in the previous chapters, in spite of the lofty ideals of the Renaissance and Enlightenment projects, the colour line continues to actively reproduce the fault lines of systemic and structural exclusion to even to ethics, (including research ethics) where they should apply, and who they should serve. Needless to say, the Global North represents those spaces where morality and ethics fully apply. Except for the Southern populations in the North as geographic accidents of the North, the Global North can be seen as a ‘home’ to ethics, the ethics of life and the living Western subject. The Global South, at geo-cultural level, continues to demarcate spaces of colonial difference and other abyssal lines. It is a space of non-ethics , or better still, the ethics of death for the living dead non-Western subject. Here, anything goes: the journalism of lies and manipulation to justify wars on the countries of the South by the NATO, the abuse of human subjects in unethical bio-medical research experiments, the rigging of elections and general undermining of the democratic projects through Western engineered coups, and the expropriation of the mineral wealth by the bourgeoisie state in concert with global market forces. How does all this relate to the problem of research ethics? It seems to me a very fitting background and a good starting point to understanding the problem of research ethics in the Global South where for centuries research has been perceived as a morally dirty practice (Smith 1999). The background offers a comprehensive picture to the condition of the ‘global ethical problem’ in which research ethics are only a microcosm. Indeed, research ethics are also rooted in the paradigm of difference, the pathologization of the non-West thinking and ways of knowing, the deification and imposition of the so-called modern scientific research methods over alternate methods of knowing emerging from the exteriority. As such

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and broadly speaking, the critical agenda and task for decoloniality are ensuring the existence of a praxis for decolonizing research ethics and decoupling them from the coloniality projects of dehumanization and exploitation in the new deterritorialized empire. The overarching objective is to re-animate research ethics in media and communication studies and connect them to the broader ethic of liberation and freedom linked to everyday struggles to solve the global systemic and epistemic crisis and other human problems. First, decolonizing research ethics sets the decolonial scholar at loggerheads with the positivist, utilitarian, and market-driven research ethics that are increasingly dominant in media and communication studies due to the neoliberal policies and the collapse of public funding in the university (see Bailey and Freedman 2011; Mamdani 2007). I have previously alluded to this problem in Chapter 5, albeit within the context of my discussion of academic and epistemic freedoms in the Global South. Second, decolonizing research ethics also sets the decolonial media scholar in direct confrontation with the ethnocentric biases of ethics that impose a monocultural moral framework on non-Western regions. From this perspective, decolonizing research ethics poses the challenge of developing a transcultural research ethics model that liberates, deprovincializes, and accords legitimacy to indigenous cultures as competent ethical frameworks. Last but not least, it means confronting epistemic apartheid in the practice of research ethics in the Global South as a zone of none being. This would require rigorous ethical clearance mechanisms on informed consent, beneficence, fidelity and justice, and non-maleficence. The positivist ethics are historically associated with the North American mass communication tradition and administrative school. However, their resurgence globally in the twenty-first century is due to the postCold War dominance of neoliberal free-market educational polices and the corporatization of the university and academic disciplines. Although positivist research is informed by the myths of neutrality, objectivity, and scientific values, in reality it is the driver of utilitarian research that is strategic to the capitalist edifice and its neoliberal hegemony between the modern state and market forces. The impact of this structural and institutional limitation is evidenced by the rise of the production of academic and policy research that is informed by the instrumentalist reasoning, coloniality of knowledge, and by default in service of capital. Indeed, the enduring Euro-American modernity’s ‘mantra of knowledge for progress [entrenches] the scientific model in … social sciences. Positivism [is] the

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answer for an individualist, industrial-centric society that [is] feverishly focused on production outcomes and profit. Universities [become] thinktanks for knowledge production culminating in research methodologies, extractive in nature, which served industry and business’ (Kovach 2007, p. 27). With the rise of the so-called information society and knowledge economies, the tyranny of positivism in media research has not only seen the centrality of quantitative methods even in media analysis, but more fundamentally the suppression and repression of other ways of knowing. Ironically, alternative ways of knowing are needed much more now than ever before because of the systemic, epistemic, and ethical crisis faced by Euro-American modernity. Yet despite this crisis, bourgeoisie media and education systems continue to entrench capitalist hegemony and producing cultural dupes globally. These cultural dupes—products of media research that ensures their psycho and bio governmentality in time and space—live at the level of what critical ethnographer Jim Thomas calls ‘the taken-for granted world’ (1992, p. 9). This ‘taken-for-granted world often seems too confusing, too powerful, or too mysterious to slice beneath appearances, and it is not always easy to see clearly, let alone address, the fundamental problems of social existence that we confront daily’ (ibid., p. 9). Decolonial research ethics are against knowledges of coloniality, oppression, dehumanization, objectification, and disempowerment. Their abiding moral principle is the production of knowledges that liberate the subject. Therefore, decolonizing research ethics in media and communication studies requires the respect of indigenous cultures in the postcolony as repositories of knowledge and worldviews of the ex/colonial subject. As Marie Battiste reminds us, ‘ethical research must begin by replacing Eurocentric prejudices with new [ethical] premises that value diversity over universalism’ (p. 503). For instance, ubuntu (humanness/personhood); an African relational concept rooted in the belief of a common humanity and grounded on the humane values of ‘brotherliness, togetherness, hospitality, solidarity and mutual support of each other and the community within which one exists’ (Barben 2006, p. 6); has often been suggested as a counterhegemonic value to capitalist media practices and capitalist academic research practices (Nyamnjoh 2005; Wasserman and de Beer 2005; Wasserman 2013; Stuit 2016). Others have also suggested confucianism (Chinese concept), umma (Islamic concept) or dharma (Hindi concept) as potential moral frameworks that can complement the Western human rights-based approaches to research ethics (see

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Cheng 1991; Tikly and Bond 2013; Santos 2002). However, most critics of ubuntu and these other alternative ethical frameworks have tended to critique them at the level of praxis and not the substance of their worldviews as alternative moral philosophies for a liberation ethics underpinned by communitarian and not individualism (Fourie 2008; Tomaselli 2003b; Matolino and Kwindingwi 2013). Yet broadly speaking, decolonial ethics are not just about the freedom and re-humanization of the subject from hegemonic knowledges that sustain modernity’s paradigms of difference and war, but also about a common humanity and communitarianism. According to Norman Denzin decolonial and indigenous research ethics ‘honor sacred knowledge [and] resist the commodification of knowledge. They seek to empower indigenous [and postcolonial] persons. They return control over research to the local, moral community’ (p. 278). Furthermore, decolonial research ethics are emancipatory. They emanate from transformative struggles that situate knowledge within pluriversalism and multiversalism and the importance of ‘indigenous epistemology that] is fluid, non-linear, communitarian, and relational’ (Kovach 2005, p. 27). The last points of discussion are about informed consent and confidentiality. While these are generally well accepted in the Euro-American research paradigms, they tend to be problematic in decolonial and indigenous research practices. Groh (2018) critiques the general laxity on the strict application of the traditional research ethics in indigenous contexts because of the researchers’ stereotypical view that local people maybe ignorant of what ethics and their role in knowledge production. He argues that the researcher has to prioritize unequivocal, clear, full and informed consent from the people. In ‘indigenous [and postcolonial] contexts, the requirements [must be] stricter, [because] of the abuse indigenous peoples have been subjected to in the past. Therefore, we should give a clear and full explanation what the study is about… Indigenous persons should be free to give the consent, and likewise, they should have the freedom to refuse their participation’ (Groh 2018, p. 19). Indeed, the problem of full and informed consent from indigenous people and ex/colonial subjects can also linked to what language the media researcher uses. Colonial languages are not the best to advance a decolonial and emancipatory research ethics. Indigenous and postcolonial populations ‘often associate [them] with genocide, land theft, forced displacement and other atrocities committed against indigenous peoples.

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As researchers, we need to be careful and sensitive, in order not to hurt the indigenous peoples’ feelings (Groh 2018 p. 98). On confidentiality, Groh (2018) and Chilisa (2012) agree that where people are willing to be identified by name in the write-up, this must be done. One of the primary reasons is that decolonial ethics, fully acknowledges the researched as the knowers of their circumstances and their voices must be active in the write-up in order to forge collective ownership of the ideas and theories undergirding the research project.

Conclusion There is no asking why research methodology occupies such an important space in media and communication studies. Methodology determines what we know and how we know about various issues considered very important in the discipline. The problem of the Western research methodology is that is a vehicle of the coloniality of knowledge in the Global South because it is a product of Euro-American paradigms. Western methodologies in media and communication studies are undergirded by positivist and critical theory traditions which are not emancipatory to the colonial subaltern. Decolonial research methodology seeks to change this by producing knowledge that is relevant and emancipatory to the Global South. Decolonial methodologies restore the South’s indigenous critical lens so as to be able to research its own cultures and its own media in ways that are regenerative of life and integrity of the humanity in the South. Decoloniality methodology constitutes resistance strategies against coloniality and creates the foundation of how the Global South self-writes through research.

References Asante, M. K. (1998). The Afrocentric Idea. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Asante, M. K. (2008). The Ideological Significance of Afrocentricity in Intercultural Communication. In M. K. Asante, Y. Miike, & J. Yin (Eds.), The Global Intercultural Communication Reader. New York: Routledge. Asante, M. K. (2011). De-Westernizing Communication: Strategies for Neutralizing Cultural Myths. In G. Wang (Ed.), De-Westernizing Communication Research: Altering Questions and Changing Frameworks. London: Routledge.

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CHAPTER 7

Reflections on Critical Pedagogy and Multiculturalism in Media Studies

Those of us who work in the field of education cannot afford to sit on the sidelines and watch this debate over the future of education as passive spectators. We need to take direct action, creating the conditions for students to become critical agents of social transformation. This means subjecting social relations of everyday life to a different social logic- transforming them in terms of criteria that are not already seeped in the logic of commodification. Students can- and should-become resolute and intransigent adversaries of the values that lie at the heart of commodity capitalism. Nathalia Jaramillo and Peter McLaren (2008, p. 200) Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students. Paulo Freire (1993, p. 72)

Introduction Globalization has occasioned a heightened interest in multiculturalism in general and multicultural education in particular. In media and communication studies, the potential of multiculturalism and multicultural education has always been, in principle, about creating a space for culturally diverse theoretical and pedagogical approaches in the field. However, in reality multiculturalism and multicultural education have had little transformative impact not only on social justice inside media classrooms, but © The Author(s) 2020 L. Moyo, The Decolonial Turn in Media Studies in Africa and the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52832-4_7

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also on ‘the monoculturalism…of [the field] and the wider processes of power relations and inequality between North and the Southern epistemologies ’ (May 1999, p. 1, emphasis added). Indeed, in both the Global North and the Global South, multiculturalism has become a neoliberal ideological hoax: a mere tokenism that has failed to address the underlying problems of Eurocentrism, epistemic apartheid, and structural racism in the university and broader society. From the perspective of the Global South, multiculturalism should not be about the politics of recognition but that of unconditional acceptance of alterity by the dominant AngloSaxon White culture. In other words, ‘the demands for recognition go far beyond the familiar plea for toleration for the latter implies conceding the validity of Euro-American modernity and its false hierarchies ’ (Parekh 2000, p. 1, emphasis added). The South demands, as Bhikhu Parekh searingly puts it, unequivocal ‘acceptance, respect, and even public affirmation of their cultural differences’ and not in any way to be ‘treated as pathological deviations to be accepted grudgingly, but as equally worthy ways of organizing the relevant lives or leading individual and collective lives’ (pp. 1–2). Yet over the years, it has become increasingly obvious that multiculturalism and multicultural education have provided weak answers to the big theoretical and pedagogical challenges of the twenty-first century that affect not just societies in the Global North and Global South, but also universities and their practices of teaching and learning in the classrooms. These failures—exacerbated by an astounding sense of conservatism and neocolonial capture of the academic project and spaces and the social lives of the of the damnes especially in the geographic South—have triggered radical reactions of epistemological revolt as a counterhegemonic logic of exteriority by the colonial subalterns. As stated by Jaramillo and McLaren (1994) in the epigraph, ‘Those of us who work in the field of education cannot afford to sit on the sidelines and watch this debate over the future of education as passive spectators. We need to take direct action, creating the conditions for students to become critical agents of social transformation’ (p. 200). In the imperial South of South Africa, for example, this disobedience was epitomized by student movements that began in 2015 demanding the decolonization of academic disciplines and institutional culture in universities (Nyamnjoh 2016; Ray 2016; Mbembe 2016). Almost two decades after the fall of apartheid, students saw the institutional culture of the universities as largely white and the curriculum as deeply Eurocentric and

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culturally alienating to the majority of learners. Yet this problem can never be said to be unique to South Africa: it reverberates across the continent in different ways. Mamdani (2016), for example, observes that the academic project in African universities continues to be shaped by various colonial legacies and free-market exigences of neoliberal globalization. In fact, this is also not exclusively an African problem. It also resonates deeply with the experiences of most countries of the Global South in Asia and Latin America where calls for decolonizing the university have also been rising (see Grosfoguel et al. 2016; Piya and Sunaina 2014). From the vantage epistemic angle of the South, multiculturalism is not just about respecting anything and everything that comes in the name of difference, but those ‘differences that are embedded in culture as a body of beliefs and practices that define a people and shape their lives’ (Parekh 2000). Although most post colonies of the Global South have dismantled the physical empire of colonialism, the metaphysical empire of epistemic colonialism is still intact and entrenched in university education. This neocolonial grip has far-reaching implications on how the university media teachers construct anti-racist, anti-sexist, and decolonial pedagogy that is deeply rooted on a revolutionary praxis that at once makes rehumanization and liberation of the ex/colonial subject a vocation for the student/teacher (see Freire 1993) while also expanding ‘the horizons of human possibility for postcolonial societies ’ (see Kincheloe 2004, p. 45, emphasis added). For a long time now, critical pedagogy has been touted as the archetype of the emancipatory method in the sense that it breaks away from the top-down, unidirectional banking educational model and privileges the creation of critical consciousness, critical thinking, and civic agency that are foundational to critical citizenship and animated public culture (Giroux 2011; McLaren et al. 1999; Giroux and Mclaren 1989). In the field of media and communication studies in particular, emphasis has been placed on producing the kind of student who is bequeathed with the vocational skills of media production, but is also able to transform the media industry and society in terms of the broader issues of social justice and egalitarianism. Consequently, it can be argued that critical pedagogy has been able to shield media and communication studies from the spectre of vocationalism, thus carving a space for the growth of critical media studies and critical communication studies. Vocationalism is based on pedagogies of the market and is different from vocational education. Vocational education is education for specific occupations such as teaching, nursing, carpentry, multimedia

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design, videography, and perhaps to some degree journalism. Vocational education is a necessity in society in the sense that it develops certain industry specific production skills set needed by the market for economic sustainability and profit maximization (Lewis 1998). However, vocationalism means the ‘determination of curriculum content by reference to its putative vocational usefulness and relevance’ (Williams 1994, p. 89). As capitalism’s hidden curriculum, the vocationalist pedagogies stress the importance of applied knowledge over academic knowledge, instrumental rationality over substantive rationality, and practice over critical media theory. Grubb and Lazarson (2005) argue that vocationalism is largely a systemic problem in which, for example, the fundamental value of media education is exclusively beholden to the labour market or ‘the demands for essential skills by employers’ (p. 302). Vocationalism is not concerned about social transformation in terms of class, race, gender, and sexuality.

Critical Pedagogy and Its Epistemic Limits Henry Giroux, one of the revered American educationists, defines critical pedagogy as ‘a theoretical and political practice’ that is an ‘outcome of particular struggles and is always related to the specificity of particular contexts, students, communities’ (2011, p. 3). Critical pedagogy ‘draws attention to the ways in which knowledge, power, desire, and experience are produced under specific basic conditions of learning and illuminates the role that pedagogy plays as part of a struggle over assigned meanings, modes of expression, and directions of desire, particularly as these bear on the formation of the multiple and ever-contradictory versions of the “self” and its relationship to the larger society’ (ibid., p. 3). Giroux argues that contrary to the dominant view of pedagogy as a skill, technique, or some disinterested teaching methodology, ‘critical pedagogy is not about an a priori method that simply can be applied regardless of context’ (p. 4). From this perspective, it follows then that critical pedagogy is a resistance pedagogy that has as one of its goals the creation of civic agency and resistance against power and domination. Rooted in Marxian critical theory and the politics of knowledge production, critical pedagogy unmasks the positionality of knowledge and empowers the student to develop a perspective and a voice on social problems. Since critical pedagogy is historically grounded on Marxist ideas, it naturally views class consciousness and class struggle as a loci of liberatory and revolutionary action against a capitalist transnational power structure at which pedagogy

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must take aim. According to Jaramillo and McLaren (2008), here class is not about differentiation identity markers of status, consumption habits, or social prestige, but more about ‘ownership of the means of production and whether individuals are dependent on wage labour to survive’ (p. 194). In essence, it is about ‘a sense of place [or position] within the capitalist social structure’ (ibid., p. 194). Jaramillo and McLaren further posit that the overarching goal of critical pedagogy is the emancipation of the subject and the creation of a post-capitalist socialist order. In that sense, critical pedagogy is a form of anti-capitalist pedagogy since it views formal and informal spaces of mediating reality such as the media, university, or the church as part of the broader hegemonic power structure of the transnational capitalist order. Critical pedagogy therefore ‘intervenes in this encounter [between subject and capitalism] in its attempt to establish the pedagogical conditions whereby the authentic specificity of realities lived and histories known can be used to recuperate a vision of the world outside of the capitalist-labor relation’ (p. 194). In the media and communication classrooms, critical pedagogy is therefore a collective study by the teacher and student of the extent to which media institutions in late capitalist modernity are locked within a global capitalist power structure in varying degrees and the degree to which the content they produce is symbolic of the capitalist interests. To that extent, for almost half a century, media and communication studies have produced an impressive body of critical theory that explores the dialectics of media structure and audience agency within an evermutating global capitalist order. However, with the collapse of Soviet Union and socialist imagination, the ultimate objective of some critical theories has not necessarily been to re-awaken class consciousness or reinforce our faith in the enduring value of class struggle, but a more esoteric and pedantic engagement with the dialectics of structure and agency. In most instances, Western critical theory has tended to engage in a postmodern fantasy about the power of audience agency: a position that is often anachronistic to the realities of the South where the state and the market wreak havoc. For the decolonial media scholar, the limits of critical pedagogy have been the view of the primacy of class over race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and religion. While being cognizant of race, gender, or ethnicity, critical pedagogy subordinates these factors and re-articulates them within an overarching prism or lens of class analysis. The obsession with class ‘means that critical pedagogy has evolved in a particular direction that

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centers the critique on the problem of capitalism’ yet we in the borders of the South must ‘privilege the concept of race as the point of departure for critique, not the end of it’ (Leonardo 2005, p. xi). Jaramillo and McLaren (2008) affirm the myth of the epiphenomenalism of class when they state that critical pedagogy must not recast race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality as autonomous categories, but in fidelity to the ‘causal character of class relations’ (p. 196). Elsewhere, Peter McLaren re-affirms this positionality: Critical pedagogy must transmute into a contraband pedagogy, a renegade pedagogy that views identity as a contingent articulation among class interests, social forces, and signifying practices and that replaces an essentialist logic with a theory of otherness as a form of positivity based on notions of effectivity, [and] belonging. A contraband pedagogy builds upon class solidarity without ignoring differences by conceiving alliances across race and gender as a set of affiliations. (2008, p. 32)

Decolonial pedagogy does not carry race, gender, ethnicity, and religion as a contraband of identity markers, but as legitimate baggage of the many layers of hierarchies of oppression in Euro-American modernity and global coloniality. Indeed, as teachers in media and communication studies, we must analyse subject formation and consciousness of the non-Western subject holistically and reject the supremacy of economy over other factors that equally and independently enjoy a structuring effect on not only the agency of the ‘Other’, but the hidden philosophy of the identity politics behind the Euro-American order itself. The idea of race is constitutive of Western modernity, its cultural institutions, and political processes. Hence ‘when racism is regarded as a baseless ideology ultimately dependent on other, “real” forces in society, the analytical error is that the structure of the society itself is not classified as racist’ (Leonardo 2005, p. 3). Contrary to the erroneous view of decolonial pedagogy as an essentialist pedagogy in support of a negative identity or cultural politics, the reality is it stands counterposed to the pernicious identity politics of a Euro-American global order where Whiteness is a privileged signifier in making sense of phenomena, including our cultures, our worldviews, and our humanity. This race-pivoted global identity politics is not necessarily always subject to class and economic structure, but enjoys its own inner logic of racial supremacy. To that extent, decolonial pedagogy is not synonymous with critical pedagogy because it decentres class and

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economic analysis while foregrounding race, culture, and colonial difference while at the same time, not ignoring class where and when class analysis matters. While acknowledging the importance of intersectionality of these factors with class, decolonial pedagogy also takes note that race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, or religion have their own contextual nuances in the border and that each of those can independently impact subject formation and consciousness in ways previously unimagined in critical pedagogy. In other words, race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, or religion can constitute points of analytical departure in their own right without necessarily privileging class analysis. The point for decolonial pedagogy, however, is to avoid sliding into some kind of post-critical fundamentalism or a postmodernist excitement with the power of discourse where economy as the structure of the global coloniality disappears altogether.

The Rise of Decolonial Pedagogy If the function of theory behind pedagogy is to illuminate the knowledge the teacher and the learner need in order to untangle a social problem that needs a solution, then one of the major tasks facing the decolonial media pedagogue is to reflect the extent to which critical pedagogy has been able to play that role effectively in the Global South. Indeed, the geocultural and epistemic location of the theory behind any pedagogy not only determines what the problem is, how to think about it, and in what kind of learning spaces, but also what counts as knowledge for solving that problem? For example, critical pedagogy as a Western canon operates within Western modernity’s logic of the Cartesian binaries of rational and irrational subject or scientific and unscientific education, thus framing ‘the role of the critical pedagogue [to] be to guarantee that the foundation for classroom interaction is reason…[so that]..the critical pedagogue is one who enforces the rules of reason in the classroom—a series of rules of thought that any ideal rational person might adopt if his/her purpose [is] to achieve propositions of universal validity’ (Ellsworth 1989, p. 304). Critical pedagogy implies competitive reasoning in a formal setting like the classroom where the temptation to outwit, esoterica, sophistry, and claim to superior argumentation may overshadow the foundational values of dialogue like listening, reflection, tolerance, compromise, and rapport as indispensable values of a transformative pedagogy. In essence, critical pedagogy leaves us in the labyrinthine of Hegelian hierarchies of reason,

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vanities of disciplinary mastery, intellectual status, the heat of contestation, and not the solution of human problems like poverty, alienation, and dismemberment. As Elizabeth Ellsworth rightly observes, the rational and scientific subject has been constructed ‘in ways that set up as its opposite an irrational Other, which has been understood historically as the province of women and other exotic Others’ (p. 301). Indeed, what is often left unsaid in critical pedagogy is that the exotic Others are the non-West: the Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans who are exiled from Euro-American modernity as the constituency of universal logic. Consequently, the duality of the ‘abyssal epistemic line’ (Santos 2018) in the concept of critical pedagogy simultaneously hides and advances epistemic racism, sexism, and classism mostly affecting the black, latino, orient, and female students. Therefore, before heaping praises on critical pedagogy’s transformative and revolutionary capabilities, it is ‘important to recognize that [it] remains rooted in the Western paradigm and therefore in tension within indigenous knowledge and praxis’ (Grande 2008, p. 238). Decoloniality is an anti or post-Cartesian pedagogy. Because it is premised on the epistemologies of the South that are informed by the struggle against the imperial knowledge, its institutions, and its pedagogies of enslavement, it is by default pessimist about the binaries between scientific and unscientific knowledge, rational and irrational subject, student and teacher. It views the hubristic arrogance of ego cogito (the ego politics of knowledge) as the fundamental flaw of Western critical pedagogy that has thrown capitalist modernity into the abyss of epistemic, systemic, and ecological crises. Decolonial pedagogy is also a post-literacy and post-logocentric pedagogy. Even though the students can read and write, the written word is decentred from defining the learning and teaching process or the ability to have a voice in the public sphere. Yet, for critical pedagogy to be literate did not just imply the ability to read and write, but more importantly to be ‘present and active in the struggle to re-establish a voice, history and future’ (Giroux 2011, p. 65). The valorization of the printed word as definitive of education in the West cascaded to critical pedagogy. As seen from the Habermasian bourgeoisie public sphere, its membership constituted of a reading public and rooted on the printed word of merchant newspapers and Enlightenment philosophers. Unlike critical pedagogy, decolonial pedagogy recognizes the place of orality in pedagogy particularly in parts of the Global South where knowledge continues to be produced and shared through storytelling, folklore, legends, and not just books, and academic journals. Hence, as

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Santos (2018) observes, for decoloniality, orality means that ‘the distinction between the creation and the transmission of knowledge, between research and pedagogy, ends up being problematic if not completely false’ (2018, p. 248, emphasis added). It follows then that decolonial pedagogy as a method is not limited to classrooms or media departments in universities, but is extends to non-institutional, extra-institutional, and supra-disciplinary spaces thus unmasking the fallacy of expert knowledge, the teacher as knower, the student as a learner, the superficial distinction between theory and practice, and intellectual labour versus manual labour. Intellectual workers ‘are not only those with a Ph.D. or a best-selling book. Intellectual labour is often collective; it is done in institutional settings ranging from corporations to schools to churches, and can be combined with other forms of work. Furthermore, intellectual work is shaped into different projects of knowledge formation’ (Connell 2014, p. 212). Therefore, decolonial pedagogy demonstrates that in reality knowledge is everywhere and is not a property of university scholars and libraries. Similarly, pedagogy as a weapon of liberation or conscientization for the colonial subaltern is also socially and historically contingent. It is not tabularasa or confined to intellectual production in formal spaces and institutions, but extends to mobilizing everyday learning that is grounded on real-life experiences and the struggles of the oppressed as articulated in the ideas of social movements, women’s movements, and artisanal places in the border. This is the essence of the decolonial pedagogy as a ’pedagogy of the oppressed’ (Freire 1993; Santos 2018). Let me now move on to discuss specific examples of decolonial pedagogies emanating from the Global South. These can be grouped under the rubric of what is increasingly referred to as border pedagogy— a descriptor that highlights not only their provincialization in Western pedagogy, but also captures their endogenous, indigenous, disruptive, counterhegemonic, and revolutionary nature (Anzaldua 1987; Grande 2008; Alexander 2006; Giroux 2005; Ramirez et al. 2016). Africa has contributed ubuntu pedagogy (Oviawe 2016; Quan-Baffour; 2014; Mnyaka and Motlhabi 2005), Latin America has proffered the nepantla pedagogy (Anzaldua 1987, 2015; Jaramillo and McLaren 2008) while American Indians have created the alternate red pedagogy—possibly a derivative from Red Indians (Grande 2008, 2015; Battiste and Barman 1995; Battiste 2000). What is common about all these pedagogies is that they are oppositional counterhegemonic pedagogies created by the colonial subalterns of Euro-American modernity who are marginalized in its

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knowledge order. Border pedagogy ‘summons subordinated knowledges that are produced in the context of marginalization in order that we (i.e. Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans) might displace existing practices and thus cross the fictive boundaries of exclusion’ (Alexander 2006, p. 22). The border is at once a place of bondage, yet it is also a place that inspires resistance, collective agency, and self-determination. The duality of the border is something that has captivated border intellectuals for a long time. Gloria Anzaldua (1987) described the border as a place of liminality, suffering, hopelessness, disenchantment, loss, and alienation of being and culture. The border—represented by Anzaldua through the metaphor of “Nepantla” (meaning place in the middle in the Nahuatlone language—is a ‘vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary…The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants…Tension grips the inhabitants of the borderland like a virus. Ambivalence and unrest reside there and death is no stranger’ (1987, pp. 3–4). The border, a product of unnatural physical and cultural boundaries, is the underside of Euro-American modernity. It is inhabited by a liminal non-Western subject and characterized by multiple layers of domination that Grosfoguel (2009) identifies as ‘European/capitalist/military/christian/patriarchal/white/heterosexual’ (2009, p. 18). The border is a place of yearning. Its inhabitants yearn for freedom from the modern slavery of racial capitalism, they yearn for cultural freedom from capitalist commodification and cultural pathologization by the West, they yearn for freedom from the heavy weight of racial stereotypes from Western media. Indeed, they yearn for spiritual freedom from monotheistic colonial religions, and yearn for freedom from ‘a global gender hierarchy that privileges males over females and European JudeoChristian patriarchy over other forms of gender relations’ (Grosfoguel 2011, p. 38, Also see Lugones 2007). Indeed, the everyday lived experience of the colonial subaltern at the border is that of multiple hierarchies of domination, including epistemic domination. To the extent that the border is a place of hellish existence, border pedagogy is characterized by decolonial love and decolonial healing as its inherent ethico-political value system towards the student of life, not just disciplinary knowledge, and culture not just communication. Hence, border pedagogy is not a pedagogy of vocational education or capitalism, but an enduring belief in

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the essence of moral, political, and cultural agency in deep global transformations of the capitalist system and its institutions. Border pedagogy targets the liminality of the border subjects, their double consciousness. It ‘must take into account their behavior, their view of the world, and their ethics [since] a particular problem is the duality of the oppressed: they are contradictory, divided beings, shaped by and existing in a concrete situation of oppression and violence’ (Freire 1993, p. 56). Gloria Anzaldua also saw the border as a place of hybridity; a place of ‘betwixt and between’ and as existing ‘between overlapping and layered spaces of different cultures’ (2000, p. 176). There ‘have been compensations for this mestiza, [the border] and certain joys. Living on borders and in margins…keeping intact one’s shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element, an “alien” element. There is an exhilaration in being a participant in the further revolution of humankind, [where]..dormant areas of consciousness are being activated, awakened’ (p. 5). Border pedagogy is not premised on a fatalistic logic, but an optimistic view to rehumanize ‘not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it’ (Freire 1993, p. 44). This is because as Lewis Gordon emphatically puts it ‘Humanity has died in Europe, the United States, and anywhere in the world in which Western Man- that is, White Man/White Culture- is Man and, therefore, Reason. In other words, humanity has suffered a global death’ (Gordon 1995, pp. 8–9). Indeed, border pedagogy seeks to save humanity from its fall due to racism, sexism, tribalism, capitalism, and free market fundamentalism that have ravished the souls of our media as cultural institutions, our universities as intellectual spaces, and our sense of spirituality (not religion). From a media and communication studies perspective, border pedagogy will not save humanity, but it certainly can resuscitate critical consciousness in classrooms, illuminate better transformative media policies, and create the much needed capacity to envision a more meaningful ethics for a progressive global cultural politics. As Hanno Hardt inspiringly put it: ‘How we communicate determines how we relate, and how we relate determines how we communicate’ (1992, p. 55). There is a self-evident institutional decay, too big to ignore, in how coloniality, racism, and capitalism have colonized the powerful and globally entrenched Western media monopolies that mediate global realities in the interests of global capital and their powerful Western governments. Thus, the task of border pedagogy is, broadly speaking, to bring back the media to the people by wrestling it from the grip of capitalism.

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Border pedagogy must unthink the dominant model of bourgeoisie media systems and rethink of more transformative ways of mass media ethics, regulation, funding, and financing, and journalistic training. Service to humanity and not capital is at the centre of all border pedagogies from ubuntu, nepantla, to red pedagogy. For example, ubuntu is an enduring African concept that transcends colonial borders as a crosscutting moral and ethical principle that is applicable to individual and institutional behaviour as an overarching principle. Indeed, to Mluleki Mnyaka and Mokgethi Motlhabi the moral significance of ‘Ubuntu is not only about human acts, it is about being, it is a disposition, and it concerns values that contribute to the well-being of others and of community’ (2005, p. 217). As a pedagogy, ubuntu breaks away from the positivist, individualistic, and Cartesian-based Western pedagogy to emphasize humanistic liberation from global coloniality and capital. Joan Oviawe, a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for African Development at Cornell University who has also worked closely with UNESCO on some of her educational projects, believes that ‘rediscovering the ubuntu paradigm in education is a first step towards reclaiming the African educational space in order to create education systems that are culturally and intellectually relevant’ (2016, p. 3). She argues that ubuntu pedagogy would transform curricular in the classrooms of Africa and the Global South by ‘ameliorating the long-standing effects of the colonial legacy of the received [banking and critical] education system in Africa’ that epitomize ‘the tragedy of excellence without a soul’ (ibid., p. 3). These ideals are coterminous with the nepantla pedagogy, a concept that Jaramillo and McLaren (2008) have recast ‘as a space where students and teachers can engage in a dialectics of negation [and] open up possibilities for potentially new and transformative social practices to emerge’ (p. 198). Like ubuntu, the nepantla pedagogy is a pedagogy based on the redemptive politics of life and liberating the voices of marginalized students by ‘developing languages of critique and resistance that help us to understand how the self—as racialized, indigenous, gendered, and alienated—is historically and contingently configured with respect to the totality of capitalist social relations’ (Jaramillo and McLaren 2008, p. 196). Again, like ubuntu the nepantla pedagogy is rooted on the principles of historical and cultural contingency and a knowledge politics that ‘enables students to recognize what they normally misrecognize’ (p. 198). Hence, neplanta recasts pedagogy as a practice for the search of agency and cultural freedoms from not just the market or capital, but also the Euro-American knowledge

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order in order to ‘create a language [that] is able to re-articulate critical thinking beyond …Cartesian rationality and Eurocentric arrogance’ (Jaramillo and McLaren 2008, p. 199). To that extent, border pedagogy is clearly a pedagogy of decolonization not just of the language of teaching, cultures, epistemologies, world views, but land as a medium of both our livelihoods and ancestral worship. Sandy Grande argues that while critical pedagogues are preoccupied with socialism as the final destination for our collective dreams for distributive and economic justice, the decolonial/border pedagogy is preoccupied with land as the metaphor of cultural and economic sovereignty and self-determination for the colonial subaltern. She exposes the inherent contradictions of critical pedagogy and its hypocrisy in advocating a kind of democratic project that ignores the questions of historical justice, distributive justice, or red/black/yellow pain from the colonial wound. In ways that automatically resonate with every pain of the ex/colonial subject in the South, she asks: ‘How does the “egalitarian distribution” of colonized lands constitute greater justice for Indigenous [or postcolonial] peoples? In other words, if the emancipatory project [of critical pedagogy] begins with the assumption of the “finished” project of Indigenous colonization, how is that liberatory for American Indians?’ (Grande 2015, p. 66). Put differently, critical pedagogy has the democratic project (not the cultural and economic sovereignty of the indigenous and postcolonial peoples) as its agenda. In media and communication studies, for example, its invisible and yet very powerful cues have produced a kind of academic research agenda and global media system that is at worst conservative and at best reformist to the capitalist power structure. Often, the media worker that liberal and critical pedagogies have produced thus far explains the poverty of indigenous and postcolonial populations in terms of laziness, corruption, dictatorship, and never as a result of land dispossession and dismemberment (see, Moyo 2011). In essence, decolonial/border pedagogy argues for a kind of global journalism that is premised on the definitive higher order ethics of humanity, truth, social justice, and human rights than just lower order ethics of balance, accuracy, and impartiality. Furthermore, using red pedagogy, Grande also explains the complexity of decolonial or border pedagogy. For example, red pedagogy helps to demonstrate the multi-subjectivity of the border learner where identity is ‘rooted in [land] and traditional indigenous knowledge and praxis’ (Grande 2008, p. 238). Red pedagogy recognizes the material, linguistic, spiritual, cultural, and relationality aspects of the lives of border learners.

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Its critique goes beyond the historical materialist conceptions of critical pedagogy to invoke the material and spiritual value of land to the native Americans and postcolonial subjects. The land in all border pedagogies symbolizes the conflation of object- spirit- subject. For example, Meyer (2008) argues that spirituality offers a deep cultural context for how knowledge is not only perceived, but also stored in the border pedagogies. He contends, the ‘knowledge that endures is spirit driven. It is a life force connected to all other life forces. It is an extension than it is a thing to accumulate’ (p. 218). In other words, spirituality occupies a very important space in border pedagogy not only in the constitution of a fuller being, but also in the framing of knowledge as transcendent and not just disciplinary. As media and communication scholars, this helps us to reflect on how far our teachings go in constituting the learners as fuller beings whose ideals go beyond remunerated media work to include transforming media industries and creating better societies through new journalism epistemes that are not grounded on conflict and drama, but the creation of new values that reflect a critical consciousness about the epistemic, cultural, communicational, and ecological crisis that has characterized Euro-American modernity. Border pedagogies do not seek to produce neoliberal advocacy journalism, but a kind of journalism that speaks to deep structural changes to the system.

Decolonial/Border Pedagogy in the Classroom Paulo Freire argued that education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students (1993, p. 72). In the classrooms of media and communication, perhaps more accurately critical media and critical communication studies, critical pedagogy has become something of a meaningless routine: an attention grabbing gambit that is often calculated to showcase the dazzling heights of the teacher’s knowledge of Western critical theory than engage in a truly transformative dialogical educational process in which both student and teacher are engaged in reciprocal learning and teaching that is informed by their everyday lived experience and not the esoteric abstractions of theory. As Jaramillo and McLaren (2008) observe in their discussion of alternative indigenous pedagogies, problem-solving, student-centred, and participatory critical pedagogy approaches now almost come naturally

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to every university teacher, but the problem is that the transformative capacity of the approach has been lost because of the paralysis in envisioning the alternative social orders to capitalism. In her anti-racist pedagogy project in the classrooms of the University of WisconsinMadison in the late 1980s, Elizabeth Ellsworth observed that despite their conceptual high soundness, the ‘code markers’ of critical pedagogy such as ‘empowerment’, ‘student voice’, ‘critical’ ‘emancipatory’, and ‘liberatory’ were in reality very unhelpful in classroom teaching practices. In fact, she argued that they amounted to ‘repressive myths that perpetuated relations of domination’ and ‘exacer-bated the very conditions we [are] trying to work against, including Eurocentrism, racism, sexism, classism, and banking education’ (p. 298). This criticism is important not just in the broader sense of critical pedagogy’s anti-Eurocentric Eurocentrism project of futility, but more specifically its degeneration into the tyranny of Western critical theory against the Other. To that extent, critical pedagogy speaks through the Freirean language, albeit not entirely representative of liberatory philosophy of education to the fullest. Decolonial or border pedagogy reclaims Freire from the critical paradigm to the border where the locus of enunciation speaks to the problems of colonial difference, linguicides, epistemicides, social and epistemic racism, liminality, and the general decay in everyday life in the border. Decolonial pedagogy is a re-reading of the Freirean method of the pedagogy of the oppressed from the borderlands or hinterlands of media and communication studies that are situated mostly in the South. This means the language of Freire’s liberatory pedagogy is re-interpreted from the prism of the border as an geo-social and epistemic site. This gives it (i.e., Freirean method) new meaning and agency not only in terms of revolutionary action, but also re-animating the classroom as a space of intellectual and cultural production that regenerates cultural agency and the vitality of institutions in the border. For example, from a decolonial perspective dialogue is more of a philosophy behind the teaching method than the method itself. It ‘characterizes an epistemological relationship [as] a way of knowing and should never be viewed as a mere tactic to involve students in a particular task’ (Freire and Macedo 1995, p. 18). Freire and Macedo further argued that dialogue captures the social character of learning and knowledge since both are produced relationally through language as well as culture. Therefore, dialogical education should be deep, participative, and transformative. It is not about the preponderance of classroom activities such as discussion groups where

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participation has been recast as a liberal method centred on rights-based pedagogy that can easily be discriminatory to the ‘Other’. For decolonial pedagogy, the student voice embodies and articulates the philosophy that undergirds dialogue as a springboard for a revolutionary praxis for the ex/colonial learner. Here, the language and home culture of the colonial subaltern must be at the centre of the curriculum because as Wa Thiong’o (1981) usefully reminded us, the value of language is not just for communication or dialogue, but also is a carrier of people’s culture and identity. Dialogue must not be reduced to the teacher’s ‘middle-class narcissism’ or a theatre of empathy for the poor, or better still, some kind of clinical psychological conversation that ‘provides participants with a group-therapy space for stating their grievances’ (Macedo 2000, p. 18). Dialogue in decolonial pedagogy is about the deep interaction of difference for the creation of a planetary curriculum that is informed by the radical transformative values of interculturalism and transculturalism. Dialogue must be indicative of a planetary curriculum which, apart from being anchored on the Northern archive and Southern archive, is also able to create ‘citizens capable of understanding that as well as belonging to..a nation, they are also members of the wider human family’ (Ednir and Macedo 2011, p. 1). The idea of a planetary curriculum stretches the concept of multicultural education into that of a pluriversal and multiversal education that acknowledges the fact that the world is made up of many centres of knowledge and culture not just Eurocentrism. For Paulo Freire, the philosophy behind dialogue is the foundation for revolutionary action that is based on the student’s intellectual curiosity to speak truth to power and change the world. According to Freire (1993), truthful words are inherently revolutionary because they epitomize critical consciousness of both learner and teacher in the dialogical process. Consequently, in decolonial pedagogy, the simultaneity of word and action is reflected in that of dialogue and liberation since dialogue devoid of transformative power is inconsequential. Freire explains this point in a more colourful way: ‘Because liberating action is dialogical in nature, dialogue cannot be a posteriori to that action, but must be concomitant with it. And since liberation must be a permanent condition, dialogue becomes a continuing aspect of liberating action (1993, p. 139). Freire believed the classroom was a space for critical consciousness. Social change was possible only through the spoken word because ‘human beings are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection’ (1993, p. 88).

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From the decolonial perspective, the classroom must also be a space for black consciousness for the Global South and Souths in the North particularly for those students whom race is tied to fate and is an impediment that must be survived. Due to the persistence of the colour line even in the twenty-first century, decolonial pedagogy sees black consciousness as a critical resource in dialogic education in the border. Black consciousness helps us better understand the problem of ‘colonial difference’, ‘dismemberment’, ‘linguicides’, ‘epistemicides’ and ‘necropolitics and social death’ as problems of the border and darker peoples of the world (see Wa Thiong’o 2009; Mbembe 2019). As Ellsworth (1989) rightly observed, these problems cannot be solved by privileging critical pedagogy over decolonial/border pedagogy since ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ (p. 305). She observed the injustice of calling on ‘students of color to justify and explicate their claims in terms of the master’s tools [such as] rationalism- fashioned precisely to perpetuate their exclusion [and thus] keeping the op-pressed occupied with the master’s concerns’ (ibid., p. 305). It is also important to note that decolonial pedagogy as a social justice pedagogy does not hide its anti-racist, anti-capitalistic, and antioppression political agenda. In the exercise of a liberating education, the teacher and the student are clear about the overarching goal of freedom from the power structures of oppression and their neo/colonial pedagogy. To be overtly political also means a conscious undermining of the limits of Cartesian rationalism as a method of the oppressive system that cannot be used to defeat oppression within the border. As such, decolonial pedagogy for media and communication studies must unmask the fact that the myths of rationality and universality ‘have been oppressive to those who are not European, White, male, middle class, Christian..and heterosexual’ (Ellsworth 1989, p. 304). At its heart, decolonial pedagogy is really about alternative ways of knowing emerging from silenced knowledges and silenced histories. In the classroom, decolonial pedagogy does not seek validation as critical within the framework of Cartesian doubt, but presents itself as a partial and subjective narrative that is conscious of its cultural and political baggage and interests as well as its positionality in terms of culture, race, gender, sexuality, and class. Both the teacher and the student in the classroom acknowledge that they are situated learners in socially, historically, and geographically, although the teacher must be keenly interested in the narrative and worldview of the student for its own sake and not necessarily the pronunciation of rational judgements.

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The previous point brings me to the problem of power relations between teacher and student that is perpetuated in critical pedagogy. Because of the power relations implied in critical rationalism, there is no convincing evidence that critical pedagogy deviates in any radical or meaningful way from the banking model which views the teacher as superior to his or her students. Critical pedagogy has not challenged this asymmetrical relationship that is also deeply rooted in the institutional validation of the teacher as the knower by his or her university employers. It has ‘failed to launch any meaningful analysis of or program for reformulating the institutionalized power imbalances between [teacher] and student, or of the essentially paternalistic project of education itself’ (Ellsworth 1989, p. 306). Unlike critical pedagogy, decolonial/border pedagogy confronts the problem of power imbalances between the teacher and the student. According to Freire, decolonial pedagogy locates itself within a new paradigm where ‘the teacher-of-the-students and the studentsof-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher- student with students-teachers’ (1993, p. 78). Freire argues that although the teacher might be the first who draws the course syllabus, in the classroom he learns from students ‘who in turn while being taught also teach’ (ibid., p. 78). Power relations between student and teacher must be eliminated by dialogue as an epistemic relationship where ‘arguments based on “authority” are no longer valid’ and where ‘authority must be on the side of freedom, not against it’ (ibid., p. 78). Informed by this Freirean perspective, Ellsworth (1989) has developed a typology of options that deal with power relations between the teacher and the student. First, she argues that we may have to make an honest admission that the student-teacher power relations are unavoidable. Here, she sees what she calls ‘emancipatory authority’ as the answer to the power disequilibrium. However, emancipatory authority can only function effectively in circumstances where the curricular is explicitly open to the learner about its political agenda of the resistance to domination and the struggle for human freedom against global coloniality and racial capitalism. To that extent, emancipatory authority is legitimated by the moral worthiness of struggle. It is a kind of authority the teacher earns from the student since it cannot be imposed. While the student initially concedes to it based on trust, both student and teacher must continuously reflect on its redemptive power because ‘no teacher is [completely] free of …learned and internalized oppressions’ and ‘no… accounts of one group’s suffering

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and struggle [are] immune from reproducing narratives oppressive to another’s’ (Ellsworth 1989, p. 308). Second, to create a power balance, the teacher ceases to be the knower and becomes ‘more like the student’ who must learn from ‘the student’s reality and knowledge’ (306). Here we must be ready to view learning as something that can be de-institutionalized and de-vocationalized in the sense that the student-teacher dialogue must transcend the constraints of capitalism and the imperial university. Capitalism and the imperial university present learning as an institutional process that is linked to the learner’s upward mobility in a capitalist society. Both produce adaptive education which in turn produces workers for the capitalist system. Again, both confuse schooling with learning, ‘grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something [original] and new’ (Illich 2000, p. 1). In reality, this kind of learning simply integrates the learner into the capitalist logic. It is not in service of human problem but those of capitalism. Taking up Ivan Illich’s deschooling society and learning thesis, decolonial pedagogy sees the world as the classroom for both teacher and student. To that extent, learning becomes a lifelong everyday vocation in which both teacher and student need not be limited by the schooling and institutionalized learning logic of the imperial university. Only a decolonized university and decolonized curricular frees both teacher and student. The decolonial solution ‘is not to integrate them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become beings for themselves’ (Freire 1993, p. 74). The process of dedecolonization of the curricula and the university re-instates both teacher and student with a voice that speaks ‘outside’ the capitalist discursive formation of university learning. The imperial university is not a site for learning, but capitalist and modernist discourse. Following Michel Foucault’s views on the power of discourse, Joe Kincheloe reminded us that institutionalized learning as a ‘discursive practice and [formation] sets…tacit rules that regulate what can and cannot be said, who can speak with the blessings of authority and who must listen, whose social constructions are valid and whose are erroneous and unimportant’ (2004, p. 55).

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From a Multicultural to a Pluriversal Media Education In his book Critical Multiculturalism: Rethinking Multicultural and Antiracist Education, Stephen May criticizes multiculturalism and multicultural education for failing to address the problem of systemic or structural racism. He rightly observes that multiculturalism is a ‘deracialized discourse’ and that it is therefore unsurprising that ‘multicultural education has failed to ameliorate, let alone contest, the wider patterns of racial discrimination and disadvantage faced by minority students in the North and the majority of the black students in the imperial South postcolonies ’ (May 1999, p. 2, emphasis added). May is not alone in his criticism of multiculturalism and multicultural education. A number of Anglo-American anti-racist educationists, most writing within the ambit of critical race theory, also argue that multiculturalism and multicultural education are deeply flawed (see Troyna and Hatcher 1992; Troyna 1993; Goldberg 1994; Apple 1996; McCarthy and Crichlow 1993). While they agree that multiculturalism has enjoyed greater critical purchase due to its quest for cultural diversity and the need to rethink pedagogy, theory, and knowledge politics in academic disciplines, they also see it as deeply ideological and some kind of empty sloganeering. Inspired by the American critical pedagogy approach, the AngloAmerican paradigm has argued in support of critical multiculturalism as better alternative. Barry Kanpol and Peter McLaren (1995) characterize critical multiculturalism as a postmodernist critique of not only the blind spots of conventional liberal multiculturalism, but also its hegemonic tendencies. In both the North and the South, the hidden curriculum of multicultural education advances not just the free market vocationalism, but also an insidious global identity politics of Whiteness and Eurocentrism as the overarching logic of academic learning and reasoning. Critical multiculturalism, they argue, must be viewed more specifically as a ‘resistance or critical postmodernist discourse’ (p. 3). Inspired by the Foucauldian view of the ‘insurrection of subjugated knowledges’ and Marxian view of ‘class struggle’, critical multiculturalism attacks all hegemonic universals be it racism, sexism, and patriarchy. However, it does so via not only class analysis, but also ‘a rejection, not a defence of singular…cultural identities’ (May 1999, p. 24). In other words, by denying the centredness of cultures, critical multiculturalism unwittingly endorses the dominant Anglo-American hegemonic cultural order while consigning

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the cultural spaces of the ‘Other’ to liminality. By now it must be reasonably clear that critical multiculturalism as an offshoot of critical pedagogy and critical theory is a Northern concept in terms of its geo-cultural and epistemic articulation. It is therefore a criticism of multiculturalism from within and therefore not transformative enough for the border. Pluriversalism emerges partly as a critique of both multiculturalism, critical multiculturalism, and their attendant educational systems that mediate coloniality of knowledge, being, and culture. In post-apartheid South Africa, for example, the broad ideologies of multiculturism have reproduced and extended apartheid’s pernicious cultural and identity politics that is undergirded by racism and the continued dehumanization of black Africans (Mbembe 2016). The burden of postcolonial whiteness weighs heavily on post-apartheid South Africa because Whiteness continues to be ‘a privileged signifier’ in the postcolony, its media, and its universities. Following Leonardo (2009), we must distinguish between having a white pigmentation and being white. While there are many white people who have fought and continue to fight for the cause of social justice, ‘being white’ implies moral and racist blindness about the social, cultural, and economic legacies of apartheid on the black majority. To summarize Alfred Lopez (2005), postcolonial whiteness means the continuation of white privilege, institutionalized racisms, and the invention of newer subtler and covert racisms based on colour, culture, neoliberalism, and economic segregation. Mishra (2005) has suggested that multiculturalism is not ‘anti-racist, but is in fact oblivious to racism’ (p. 5). From a decolonial studies perspective, we can argue that it is ‘a mode of diversity management [and] a means of preserving and fortifying power relations based on…race’ (Davis 1996, p. 41). Rooted in the cultural politics of the liberal white nation-state, multiculturalism reproduces the Hegelian hierarchy of slave and master and fails to provide radical views of alterity that shun racism, tribalism, patriarchy, and sexism. Multiculturalism fails to conceptualize cultural difference laterally. Pluriversalism speaks to the idea of many cultural worlds existing in peaceful coexistence: a multiversal onto-epistemic and cultural order that acknowledges and respects the plurilogic that the world is made up of many cultures, worldviews, thinking, and ways of knowing (see Monica 2006; Mignolo 2007). These are sovereign in their own right, although they exist in dialogue and reciprocity with each other as spaces of centred consciousness. Pluriversalism stands counterposed to

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Euro-American modernity as a system that universalizes Whiteness, Eurocentrism, and coloniality. Put differently, a pluriversal order amounts to the end of the Western universalism or the global dominance of Euro-American particularism. It is about decentring Western universalism, and replacing it with what Parekh (2000) calls ‘pluralist universalism’: a geo-cultural and epistemic order where all world cultures bloom and cross-pollinate; a world where no flower labels the other a weed, or sees its own colours as the best there has ever been. Indeed, in age of globalization, cultural translation is the language of pluralist universalism for culturally centred media and societies. As Parekh puts it, pluriversalism means humanity exists in a universe that respects the diversity of world cultures and identities. Hence, a in media and communication pedagogy a planetary curriculum provides a truly multicultural media and communication education where different ways of knowing are as important as the different knowledges they produce. A planetary curriculum is a product of cross-cultural dialogue, a dialogue between knowledge archives, an epistemic dialogue. Parekh explains this so beautifully: ‘Since we are culturally embedded and prone to universalizing our own cultural values, we need dialogue to counter this tendency and help us rise to the required level of intellectual abstraction’ (2000, p. 128). He shows that Western thinking is unable to conceptualize the moral weight of diversity because of its inbuilt abyssal fault lines and the demonizing the ‘Other’. Yet ‘far from being an aberration or a source of puzzle, cultural diversity is an integral part of humanity’ (p. 127). The planetary curriculum is a product of an honest acknowledgement and acceptance not only of the humanity of the non-West, but also the fact that ‘ours is a time of planetary entanglement’ characterized by ‘the saturation of the everyday by digital and computational technologies’ that ‘has led to the acceleration of speed and the intensification of connections’ (Mbembe 2019, p. 93). In other words, the redemptive power of technological globalization has been the unintended unmasking of the Euro-American lie of epistemic universalism and the deprovincialization of the Southern intellectual movements that advocate decolonial multiculturalism and decolonial multicultural education.

Conclusion Decolonial or border pedagogy in media and communication studies is central in the creation of a new praxis in terms of teaching and learning.

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Border pedagogy is cynical with critical pedagogy because the Marxistbased critical pedagogy reproduces the same coloniality of knowledge and being that is associated with the banking method. Border pedagogy in the interdiscipline means that we have to return to the source in terms of the reassessment of the value of indigenous methodologies in delivering local knowledges that empower the subject. As a method, border pedagogy reconfigures the relationship between teacher and student, their identities, and spaces of learning. Here, learning and teaching are a journey into Southern cultures, histories, and epistemologies in ways that amount to decolonial therapy and healing about the self.

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Lewis, T. ( 1998). Vocational Education as General Education. Curriculum Inquiry, 28(3), 283–309. Lopez, A. J. (2005). Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire. New York, NY: State University of New York Press. Lugones, M. (2007). Heterosexualism and the Coloniality of Modern Gender System. Hypatia, 22(1), 186–209. Macedo, D. (2000). Introduction to the Anniversary Edition. In P. Freire (Ed.), The Pedagogy of the Oppressed 30th (Anniversary. ed.). London: Continuum. Mamdani, M. (2016). Between the Public Intellectual and the Scholar: Decolonization and Some Post-Independence Initiatives in African Higher Education. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 17 (1), 68–83. May, S. (1999). Critical Multiculturalism: Rethinking Multicultural and Antiracist Education. London: Falmer Press. Mbembe, A. (2016). Decolonizing the University: New Directions. Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, 15(1), 29–45. Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University. McCarthy, C., & Crichlow, W. (Eds). (1993). Race, Identity and Representation in Education. New York, NY: Routledge. McLaren, P., & Jaramillo, N. (1994). Rethinking Critical Pedagogy: Socialismo Nepantla and the Specter of Che. In N. K. Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln, L. T Smith (Eds.), Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies. London: Sage. McLaren, P., Castells, M., Flecha, R., Freiré, P., Giroux, H., Macedo, D., & Willis, P. (1999). Critical Education in the New Information Age-Rowman. Lanham, MD: Roman & Littlefield. Meyer, M. A. (2008). Indigenous and Authentic: Hawaiian Epistemology and the Triangulation of Meaning. In N. K Denzin, Y. S Lincoln, & L.T. Smith (Eds.), Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies. London: Sage. Mignolo, W. D. (2007). Delinking. Cultural Studies, 21(2), 449–514. Mishra, V. (2005). What was Multiculturalism. Portal Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, 2(2). Mnyaka, M., & Motlhabi, M. (2005). The African Concept of Ubuntu/Botho and its Socio-Moral Significance. Black Theology, 3(2), 215–237. https://doi. org/10.1558/blth.3.2.215.65725. Monica, G. G. (2006). Walter Mignolo: Towards A Decolonial Horizon of Pluriversality: A Dialogue with Walter Mignolo on and Around the Idea of Latin America. Lucero, 17 (1), 38–55. Moyo, L. (2011). The CNN Defect. Journal of International Communication, 17 (2), 121–138. Nyamnjoh, F. B. (2016). RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa. Bamenda: Langaa Research & Publishing CIG. Oviawe, J. O. (2016). How to Rediscover the Ubuntu Paradigm in Education. International Review of Education, 62(1), 1–10.

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Parekh, B. (2000). Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory-Palgrave. London: Macmillan. Piya, C., & Sunaina, M. (2014). The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Quan-Baffour, K. P. (2014). Unity in Diversity: Ubuntu in the Classroom to Promote Learning Among Adults from Diverse Backgrounds. Studies of Tribes and Tribals, 12(2), 239–243. Ramirez, P.C., & Ross, L., & Jimenez-Silva, M. (2016). The Intersectionality of Border Pedagogy and Latino/a Youth: Enacting Border Pedagogy in Multiple Spaces. High School Journal, 99(4), 302–321. Ray, M. (2016). Free Fall: Why South African Universities Are in a Race Against Time. Johannesburg: Bookstorm. Santos, B. (2018). The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. Durham: Duke University Press. Troyna, B. (1993). Racism and Education. Buckingham: Open University Press. Troyna, B., & Hatcher, R. (1992). Racism in Children’s Lives: A Study of Mainly White Primary Schools. London: Routledge. Wa Thiong’o, N. (1981). Decolonizing the Mind. Harare: Zimbabwe House. Wa Thiong’o, N. (2009). Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance. New York: Civitas Books. Williams, K. (1994). Vocationalism and Liberal Education: Exploring the Tensions. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 28(1), 89–100.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion: The Paradigm of Dialogue and the Future of Media Theory

The golden age of cultural theory is long past. The pioneering works of Jacques Lacan, Claude Levi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault are several decades behind us. So are the path-breaking early writings of Raymond Williams, Luce Irigaray, Pierre Bourdieu, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Jurgen Habermas, Fredric Jameson and Edward Said. Terry Eagleton (2004, p. 1)

First, it is beyond doubt that Europe is no longer the (only) center of the world. Second, legitimate social sciences can no longer have the European experience as a sole point of reference. Third, the European tradition does not have a monopoly on variants of epistemology and ethics, at least not anymore. If the social sciences are not able to adjust to this new point of departure, traditions with a more suitable or apt grasp on reality will emerge in the new centers. Boike Rehbein (2015, pp. 8–9)

Introduction I would like to conclude this book by arguing that the future of media and communication studies is here with us. Change is upon us. However, for change to deliver the desired disciplinary transformation, we will have to be the change that we want to see in terms of critical agency. In his book After Theory, Terry Eagleton bemoaned the end of the golden age

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for Euro-American cultural theory. In fact, on closer analysis, perhaps it is more accurate to say Eagleton celebrated the golden age of media and cultural theory, but bemoaned the end of pathbreaking organic theories in the West. It seemed as if the powerful locomotives of theory building in media and cultural theory in Europe had ground to a halt. In his words, ‘not much that has been written since [had] matched the ambitiousness and originality of these founding mothers and fathers’ (Eagleton 2004, p. 1). Needless to say, I agree with Terry Eagleton. I also think that many in the interdiscipline do agree with him too. His anxieties reverberate strongly with the silent, but ever nagging question that faces all that are concerned with the problem of Western universalism in media and communication studies. The question is: What would be the state of critical media theory in the aftermath of the rise of the decolonial critique from the non-geographic Global South? Sometimes, these concerns also manifest as moral panics for the imperial North and imperial South who do not see the value of multicultural theory emerging from intercultural and trans-epistemic dialogue. However, I believe that better days for media and cultural theory are coming. There is another golden age of theory in sight, albeit a different golden age from that which was celebrated by Terry Eagleton. It is a golden age whose theory in the field is not going to be centred in Europe, or its hegemonic universalisms and the whiteness of knowledge. This new golden age of media theory will be a product of a multicentric and not monocentric world system. As Rehbein (2015) correctly observes, Europe ‘does not have a monopoly on variants of epistemology, and ethics…anymore. If the social sciences, [and indeed, media studies] are not able to adjust to this new point of departure, traditions with a more suitable or apt grasp on reality will emerge in the new centers’ (pp. 8–9). In many ways, this may already be happening because the Global South is slowly morphing into an epistemic location or angle that has become a launchpad for its media and communication theoretical projects now and in future. Again, Western media and communication studies, as a geo-cultural formation and epistemic frame, have been able to adjust in progressive ways towards the creation of a trans-epistemic intercultural dialogue that will deliver a true multicultural theory. Indeed, the interdiscipline is on the threshold of something that is not only big, but big enough to transcend the interdiscipline.

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In Chapter 1, I argued that Euro-American modernity’s paradigms of cultural difference and that of war are antithetical to the planetary and cosmopolitan projects of theory building in media and communication studies. The two paradigms are inimical to the global projects of multicultural theory building because they are rooted in coloniality. As a Western political and epistemic project, coloniality is not in pursuit of the collective and harmonious fate for all humanity, but accumulation and profit maximization through the enslavement, oppression, and exploitation of the non-Western subject. It is a project of the dehumanization of the Other. The very powerful metaphysical empire—including, but not limited to the Western media monopolies—works to conceal this dehumanization and possibilities for transformative dialogue and alternative global or planetary futures. However, the Global South represents a new paradigm of trans-epistemic intercultural dialogue which can be characterized as global, revolutionary, planetary, transcultural, cross-cultural and in search of cohesive global futures of multiculturalism, true unity in diversity, and the peaceful coexistence of world cultures. In media and communication studies, it is a paradigm that can give birth to new decolonial media theories through the multiple strategies of, on the one hand, the dialogue of cultures, the decolonization and de-imperialization of the Western colonial library of media theory, method, and pedagogy, and on the other hand, liberating and deprovincializing the suppressed, silenced worldviews of the South embedded on resistance epistemologies, indigenous knowledges, and artisanal knowledges from everyday practices in the border struggles. These border processes must culminate in the creation of alternate normative foundations for critical media theory that is against all forms of coloniality, while at the same time being in sync with the project of the emancipatory decolonial critique in the interdiscipline. As observed throughout the book, the Euro-American paradigm suffered in-built normative and epistemological limitations that are in turn reproduced in its media theories, research methods, and pedagogy. Indeed, the paradigms’ interpretive horizons ‘subjected [the West] to certain constraints that affect its methods of inquiry, its justificatory strategies and its proposals as regards the form or content of the social conditions that would facilitate human flourishing in the spaces of the Other’ (Cooke 2004, p. 39, emphasis added). The paradigm of intercultural trans-epistemic dialogue emanating from the Global South aims to expand the scope of Western theory’s interpretive horizon through

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decolonial reflective conversations between the non-geographic North and non-geographic South.

Normative Foundations and the Future of Media Theory The birth of new decolonial critical theories in media and communication in the non-geographic Global South requires the construction of new normative foundations. Such moral philosophical underpinnings are indispensable in that they inform the critical agenda of new theory. In practical terms, the construction of the new normative foundation demands a conscious negation or decolonization of the Enlightenment’s Eurocentric values of progress, rationality, science, and technology which have undergirded the liberal and critical traditions of media and communication theorization since the field’s birth almost a century ago. In the broader humanities and in media and communication studies, Western critical theory no longer enjoys moral high ground because of its problem of coloniality, deceit, and conceit that has been unmasked by the border and decolonial critiques as the ‘Western code’. Its recovery lies in a selfconstituted dialogic attitude that predisposes it to intercultural dialogue as a powerful medium by which Western theory can self-rehabilitate and re-embrace true multiculturalism in both society and media pedagogy. Although in some way limited, these efforts are already underway through what I referred to in Chapter 1 as the internal Euro-American critique of Western universalism in the field or anti-Eurocentric Eurocentrism. So, what moral philosophies can constitute the normative foundations of the new golden age of theory in media and communication studies? First is the normative principle of re-humanization of the colonial subaltern. Theory must save the colonial subaltern from the trauma of the colonial wound, the zone of none-being, the slum-like conditions of border, and the abyss of wretchedness created by the continued impoverishment of the border by modern capitalism and a neoliberal predatory state birthed by global free-market fundamentalism. It must unmask the intertwined workings of systemic violence and symbolic violence, and disrupt the false classifications and hierarchies of Euro-American modernity so as to restore humanity in both the centre and the periphery. Frantz Fanon taught us that ‘the colonial world is a Manichaean world. [The] colonist turns the colonized into some kind of quintessential evil. Colonized society is not merely portrayed as a society without values…The

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“native” is declared impervious to ethics, representing not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values’ (2004, p. 6). Rehumanizing the colonial subject implies a media theory that helps the subaltern to embark on a journey of self-discovery in terms of reconstituting the self and their cultural values and worldviews as the epicentre of their being. It must be a theory that while viewing culture as porous and problematic also acknowledges culture’s structuring qualities on subjectivity, intergenerational knowledge, theoretical languages, and worldviews. Similarly, while putting race and colonial difference at its centre, the media theory of re-humanization must also be able to acknowledge their complexities. Being white is not synonymous with being an oppressor, and being black is not synonymous with being a victim or a liberator. This is why Ngugi Wa Thiong’o portrayed the struggle of self-reconstitution in the border as a struggle that happens at two levels: (1) by moving our cultural and epistemological centres from the North to the South and (2) by moving the centres from the dominant black petty bourgeoisie and Eurocentric elites ‘within [postcolonial] nations to the real creative centres among the working people in condition of gender, racial and religious equality’ (1993, p. 17). Because coloniality has cascaded from the centre to the periphery, re-humanization theories must also attack the nationalist, patriarchal, and androcentric fundamentalisms of the periphery and their attendant neuroses of border exploitation, black on black violence, border primitive accumulation, border consumerism, and border sexualization and exploitation of women. Second is the re-humanization of the colonizer or the oppressor. In his classic, Epistemic Freedom in Africa, Ndlovu-Gatsheni details how the European subject is a product of the colonial turn. The colonizer is a product of the colonial turn born out of Euro-American Renaissance and Enlightenment projects. He argues that ‘at the centre of the unholy alliance of modernity, racism, imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism emerged a new architecture and configuration of power as well as new Cartesian conceptions of the human’ (2018, p. 71). Colonial modernity’s social classifications elevated the oppressor to be the master of everything while reducing everything and everyone else to ‘things’ that can be exploited for the benefit of the European man. In this sense, coloniality was not just a death project for the colonized, it also dehumanized the oppressor and robbed him of his humanity. According to NdlovuGatsheni, the decolonial turn as a critical project of re-humanization is not just a cultural and epistemic turn, it is also an onto-decolonial turn.

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The onto-decolonial turn tries to restore the humanity of the colonizer by ‘mending the damaged relationship of the [colonizer] with other “selves” as well as with [the environment]’ (p. 72). What has this to do with media and communication s theory? The onto-decolonial turn offers a good opportunity for the rehabilitation of the Western subject reason, and indeed theory (Mbembe 2015). It offers a moral philosophy for a media theory that bridges the gap between subject and object, nature and nurture, culture and structure by theorizing culture as irrevocably intertwined with not only the ecological questions of the day, but also capitalism as a social structure that has imprints on the symbolic world of the media and our social justice projects. Capitalism has posed the greatest danger to humanity, and the re-humanization of the colonizer is an effort to wrestle him free from his addiction with power, greed, and accumulation. Consequently, rehumanization as a moral philosophy stands counterposed to capitalist avarice and its exploitative impulses based on race, gender, and class. By extension, media theory emerging from this moral philosophy must aim to rehabilitate and transform bourgeoisie media systems and wrestle freedom of expression from capitalist media monopolies and give it back to the people as a reaffirmation of the people’s right not just to information, but to communication and voice. The right to communicate goes deeper than just freedom of expression for the mainstream; it goes as far as giving a voice, or better still, the means to a voice for the silenced, those representing struggles not only from below modernity, but also from ‘outside’ modernity. Third, the principle of (decolonial) multiculturalism is another foundational myth for new theory. I discussed multiculturalism at length in Chapter 1 and so I am going to be brief here. What undergirds decolonial multiculturalism as a normative foundation for new theory is the notion of trans-epistemic intercultural dialogue which implies intercultural communication as a central part of the project of theory building. However, dialogue cannot be possible without the ending or banishment of the Western gaze of cultural difference to the Other which has historically been associated with the demonization of alterity. Decolonial multiculturalism means shifting from the tolerance of cultural difference to the acceptance of cultural difference. The possibility of this idealism is informed by what Dmitri Ginev refers to as the ‘hegemony of dialogue’. He argues that ‘dialogic hegemony’ is not about the traditional Gramscian

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meaning of hegemony, but ‘denotes the dominance of authentic existential possibilities revealed by the interplay of ontological narratives in the public sphere of multicultural theory’ (2004, p. 103, emphasis added). Indeed, the fidelity to the hegemony of dialogue recasts dialogue as ‘situated transcendence’ which refers to a culture’s ability to transcend its ethnocentric prejudices about the Other. Since ‘every cultural life-form is predicated on situated transcendence, a multicultural..society is not an ensemble of cultural life worlds incommensurable with each other, but a totality in which each is open to the other’ (p. 101). Similarly, a multicultural media theory is not one that embodies all cultures, value for value, and spirit for spirit, but one with the ability to develop intellectual and moral coherence between cultural particularisms and pluralist universalisms. Decolonial multiculturalism is about moving from the hegemony of Eurocentrism to the hegemony of trans-epistemic intercultural dialogue as a core normative of theory building projects from the rehabilitated North and South. Others may criticize decolonial multiculturalism for reifying dialogue as a normative principle for post-Cartesian media theory building projects. However, the focus on North-South dialogue does not necessarily mean consensualist dialogue, but ‘implies the idea of a hermeneutic counderstanding without consensualist utopia’ and ‘to practice tolerance in a multicultural [interdiscipline] means not to search for a universal framework, but to enjoy existential possibilities revealed by the dialogue without consensualist dogma’ (Ginev 2004, p. 103). Dialogue is not just trans-spherical, it can also be lateral as in North-North dialogue and South-South dialogue since neither the North or the South are homogenous. Indeed, the ideal of acceptance of cultural difference in practice translates to multiple loci of enunciation in the project of theory building in media and communication studies. The multiple loci of enunciation puts cultural translation at the centre of all media theory building projects that prioritise social justice as an inherent part of theory. However, the framework of trans-epistemic intercultural dialogue has been criticized by others who see dialogue as implicitly re-asserting Eurocentrism instead of questioning it. For example, to what extent does the use of English, French, Portuguese, or Spanish as ex/colonial languages undermine the normative principle of theory building through dialogic encounters? Does the use of these languages reproduce the colonizer’s privileged position and undermine the revolutionary capacity of interculturality, if any? Robert Aman argues that definitely the use of foreign

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colonial languages reproduces the liberal and imperial notions of interculturality that create the ‘predicament of…fostering inclusion at the price of a concomitant exclusion of the Other’ (2018, p. 57, emphasis added). This is a valid criticism, but perhaps where we have no defence, we can highlight the strategic trade-offs between the colonizer and the colonized. Both the colonizer and the colonized are ‘learners’ of new vernaculars in the dialogic encounter. The colonized continue to learn to share their deepest psycho-cultural anguish through a foreign colonial language while the colonizer also painstakingly learns the real, true value of dialogue that is not based on advancing global coloniality and capitalist accumulation, but the true meaning of communicating for ethical global fellowship and a planetary multicultural society. Trans-epistemic intercultural dialogue therefore implies a painstaking process of the ending of epistemic deafness or epistemic insularity of the colonizer (see Rabaka 2010). The real weight of trans-epistemic intercultural dialogue is that for the first time since the Renaissance and Enlightenment period, the colonizer has to listen; and for the first time since slavery and colonization, the colonized have a chance to speak from the heart and not colonial script, colonial theory, or colonial archive. Finally, it goes without saying that social justice and cognitive justice lie at the centre of new theory. Critical media analysis must continue with its social justice agenda of unmasking social power structures and their manifestations through the hierarchies of race, gender, class, sexuality, and religion. Cognitive justice is not just about the social location of thought, but also the fact that ‘spaces must be opened up and opportunities created so that people in marginalized positions [and from outside colonial modernity] have the opportunity to collectively struggle against oppression, to voice their concerns, and create their own representations’ (Kellner and Share 2007, p. 61). Indeed, cognitive justice is about ‘coming to voice [which is something very] important for people who have seldom been allowed to speak for themselves like women, indigenous minorities, border intellectuals, and others representing various kinds of postcolonial and decolonial agency’ (p. 61, emphasis added).

Conclusion The decolonial turn in media and communication studies is proving to be a very powerful turn that no well-meaning intellectual in the interdiscipline can ignore. Its power is derived not from attacking the

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Euro-American archive, but from unmasking all forms of coloniality including Eurocentrism as the face of the coloniality of knowledge in media and communication studies. Its power is also derived from the trans-epistemic intercultural dialogue as a way of unlearning Eurocentrism and searching for new loci of enunciation for projects of theory building in the field. The decolonial turn stands counterposed to all media theory that is rooted in coloniality and Eurocentrism. However, the latter are never static because their language and discourses mutate all the time so as to conceal their real objectives of domination and exploitation of the Other. In this book, I have criticized Eurocentrism and the coloniality of knowledge in media and communication studies mainly as epistemic projects. However, in reality, these are also Western political projects that reflect the deterritorialized empire’s hegemonic projects of the institutionalization of domination, social ordering through false hierarchies, and the social control of dispersed populations. In Euro-American modernity’s knowledge politics, Eurocentrism has survived for 500 years because it used centralized distancing, an ideological and political strategy based on the social classifications that divide and rule in its interest. A fitting example of the centralized distancing model is given by Karen Barkey in Empire of Difference where she argues that ‘empires conquered and ruled by maintaining a pattern structurally resembling hub-and-spoke network pattern, where each spoke was attached to the center but was less directly related to the others…[The] peripheral entities communicated mainly with the center and with one another only through the center’ (2008, p. 28). Eurocentrism has also sustained itself as a global epistemic centre or hegemonic universal through that model. In the knowledge politics of modernity, Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans are made to know each other only through the Eurocentric lens as a mechanism of centralized distancing. Similarly, in their everyday lives, they also know of each other through representations from Western media monopolies like the CNN, BBC, Reuters, Agence France Presse, etc. The decolonial turn aims to subvert this centralized distancing by Eurocentrism in both media theory and the life world of populations of the Global South. The unmasking of this distancing has been an important first step towards the non-geographic Global South to come to voice and develop horizontal strategies of communication, solidarity, and cultural resistance through academic projects, economic and political blocs, decolonized university partnerships, cultural exchange projects, and transnational media projects.

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This Global South social movement must resist the temptation of a fundamentalism that reduces decoloniality to the binaries of North/South, black/white, and Europe versus the rest of us, but illuminate decolonial moral philosophy as anchored on the social justice struggles of decolonization, de-imperialization, and de-patriachization of knowledge and society in which cultural and intellectual production are located. The rise of the Global South stands as an indictment to colonially structured knowledge in academic disciplines and media education programmes, and inspires hope for a true global economy of knowledge built from the multicultural bricks from Europe, North America, Africa, Asia, the Carribean, and Latin America.

References Aman, R. (2018). Decolonising Intercultural Education: Colonial Differences, the Geopolitics of Knowledge, and Inter-Epistemic Dialogue. London: Routledge. Barkey, K. (2008). Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cooke, M. (2004). Between ‘Objectivism’ and ‘Contextualism’: The Normative Foundations of Social Philosophy. In D. Freundlieb, W. Hudson, & J. F. Rundell (Eds.), Critical Theory After Habermas: Encounters and Departures. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers. Eagleton, T. (2004). After Theory. New York: Basic Books. Fanon, F. (2004). The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Ginev, D. (2004). The Pluralistic Public Sphere from an Ontological Point of View. In D. Freundlieb, W. Hudson, & J. F. Rundell (Eds.), Critical Theory After Habermas: Encounters and Departures. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers. Kellner, D., & Share, J. (2007). Critical Media Literacy Is Not an Option. Learn Inq, 1, 59–69. Mbembe, A. (2015). Critique of Black Reason. Durham: Duke University Press. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. (2018). Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization. London: Routledge Rabaka, R. (2010). Against Epistemic Apartheid: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Disciplinary Decadence of Sociology. New York: Lexington Books. Rehbein, B. (2015). Critical Theory After the Rise of the Global South_ Kaleidoscopic Dialectic. London: Routledge. Wa Thiong’o, N. (1993). Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms. London: James Currey.

Index

A abyssal lines, 9, 131, 167, 216 invisible, 9, 124 academic and social multiculturalism, 18 academic disciplines, 1, 2, 5, 11, 12, 19, 47, 52, 79, 129, 217, 228, 246, 262 diverse, 47 academic discourses, 54, 66, 214 academic exchange, free, 192 academic freedom, 155, 157–165, 167–171, 175, 177, 179, 180 celebrated, 157 undermined, 162 academics/academy, 6, 10, 14, 16–19, 29, 31, 39, 40, 48–50, 52, 53, 66, 80, 91, 100, 102, 103, 115, 116, 118, 138, 139, 154–158, 160–164, 167, 170, 171, 173, 175, 176, 179, 180, 188, 192, 194, 200, 201, 203, 207, 211–213, 217, 218, 228–230, 234, 239, 246, 261

detached, 57, 118, 162 self-promoting immigrant, 103 academic workplace, 47 Acharya, A., 40 Achebe, Chinua, 172 administrative approaches, 191 administrative structure, 154 administrators, 160, 161 aesthetic area, 93 aesthetics, 72, 93, 156, 177 Africa, 154, 155, 158, 165, 166, 169, 170, 172–174, 178, 180, 188, 190–193, 207, 209, 212, 213, 235, 238, 262 frames, 44, 51, 178, 212 primitive, 67, 69, 87, 125, 166, 189, 193, 209 primitive ignorant, 44 sub-Saharan, 166 Africa and African populations, 94 Africa and Latin America in ways, 39 African-American scholars, 94 African-American school of thought on Afrocentrism, 94

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. Moyo, The Decolonial Turn in Media Studies in Africa and the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52832-4

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INDEX

African and Asian continents, 192 African and Asian countries, 100 African and Asian scholars, 133 African and Asian subject, 55, 189 African/Asian codes, 55 African/Asian experience and African/Asian ideals, 55 African/Asian experience and African/Asian ideals and values, 55 Africana studies, 120 African audiences, 213 African-centered scholarship, 94 African concept, 238 African continent, 188 African continent in higher education, 168 African countries, 12, 56, 141, 164, 168, 169 African cultural practices, 95 African culture, 55, 92–94, 98, 148 traditional, 93 African Development, 238 African educational space, 238 African elite hypocrisy, 159 African ethnologies, 92 African gnosis, 95 African higher education, 39 African ideals, 92, 148 African indigenous knowledges, 4 Africanity, 91, 95, 128 Africanization/Africanize, 3, 4, 13, 54–56, 155 low-level, 13 Africanize modernity, 92 Africanizing and Asianizing media and communication studies, 55 Africanizing Knowledge, 55 African knowledge and culture, 147 African Languages, 141 African media, 181 African modes, 56

African orature, 140 African origin, 95 African Philosophy, 140 African populations, 94 African principle, 214 African problem, 229 African relational concept, 218 Africans, 4, 6–8, 14–16, 32, 42, 48, 51–55, 57, 71, 72, 92, 94, 125, 126, 130, 133, 147, 155–158, 162, 165, 166, 172, 174, 181, 190, 195, 197, 199, 209, 210, 213, 229, 234, 236, 247, 261 black, 41, 92, 147, 155, 156, 192, 247 modern, 12, 21, 92, 94, 212 Africans and Asians sinking, 198 African scholars, 129 African speech, 140 African states, 158, 169 African Studies, 197 African subject, 95 ex-colonized, 94 African subjectivity and African, 92 African thought, 166 African tradition, 140 African universities, 12 African university media and communication classrooms, 122 African values, 4, 92 African villages, 94 Africa’s liberation movements, 41 Africa springs, 125 Africology, 95, 128 Afro, 96 Afro-Caribbeans, 141 Afrocentric/Afrocentrism/Afrocentricity, 54, 91, 92, 94–96 Afrocentrism and Pan-Africanism, 41, 95 Afrocentric scholars, 93 Afrocentric theory, 92

INDEX

Afrocentric thinking, 93 Afrocentric turn, 91 Afrocentrism/Asiacentrism, 55, 91–93, 95, 96 Afrocentrism prioritizes decolonial healing, 92 Afrocentrists, 94 Afrocentrity, 128 Afro-Latin American, 73 Afrology, 95 Afrophobia, 97 Afropolitanism, 95–98 Afropolitanism heralds, 96 Afropolitanism’s postmodernist thesis, 96 Afropolitan Turn, 91, 95, 98 alienates/alienation, 12, 13, 33, 85, 157, 234, 236, 238 content-economistic, 12 cultural, 12, 33, 157 alien element, 124 allocative decisions, 164 alterity, 47, 115, 131, 135, 139, 145, 189, 194, 213, 228, 247, 258 hand attacks, 194 human, 145 alternative modernities, 74, 114, 115 marginalized, 114, 123, 125 ambivalence, 121, 126, 133, 236 ameliorating, 238 America and world capitalism, 31 American Association of University Professors (AAUP), 163 American critical pedagogy approach, 246 American cultural tastes, 173 American culture, 13 American imperialism, 40 American Indians, 235, 239 Americanization, 176 American media intellectuals, 57 American media scholars, 126, 195

265

Americans, 48, 240 native, 135, 136, 240 American state, 83 American style of education, 44 Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, 49 anachronistic, 55, 84, 132, 231 ancestral worship, 239 Anderson, Chris, 188, 196–199, 203 androcentric fundamentalisms, 257 Anglo-American anti-racist educationists, 246 Anglo-American approach, 30 Anglo-American capital, 57, 191 Anglo-American global media, 134 Anglo-American hegemony, 99 Anglo-American orbit, 52 Anglo-American paradigms, 33, 130, 246 Anglo-American research, 189 Anglo-American theory, 32 Anglo-American TNCs, 40, 176 Anglo-American tradition, 29 Anglo-Saxon axis, 135 anthropology, 24, 87, 116, 189, 207 anti-black racist constructions, 147 anti-border, 23 anti-capitalist/anti-capitalistic, 75, 199, 231, 243 anti-capitalist position, 71 anti-capitalist struggle, 69 anticipation, 188 anti-cold war politics, 75 anti-coloniality, 136 anti-colonial struggles, 36, 41, 42 anticolonial thinking, 103 anti-democracy, 14 anti-development/anti-developmental, 193, 209 anti-essentialist approach, 96 anti-globalization movements, 71 anti-imperial/anti-imperialism, 37, 69

266

INDEX

anti-imperialisms, prior, 75 anti-imperialist, 36, 53 anti-imperialist resistance, 37 anti-internationalist attitude, 37 anti-neoliberal, 199 anti-oppression, 21, 106, 198, 243 anti-oppression research methods, 199 anti-oppression struggles, 21 anti-patriarchal, 199 anti-racist, 229, 243, 246, 247 Antiracist Education Stephen May, 246 anti-racist struggles, 86 anti-Semitism, 191 anti-sexist, 229 antithetical, 255 apartheid, 12, 23, 192, 228, 247 apartheid era, 155 apocalyptic prophecies, 85 apolitical, 179 Appiah, Kwame, 174 architecture, new, 257 Argentina, 169 artefacts, 20, 86, 93, 130 cultural, 86, 93, 130 historical, 86 artisanal spaces, 21 Asante, M.K., 3, 4, 13, 16, 34, 54, 90–93, 95, 116, 118, 119, 123, 126–129, 132, 140, 146, 148, 190, 194 Asia, 7, 9, 13, 18, 20, 30, 34, 36, 37, 39, 41, 42, 44, 48, 54, 56, 57, 66, 67, 73, 75, 77–79, 97, 102, 114, 119, 125, 128, 129, 134, 140–142, 144, 146, 154, 155, 158, 162, 165, 170, 173, 174, 178, 190–193, 207, 209, 213, 229, 262 Asiacentricity, 128 Asian and Latin American extraction, 91

Asian and Latin American reason, 162 Asian and Latin American ways, 52 Asian centricity, 54 Asian-centrism, 148 Asian continents, 192 Asian countries, 100 Asian cultures, 4, 55 Asian dignity, 148 Asian ethnophilosophies of yesteryear, 4 Asianization/Asianize, 3, 4, 13, 54–56, 155, 156 Asianization of disciplines, 54 assimilation, 23 cultural, 23, 175 Association’s membership, 3 asymmetrical relationships, 39, 244 atavistic primordialism, 192 atheoretical, 84 atrocities committed, 193, 219 Australian academics, 45 authoritarian/authoritarianism, 73, 159, 163 authority, 17, 53, 126 epistemological, 5, 6, 17, 53, 93 institutional, 12, 170 intellectual, 81, 132, 176 reciprocal, 178 axiological, 93, 197 axiological answers, 93

B Balakrishnan, S., 92, 96 behavioural attitude, 124 behaviourist, 191 beliefs, 16, 17, 24, 55, 80, 86, 88, 92–94, 102, 105, 143, 166, 193, 203, 218, 229, 236 organic, 102 unflinching, 24

INDEX

beneficiaries, 125, 177 white, 125 biases, 190, 198, 204 ethnocentric, 217 biblical status, 122 binaries, 22, 44, 91, 135, 234, 262 false colonial, 44 static, 91 biological trait, 75 bio-political/bio-politics, 127, 144, 154, 156, 166, 167, 181 Black African intellectuals in Africa, 91 black African journalists, 56 Black/Asian/Latin American, 4, 155, 157, 162, 165, 166, 168, 174, 180, 181, 190, 195, 197, 209, 210, 213, 234, 236, 261 black cultural nationalism, 92 black feminist approaches, 120, 207 Black internationalism, 40–42 Black Latin American, 73 black majority, 247 Black Marxism, 100, 128 Black Marxist thought, 91 black skin white masks, 174 black struggles, 41 Black Women, 120 blind spot, 5, 65, 84, 98, 121, 157, 246 conceptual, 65 epistemological, 5 blind theorization, 132 Book Decolonizing Methodologies, 189 border theory, 179 Botswana, 203 BRICS, 73 BRICS formation, 155 British imperialism, 40 British media studies, 30 bureaucratization, 85

267

C Canada, 207 capital/capitalism, 8–12, 21, 38–41, 68–71, 75, 77, 85, 89, 102, 124, 125, 131–134, 147, 159, 165, 168–170, 173, 175, 176, 189, 190, 193, 200, 214–217, 230–232, 236–238, 241, 244, 245, 256–258 capitalist, 15, 21, 41, 46, 67, 68, 123, 126, 132, 133, 146, 157, 165, 173, 188, 191, 216, 231, 236, 238, 245 environmentalists attack, 15 capitalist accumulation, 260 capitalist avarice, 258 capitalist bondage, 214 capitalist commodification, 236 capitalist conquest, 192 capitalist consumerism, 11 capitalist culture, 11, 12 universal, 12 capitalist discursive formation, 4, 245 capitalist edifice, 46, 99, 122, 134, 217 global, 46 modernity’s, 99 capitalist exploitation, 41, 74 capitalist hegemony, 71, 214, 218 entrench, 67, 218 capitalist individualism, 204 capitalist interests, 231 capitalist internationalism, 4 capitalist-labor relation, 231 capitalist media corporatization, 71 capitalist media decadence, 134 capitalist media monopolies, 9, 258 capitalist media practices, 218 capitalist modernity, 13, 173, 177, 191, 234 late, 231 capitalist oppression, 100, 146

268

INDEX

racial, 9 capitalist paradigms, 200 capitalist power structure, 239 capitalist society, 245 capitalist system, 15, 67, 237, 245 global, 67 capitalist world system, 21, 22, 215 Cartesian-based Western, 238 Cartesian binaries, 233 Cartesian logic, 20, 208 Cartesian rationalism, 243 Cartesian rationality, 239 centrality, 24, 142, 172, 196, 210, 218 Centre-periphery, 66 Centre-periphery model, 65 Césaire, Aimé, 100 China, 19, 31, 37, 48, 73, 84 Chinese socialist market economy, 159 civilization/barbarism, 18, 38, 101, 135, 136, 141, 145, 159, 212 clash of, 18 settler, 136 civilization’s self-image, 105 civilizing mission, 203 civil rights movements, 42, 85, 86, 128 cognitive justice, 34, 42, 55, 114, 115, 200, 260 colonial, 2, 8, 9, 11–13, 19, 22, 36, 38–40, 42, 44, 45, 47, 50, 53, 70, 74, 75, 77, 79, 84, 90, 94, 99, 101, 102, 105, 119, 121, 122, 125, 127, 131, 134, 136, 137, 139–142, 144–146 hidden, 2, 136 colonial/colonialism, 154, 189, 192, 193, 197, 200, 203, 205, 209, 213, 215, 216, 219, 220, 228, 229, 233, 235, 236, 238, 239, 241, 255–257

academic, 131 addressing modern, 167 justified, 143 modern, 38, 167 new, 189 colonial internationalization, 43 colonialists, 141, 165 colonialities, multiple, 34, 189 coloniality ideologies of, 39 logic of, 74, 126 matrices of, 22, 74 pervasive, 34 coloniality of knowledge and coloniality, 10, 54, 56, 141, 154 coloniality of power, 133, 136 coloniality projects, 9, 101, 133, 211, 217 popular, 101, 211 colonial modernity, 21, 38, 132, 257, 260 colonial modernity’s Cogito, 20 colonial modernity’s politics, 9 colonial subalternity, 128, 131 collective, 54 colonial subalternity position, 21 colonial subaltern position, 133, 242, 256 colonial theory, 260 colonial wounds/decolonial healings, 236, 256 colonization, 7, 8, 22, 34, 99, 127, 140, 142, 147, 207, 260 academic, 31 mental, 95 modernity’s, 140, 177 commercialization/privatization, 169 commissioned operator, 174 commodification, 77, 85, 122, 176, 219 communication classrooms, 231

INDEX

communication for development and social change, 206 communication imperialism, 190 communication research, 21, 51, 120, 123, 189–191 early, 84 mass, 24, 217 communication research preoccupies, 1, 191 communication resources, 122 communication scholars, 35, 116, 118, 188, 240 communication theorization, 256 communication theory, 10, 52, 113, 114, 137 communities, 15, 16, 33, 87, 97, 156, 160, 176, 180, 195, 198, 202–206, 208, 209, 218, 230, 238 academic, 80, 154, 160 broader, 205 moral, 208, 219 concept analytical, 68 bio-political, 154 central, 79 conservative, 47 critical, 76 emancipatory, 67 historical, 161 institutional, 161 kaleidoscopic, 56 liberal, 162 liberatory, 67, 69 mobilizing, 105 multidimensional, 160 multifarious, 68 non-ideological, 164 static, 162 technological, 74 concept fetishism, 116, 117 confidentiality, 219, 220

269

configuration, 65, 75, 257 conscientization/conscientizes, 144, 202, 204, 235 conscious border Intellectual, 171 consciousness black, 22, 42, 141, 174, 210, 214, 243 critical/black/political, 22, 69, 70, 87, 105, 204, 210, 229, 237, 240, 242 cultural, 167 double, 11, 133, 145–147, 237 historical, 120 oppositional, 12 political, 7, 69 consciousness institutions, 69 consciousness philosophy, 95 constitution, 31, 47, 240 contradictions flagrant, 215 historical, 82, 113 legitimate internal, 176 moral, 165 seated social, 11 teacher-student, 240 conundrum, 142, 168 conventions, 12, 38, 56, 71, 140, 211 co-operation, 146, 155 corporations, 179, 235 multinational, 179 cosmopolitanism, 8, 46, 96, 117, 131, 135, 165, 180, 255 counterhegemonic impulses, 133 counterhegemonic internationalisms, 4, 37 alternative, 40 counterhegemonic literature, 158 counterhegemonic logic, 228 counter-narratives, 144 crisis epistemic existential, 173 epistemological, 118

270

INDEX

ethical, 218 unproclaimed, 24 critical multiculturalism attacks, 246 critical pedagogues/critical pedagogy, 21, 170, 229–234, 239–241, 243, 244, 247, 249 critical pedagogy approaches, 240 critical reflections, 189, 199, 214 critical theorists, 118, 132, 147 critical theory, 1, 33, 77, 93, 117, 118, 127, 130, 140, 147, 156, 181, 220, 231, 247 grounded Southern radical, 22 radical, 127, 128 critique anti-European, 14, 104 dislodge, 104 enduring, 56 ethnocentric, 209 informed, 161 internal, 6 permanent, 24 postmodern, 53 postmodernism, 96 radical, 117, 162 self-emancipatory, 145 sympathetic, 117 three-pronged, 137 unsympathetic, 210 critique Eurocentrism, 78 cultural disintegration, 207 cultural diversity, 246, 248 global, 23 real, 11 cultural domains, 78 cultural epistemic, 123 cultural-epistemic turn, 4 cultural essentialism critiques, 104 cultural exchanges, 11, 73, 261 cultural expectations, 212 cultural ferment, 3, 120 cultural flows, 38, 73, 97, 178

global, 23, 66, 113, 119 cultural formulation, 17 cultural imperialism, 11, 12, 38, 66, 122, 179 crude, 12 new, 11 cultural industries, 99, 134 cultural influence, 159 cultural inheritance, 73 cultural insensitivity, 194 cultural politics global, 123, 237 progressive, 2, 16, 237 progressive global, 237 cultural positionality influence, 196 cultural resistance, 9, 38, 68, 71, 87, 91, 105, 128, 261 cultural studies, 24, 51, 66, 88, 130, 192, 204 coloniality of being, 56, 137, 214 cultural visibility, 3 global, 13 cultures academic, 29, 138 academic research, 48 alternative, 15 bounded, 55, 72 buried, 105 coerced, 101 community, 206 corporate, 161 deep structure of, 55, 93, 96 a dialogue of, 18 distinct, 17 diverse, 70, 177 dominant, 15, 16, 137 dominant Anglo-Saxon White, 228 everyday, 88 foreign, 141 given, 55 global, 3, 13, 162, 177, 178 homogeneous, 55

INDEX

literate, 200 local, 56, 193 mass, 85, 92, 122, 132, 173, 177 new, 35, 213 non-Western, 18, 159, 193, 194, 215 our, 33, 117, 162, 193, 232 particular, 211 people’s, 242 recalibrated, 131 researched, 213 silenced, 122 static, 55 traditional, 85 traverse, 49 variegated, 17, 210 variegated planetary, 24 visual, 124 white-identified, 174 curriculum, 164, 168, 228, 230, 242 hidden, 164, 230, 246 metropolis, 48 planetary, 242, 248

D Darker Side of Renaissance, 165 Darwinist-inspired evolution model, 193 Darwinist theories, 143 death global, 237 incomplete, 145 intellectual, 33 necropolitics and social, 243 random, 135 slow, 118 death bed, 103 death ethics, 124 decolonial black, 41 counterhegemonic, 21, 131

271

new, 11 producing, 42 decolonial approach, 202 decolonial border epistemology, 178 decolonial indigenous ethnography, 213 decolonial media epistemology, 126 decolonial multiculturalism, 14, 15, 248, 258, 259 decolonial privilege, 74 decolonial self-healing, 106 decolonize, 12, 22, 30, 48, 71, 104, 145, 156, 199, 201, 245, 261 deconstructing, 147, 199 deconstructing racism, 147 deconstruction, 201 decoupling, 139, 217 de-globalizes, 32 dehistoricise, 165 dehumanization, 69, 74, 125, 165, 193, 217, 218, 247, 255 dehumanizing, 23, 192, 203, 257 dehumanizing impulses, 146 de-imperialization, 255, 262 de-imperializing, 114 de-internationalization, 3, 36, 49, 50 de-internationalizes, 32 democracy, 9, 134, 158, 159, 163, 170, 179, 198 institutionalizing, 73, 158 multi-party, 158 democratic struggle, 68 democratizing, 170 demonization, 37, 103, 213, 258 de-patrichalization, 262 Dependency theory, 128 depoliticization/depoliticize, 50, 57, 103, 165 deprovincialization, 53, 137, 248 deprovincializes/deprovincializing, 217, 255

272

INDEX

development, 37–39, 50, 114, 117, 118, 134, 169, 170, 187, 193, 194, 198, 202, 203, 205 economic, 23 evolutionary, 84 deviations, pathological, 228 devilish intentions, 173 de-Westernization, 3, 24, 36, 51–54, 56, 127 de-Westernization, crude, 4 de-Westernization, cultural, 53 dewesternization liberate, 53 de-Westernization, traces, 53 de-Westernizing, 114 dialogical transformative, 18, 240 dictatorship, 201, 239 cultural, 177 discipline decoloniality, 103 discipline resistance epistemologies, 102 discourse, 180, 189, 198, 200, 203, 205, 212, 213, 233 alternative cultural, 24 counterhegemonic, 11, 178 critical philosophical, 126 critical postmodernist, 246 dehumanizing colonial, 87 deracialized, 246 ethical, 215 global, 23 intellectual, 190 modernist, 215, 245 modernization, 66 neocolonial, 213 normative, 78 oppositional, 178 oral, 140 priming, 105 rights-based, 15 scientific, 165 shared, 86

stereotypical, 178 uninterrupted spoken, 140 discourse analysis, 196 discourses mutate, 261 diversity, 167, 177, 203, 218, 248, 255 communal, 16 communal/national, 17 national, 16, 19 perspectival, 16 planetary, 18 subcultural , 15, 16 dominant black petty bourgeoisie, 257 dominant epistemologies, 78, 143 Downing, John, 24, 52, 116

E economics, 80 economic segregation, 247 economic sovereignty, 239 economic struggles, 68 economy, 233 centralized, 169 global capitalist, 134 global knowledge, 10, 47, 175 education academic, 34 adaptive, 245 dialogic, 243 global, 38, 46 internationalized, 49 missionary, 84 multicultural, 2, 227, 228, 242, 246, 248 multiversal, 242 neoliberal, 31 unscientific, 233 vocational, 46, 229, 236 educational policies, 42, 217 educational systems, 41, 44, 46, 58, 247

INDEX

egalitarian exercise, 105 egalitarianism, 119, 229 ego, 197, 210 non-situated, 139 ego cogito, 234 ego politics, 20, 234 Egypt, 44, 48, 100 emancipation/emancipatory, 6, 47, 68, 74, 82, 83, 118, 121, 127, 132, 165, 206, 208, 215, 219, 220, 229, 231, 239, 241 emancipatory authority, 244 emancipatory decolonial critique, 255 emancipatory designs, 41 empire academic, 50 decentred, 76 global media, 47, 173 metaphysical, 9, 35, 68, 102, 154, 207, 229 new deterritorialized, 8, 40, 47, 66 physical, 68, 229 empirical facts, 94 empiricism, 193, 196, 197 empiricist, 29, 85, 163, 198 Enlightenment, 9, 82, 83, 163, 165, 166, 191 the dialectic of, 192 Enlightenment hoax, 215 Enlightenment ideas, 118 Enlightenment modernity, 121 Enlightenment period, 42, 82, 260 Enlightenment reason, 103 Enlightenment’s Eurocentric values, 256 Enlightenment’s myths, 5 Enlightenment’s obsession, 208 Enlightenment thinkers, 234 Enlightenment values, 163, 198 enslavement, 125, 141, 234, 255 entanglements, 189, 196 discoursal, 81

273

illusory, 8 planetary, 248 entrapment, 12, 23, 85 entrenched systemic inequalities, 67 enunciation, 3, 6, 14, 16, 20, 35, 50, 54, 69, 81, 84, 105, 106, 114, 123, 127, 130, 131, 133, 138, 139, 163, 172, 210, 212, 241, 261 epigraphs, 171, 172, 228 epiphenomenal/epiphenomenalism, 121, 232 epistemes all-knowing, 140 home-grown, 132 modernity as an, 132, 142, 196 new journalism, 240 turning Western, 100 epistemic, 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 12, 23, 32, 35, 36, 42, 47, 54, 66, 68, 77, 81, 89, 95, 102, 104, 105, 117–121, 127, 130, 137, 139, 140, 145, 146 constraining, 154 new, 130 epistemic/academic community, 80, 160 epistemic agency, 65 epistemic angle, 7, 173, 211, 229 vantage, 134, 229 epistemic apartheid, 120, 137, 192, 203, 217, 228 systemic, 192, 203 epistemic articulation, 247 epistemic authority, 53 epistemic centre, 19, 76, 105, 158 global, 261 epistemic closure, 2, 118, 140 epistemic colonialism/epistemic colonization, 43, 46, 50, 190, 229 epistemic frames, 67, 121, 254

274

INDEX

epistemic freedom and academic freedom, 180 epistemic freedom in media and communication, 5 epistemic freedoms, 137, 145, 158, 162, 163, 166, 167, 173, 175, 180, 217 restore, 167 epistemic gap, 12, 106 epistemic/ideological, 31, 36, 45, 46, 50, 58, 68, 69, 74, 77, 79–83, 89–91, 99, 116, 126, 159, 161, 162, 165, 169, 172, 199, 228, 246, 261 strategic, 89 epistemic imaginary, 90 epistemic insularity, 260 epistemic intervention, 114 epistemic liberation, 142 epistemic line, 174 abyssal, 9, 131, 234 epistemic line cascades, 9 epistemic line transmutes, 9 epistemic location, 5–7, 81, 138, 139, 145, 188, 233, 254 body-political, 139 ethnic/racial/gender/sexual, 139 epistemic locus, 54 epistemic obligation, 199 epistemic order, 35, 248 epistemic pathways, 79 epistemic position, 38, 76–78, 101, 188 epistemic positionality, 126 epistemic prison, 162 epistemic privilege, 208 Epistemic process, 51 epistemic projects, 8, 9, 255, 261 epistemic racism/sexism, 32, 157, 180, 181, 194, 234, 241 epistemic rapture, 10, 83, 86 epistemic relationship, 244

epistemic resistance, 8, 69, 126 epistemic resistance project, 114 epistemic shifts, 119 epistemic site, 241 epistemic space, transparent, 180 epistemic standpoints, 30 epistemic strands, 91 epistemic structure, 188 epistemic struggle, 138, 142 epistemic tradition, 104, 140, 194 epistemic turn, 9, 79–82, 89, 91, 113, 167, 257 epistemic universalism, 18, 248 epistemic value, 7, 208 epistemological base, 80 shared, 96 epistemological consequences, 39 epistemological decolonization demands, 48 epistemological hub, 115 epistemological outlooks, 190 epistemological resistance, 114 epistemological revolt, 228 epistemological subject positions, 194 epistemological turn, 90, 99 epistemological worldviews, 115 epistemologies, 7, 9, 18, 32, 41, 58, 68, 79, 81, 85, 89–91, 115, 118, 126, 132, 156, 157, 173–175, 179, 180, 189, 190, 195, 197, 201, 202, 204, 210, 215, 234, 239, 249, 254 alternative, 141 imperial/territorial, 10, 11, 173 epochs, 82 cold war, 158 given, 175 historical, 82 monstrous, 165 equality, 41, 68, 202, 214 religious, 257

INDEX

ultra-liberal perspective attributes, 15 erasure, 9, 10, 18, 140, 193 erasure of tricontinentalism, 75 ergo sum, 20 esoteric abstractions, 240 esotericism, academic, 116 essentialistic, 72 essentialist logic, 232 ethics, 19, 104, 144, 147 broader, 217 lower order, 239 modernity’s, 216 performative, 202 ethnography, 87–89 conventional, 210–212 critical, 212 interpretive communities undergird, 88 objective, 212 scientific, 211, 212 symbolic, 87 ethnography decodes, 212 ethnography of speaking, 208 euphoric, 50 techno, 57 Euro-America, 5, 34, 98, 115, 116, 131 Euro-American archive, 32, 261 Euro-American capitalism, 8 Euro-American capitalist/modern, 215, 216 Euro-American centres, 162 Euro-American coloniality and hegemonic universalism, 8 Euro-American coloniality and hegemonic universalism in disciplinary knowledge, 9 Euro-American concept, 163 Euro-American critique, internal, 256 Euro-American cultural theory, 254

275

Euro-American educational programmes, 157 Euro-American existence, 140 Euro-American explanatory paradigms, 117 Euro-American global coloniality, 69 Euro-American global knowledge power structure, 32, 102 Euro-American global knowledge system, 102 Euro-American global order, 67, 232 Euro-American hegemonic/EuroAmerican hegemony, 34, 129 Euro-American knowledge order, 32, 197, 239 Euro-American knowledges of coloniality and alienation, 106 Euro-American liberal-pluralist internationalist and globalist, 58 Euro-American modernity, 5, 8, 11, 34, 41, 67, 73, 105, 118, 121, 124, 125, 131–138, 141–143, 145–147, 154, 157, 164, 171, 172, 175, 188, 192, 199, 203, 213, 214, 217, 218, 232, 234–236, 240, 248, 255, 256, 261 characterized, 38, 240 sustained, 146 underside of, 119, 126, 236 Euro-American modernity’s ethnocentric value system and Enlightenment’s myths, 5 Euro-American modernity’s ethnography, 213 Euro-American modernity’s paradigms, 134, 135 Euro-American modernity’s rhetoric, 69 Euro-American neocolonial forces, 198

276

INDEX

Euro-American offshore programmes, 31 Euro-American ontologies, 113 Euro-American order, 22, 232 Euro-American paradigms, 2, 6, 9, 114, 220, 255 Euro-American paradigms and cultural outlooks, 105 Euro-American particularism, 248 Euro-American Renaissance and Enlightenment projects, 257 Euro-American research paradigms, 219 Euro-American surveillance machinery of ideas, 57 Euro-American theoretical paradigms, 5 Euro-American world domination, 130 Euro-American world system, 19, 47 Euro-American worldviews, 36 Euro-America’s self-critique, 5 Euro-Atlantic orbit, 42 Euro-centred colonial/modern world power, 31 Euro-centred cultural order, 71 Euro-centred knowledge and theory, 22 Euro-centred world system, 39 Euro-centred worldviews, 31 Eurocentric, 36, 51, 104, 135, 140, 144, 155–157, 195, 204, 213, 239, 261 deep-seated, 138, 158 false, 5, 79, 203 modelled, 144 Eurocentric and Third World, 14, 104 Eurocentric concepts, 125 Eurocentric critique of Euro-American modernity, 127 Eurocentric curriculum, 12 Eurocentric elites, 257

eurocentric footsteps, 126 Eurocentric framing, 212 Eurocentric grip, 2, 12 Eurocentric lens, 115 Eurocentric media theory, 140 Eurocentric method, adopted, 33 Eurocentric methodologies, 200 Eurocentric mores and rubrics of research, 200 Eurocentric paradigms, 53 Eurocentric philosophies, 197 Eurocentric prejudices, replacing, 218 Eurocentric research, 193, 194 Eurocentric stereotypes, 125 Eurocentric theory, 36, 129 Eurocentric thinking, 48 eurocentric thought, 126 Eurocentric to African modes of storytelling, 56 Eurocentric tradition, 130 Eurocentric universalist paradigms, 102 Eurocentric values, 198 Eurocentric value system, 211 Eurocentric world, 198 Eurocentric world system, 105 Eurocentrism, 14, 50, 94, 99, 114, 116, 128, 129, 139, 140, 143, 148 anti-Eurocentric, 5 escape, 135, 138 hegemony of, 10, 98, 194, 259 re-asserting, 259 unlearning, 261 unthink, 115 Eurocentrism and Western values, 92 Eurocentrism in communication theories, 154 Eurocentrism in reverse form, 14 Eurocentrism manifests, 180 Eurocentrism’s domineering centrist ideology, 138

INDEX

Euro-modernity, 31 European audience, 212 European class subalterns, 146 European colonizers, 8 European critical theorists, 147 European culture, 126 Europe and North America, 21 European imperialism and colonialism, 189 European Judeo-Christian, 236 European literature, 132 European media and cultural theory, 53 European media scholars, 143, 187 European origin, 12 European posture, 132 Europeans, 13, 72, 92, 104, 121, 165, 213 European self-understanding, 213 European subject, 257 European white males, 181 Europe/Others, 21, 29, 34, 40, 97, 102, 133, 138, 154, 155, 163, 166, 192, 213, 237, 254, 262 progressive, 44 Europe’s exceptionalism, demonstrated, 192 Europe’s self-redemption, 213

F Fanon, F., 41, 91, 95, 100, 104, 125, 128, 141, 174, 256 fashioned geo-cultural characterization, 105 feminism, 15, 41, 146 black, 121 feminist media studies, 120 feminists, 15 black, 120 feminist studies, 88 Foucauldian, 246

277

Foucauldian bio-politics and governmentality, 156 Foucault, Michel, 44, 86, 127, 200, 245 foundations, 17, 18, 66, 77, 130, 131, 143, 146 epistemological, 29, 84 moral, 77, 146 paradigmatic, 87 philosophical, 77 theoretical, 29 true, 167 fundamentalism, 14, 104, 119, 140, 262 free market, 8, 39, 43, 124, 168, 237 global free-market, 256 post-critical, 233 fundamentalist, 17, 104, 140 default, 14 fundamentalist episteme, 14

G Gandhi, L., 99 gender, 22, 41, 72, 81, 88, 114, 120, 121, 138, 146, 178, 181, 197, 205, 211, 212, 231–233, 236, 243, 257, 258, 260 traversed, 3 gender identification, 179 gender line, 147 gender relations, 236 gender studies, 89 gender system, 132 genealogies, 35, 67, 100, 123 genocides, 16 black, 192 committed, 141 genocides/epistemicides, 10, 16, 18, 137, 141, 190, 192, 209, 215, 219, 241, 243

278

INDEX

genre, 21, 140, 211–213 conventional ethnographic, 212 folkloric storytelling, 140 geo-political configurations, 65, 75 Global citizenship, 46 Global Civil Society, 117 global coloniality, 7, 8, 11, 12, 21, 35, 47, 58, 74, 77, 91, 98, 119, 124, 131, 133, 134, 136, 146, 156, 175, 189, 216, 232, 233, 238, 244, 260 institutionalized, 77 global economy, 57, 131 false, 131 true, 262 globalism, 2, 11, 36, 39 nascent, 2 new decolonial, 11 globalisms, false, 11, 105 globalists, 24 globalization, 163, 167, 173, 176, 216, 227 contemporary, 75 cultural, 43 demanded, 71 technological, 50, 248 technologies of, 3, 13 Global North, 2, 8, 13, 14, 18, 20–22, 29, 39, 45, 52, 66, 70, 73, 74, 76, 81, 85, 86, 90, 91, 113, 115, 116, 118, 119, 122, 127, 159, 173, 190, 197, 216 Global North and Global South, 2, 3, 48, 50, 52, 191, 228 Global North in terms, 84 Global South, 157–159, 161, 162, 165–167, 170, 171, 173–176, 180, 189, 190, 193–199, 201, 203, 211, 212, 215–217, 220, 228, 229, 233–235, 238, 254, 255, 261, 262 broken, 131

geographic, 135 new, 90 non-geographic, 254, 256, 261 peripheral, 22 primitive, 198 Global South amounts, 189 Global South and Global North, 68 Global South and Souths, 243 Global South and unmasks, 8 Global South approaches, 17 Global South by Euro-American modernity, 34 Global South cultures, 14 Global South epistemology, 69, 79 Global South for alternatives, 2 Global South in Asia and Latin America, 158, 173 Global South in media and communication studies, 7 Global South perspective, 16, 50, 197 Global South populations, 136, 192 Global South’s contribution, 137 Global South’s material and cultural resources, 39 God, 35, 93, 102, 130, 200 omnipresent Christian, 93 God-eyed, 140, 197 Goebbels, Joseph, 191, 192 Goldberg, D., 246 golden age, 253, 254 new, 254, 256 Governance, 161

H Hammarlund, 38 hegemonic, 32, 37, 40, 57, 68, 69, 76, 167, 172, 197, 261 broader, 45 dominant Anglo-American, 246 hegemonic attitude, 45 hegemonic Eurocentrism, 123

INDEX

hegemonic history, 142 hegemonic institutions, 52, 103 hegemonic interests, 58 hegemonic internationalization, 31 hegemonic knowledges, 219 hegemonic lens, 115 hegemonic narratives, 51 hegemonic paradigm, 115 hegemonic project, 47, 52 hegemonic role, 99 hegemonic struggles, 173 hegemonic system, 52 hegemonic tendencies, 246 hegemonic universalisms, 8, 254 hegemonic universals, 246 hegemony, 189, 259 contemporary, 7 counter, 69 dialogic, 258 political, 66 histories, 159, 163, 170–172, 176, 180, 192, 200, 207, 209, 211, 231, 249 annuls of, 95 connected, 30, 75 divergent, 76 entangled, 90 long, 16, 41, 54, 162 monotopic, 10 multiple, 50 overprivileged, 83 people’s, 75 real, 95 remembered, 189 shared, 8, 17 silenced, 41, 207, 243 traumatic, 207 universal, 116 Hitler’s killing, 192 HIV/AIDS, 170 homogeneity, 3 homogeneous, 72

279

homogenizing, 39, 43, 72 globalization’s, 43 homogenizing forces, 115 globalization’s, 115 homogenous, 7, 55, 72, 171 homogenous entities, 66 homosexuality, 15 humanity(ies), 158, 165–167, 169, 189, 192, 194, 202, 216, 220, 232, 237–239, 248, 255, 257, 258 broader, 189, 256 collective, 69 common, 56, 104, 156, 165, 167, 218, 219 inclusive, 18 new, 74 non-Western, 165–167 restore, 256, 258 versatile, 18 human rights, 38, 73, 105, 117, 134, 158, 165, 167, 194, 239 human rights discourse, 40, 167, 215 human rights paradigm, 163 human rights violating, 198 human survival instinct, 155 Hume, David, 166 hyper-locality, 90 hypermobility, 50, 55 hypocrisy, 192, 239

I identification, 84, 96, 105, 123, 138, 146 research problem, 205 identity(ies), 188, 201, 231, 232, 239, 242, 247–249 assigned, 10 cultural, 56, 71, 207, 210, 246 disparate, 4 multiple, 237

280

INDEX

negative, 232 political, 71 respective, 18 single, 4 soil, 136 ideological appendage, 102 ideological approaches, 54 ideological armoury, 51 ideological baggage, 189 ideological bias, 197 ideological campus, 97 ideological content, 103 ideological contestations, 35, 206 ideological impact, 43, 164 globalization’s, 43 ideological influences, 48 ideological infrastructure, 71 ideological interference, 168 ideological justification, 77 ideological landscapes, 45 ideologically-charged empiricist dismissals, 103 ideological machinery, 102 ideological power, 103 ideological power struggle, 206 ideological practices, real, 43 ideological presuppositions, 78 ideological problems, 102 ideological projects, 34, 36 ideological resistance, 73, 92, 102 ideological shifts, 143 ideological struggle, 36 ideological technologies, 13 ideological terms, 81 ideology claiming transparency, 210 ideology consumerism, 176 ideology(ies), 159, 161, 196, 197, 212, 247 baseless, 232 clear, 93 dominant, 24 free market, 169

narrativized, 213 oppositional, 83 pernicious hegemonic, 136 socialist, 159 idioms, 20, 37, 57, 166 technicist, 57 translated traditional African conceptual, 166 IMF, 168, 169 indigenous, 4, 8, 12, 15, 21, 22, 51, 89, 106, 128, 141 silenced, 22 indigenous colonization, 239 indigenous communities, 191, 209 indigenous contexts, 192, 219 indigenous cultures, 208, 217, 218 local, 208 indigenous epistemology, 219 indigenous ethnography, 213 indigenous intersections, 157 indigenous knowledges, 90, 200, 255 traditional, 239 indigenous languages, 141 indigenous methodology(ies), 207, 249 indigenous minorities, 211 indigenous peoples, 193, 206, 208, 209, 219, 220 indigenous persons, 219 indigenous research ethics, 219 indigenous research methodologies (IRM), 207–210 indigenous research practices, 219 indigenous scholar, 197 indigenous world’s vocabulary, 189 indirections, 1, 31 indispensability, 19, 133, 145, 171 individualist, 218 individuality, 93, 157 individuals/individualism, 3, 41, 195, 204, 231 abstract, 41

INDEX

individuated expressions, 15 indivisibility, 158 Indonesia, 100, 124 industrialization, 37 industry(ies), 47, 162, 164, 218, 229, 230, 240 institutional culture, 12, 102, 155, 157, 228 white, 12 institutional frameworks, 161 institutional governance, 160, 161 institutionalization, 36, 71, 73, 261 institutionalized racisms, 98, 247 institutional limitation, 217 institutional structure, 135 institutional studies, 89 institutions, 168, 199, 200, 216, 232, 234, 235, 237, 241 academic, 21 deadly, 156 democratic, 68 educational, 216 elite, 200 ordinary, 33 political, 117 strategic, 199 transforming subordinating, 50 intellectual dishonesty, 194, 207 intellectual exercise, 118 intellectual expression, 9 intellectual fashions, 80 intellectual inclinations, 123 intellectual labour, 6, 156, 162, 172, 235 intellectual movements, 3, 80, 81, 113, 210 intercultural, 38, 45, 46, 49, 254 intercultural communication, 258 intercultural competences, 46 intercultural dialogue, 256 trans-epistemic, 254, 255, 258–261 interculturalism, 39, 46, 47, 49, 242

281

interculturality, 47, 115, 259, 260 intercultural situations, 46 intercultural trans-epistemic dialogue, 255 interdiscipline/interdisciplinarity, 20, 22, 24, 31, 57, 82, 118, 130, 137 international movements, 41 international ordering principles, 35 J Jing Yin’s question, 34 Johannesburg, 173, 202, 213 journalism, 216, 230, 240 global, 239 neoliberal advocacy, 240 journalism practices, bad, 79 journalism profession, 159 journalistic training, 238 journey, 2, 249, 257 soul-searching, 2 jungle status, 174 justice, 68, 180, 217, 239 distributive, 68, 239 economic, 239 historical, 239 justification, 198 K kaleidoscopic, 4, 52, 89, 165 Kant, Immanuel, 143, 166 Khoisan, 207 kind intellectuals, 173 knowledge/superstition, 22, 162, 164–166, 170, 172, 176, 179, 189, 190, 195, 197, 199–201, 203, 204, 206–210, 214, 215, 218–220, 230, 233–235, 240–243, 248, 254, 262 academic, 230 alternative, 101, 173

282

INDEX

applied, 230 artisanal, 255 authoritative, 82 coloniality of, 10, 20, 34, 38, 50, 54, 56, 127, 137–140, 142, 145, 154, 157, 194, 199, 217, 220, 247, 249, 261 communal, 206 decolonial ethnography, 214 decolonizing, 102, 136 disciplinary, 236 discounted, 44, 128 dominant, 77 ego-politics of, 139, 181 expert, 160, 235 higher-order, 81 imperial, 171, 200, 234 imported, 49 intercultural, 46 intergenerational, 257 liberating border, 114 local, 90 local/indigenous, 206, 249 naïve, 44 neoliberal, 50 obsolete, 140 participation-sharing, 206 postcolonial, 22 producing, 199, 220 refined, 31 researcher’s, 203 sacred, 219 scientific, 82, 234 silenced, 90, 105, 114, 128, 130, 200, 243 silenced subaltern, 32 situate, 219 subjugated, 208, 209, 246 subordinated, 236 teacher’s, 240 trans-epistemic, 2, 24 universal, 82

unscientific, 234 knowledge body, 80, 81 knowledge economies, 218 knowledge formation, 235 knowledge gaps, 113, 203, 214 knowledge imputes, 139 knowledge inclusion, 13 knowledge order, 11, 32, 52, 57, 80, 81, 103, 114, 138, 236 modern, 143 multiplex, 11 knowledge politics, 126, 238, 246, 261 knowledge power structure, 32, 51, 104, 126 knowledge production, 5, 6, 33, 48, 53, 115, 133, 201, 204, 211, 214, 215, 218, 219, 230 foregrounds participatory, 215 knowledge structures, 99 knowledge systems, 79, 141, 166 buried indigenous, 141 non-Western, 190 suppressed subaltern, 79 knowledge validation, 103 Koljevic, 156 Kwindingwi, W., 219

L Labor movements, 41 Labour, academic, 45 labyrinthine, 11, 233 Lagos, 202 land, 23, 143, 239, 240 land dispossession, 239 landscape, new, 97 landscapes, academic, 54 land theft, 219 language system, 37 Larsen’s observations, 178 late Amin, Samir, 5, 11, 12, 133

INDEX

Latin, 8 Latin America, 7–9, 13, 18, 20, 34, 37, 39, 42, 56, 66, 67, 73, 75, 79, 114, 119, 146, 154, 158, 165, 170, 173, 174, 178, 192, 207, 213, 229, 235, 262 Latin America in media and communication, 77 Latin American cultures, 14, 42, 130, 166, 209 Latin American extraction, 91 Latin-Americanization, 54 Latin Americanization approaches, 13 Latin American people, 180 Latin American reason, 162 Latin Americans, 7, 9, 51, 54, 55, 72, 98, 100, 101, 121, 126, 128, 129, 132, 145, 147, 148 Latin Americans by European colonizers, 8 Latin American scholars, 128 Latin American ways, 53 latino, 11, 175, 234 law, 39, 80, 86, 102 international, 39 leadership, 177, 180 intellectual, 177 learning academic, 246 global, 46 higher, 34 institutionalized, 245 internationalize, 49 mobilizing everyday, 235 reciprocal, 240 leftist, 8, 118 legacies, 23, 31, 101, 207, 229, 238, 247 economic, 247 multifarious, 101 legal principle, 134 legitimacy, 134

283

universal, 12 legitimacy/legitimates/ legitimation/legitimization/ legitimize, 20, 38, 43, 46, 77, 126, 134, 145, 189, 208, 217, 244 accords, 217 theoretical constructions, 43 legitimacy gap, 12 legitimate baggage, 232 legitimate indigenous worldviews, 208 Leopold Sedar Senghor, 104 Less Developed Countries, 66 liberal/colonial, 4, 155, 156, 161, 162, 165, 167, 177–179, 188, 189, 192, 193, 197, 200, 202, 203, 205, 209, 213, 215, 216, 218–220, 228, 229, 233, 235, 236, 238, 239, 241, 242, 247, 255–257, 259, 260 liberal/imperial, 58, 154–157, 163, 166, 173, 176, 190, 191, 199–201, 203, 204, 207, 228, 245, 254, 260 liberal internationalism, 38–41, 43 liberalization, 159 liberal mischaracterization, 53 liberal pluralist, 52 liberal-pluralist formulation, 160 liberal-pluralist frameworks, 41 liberal pluralist philosopher, 179 liberate/liberating, 5, 32, 49, 51, 69, 71, 104, 119, 142, 199, 203, 207, 217, 218, 238, 255 new, 210 liberating action, 242 liberating education, 243 liberating force, 178 liberating politics, 42 liberating praxis, 126 liberating research methodologies, 199

284

INDEX

liberation actors wanting, 101 cultural, 137 humanistic, 238 political, 126, 180 reconnect, 176 liberation concepts, 156 liberation movements, 100 liberation philosophy, 126 transformative, 1, 156 liberatory, 21, 67, 126, 201, 213, 215, 230, 239, 241 liberatory agenda, 126, 198 liberatory approaches, 187 liberatory epistemology, 104 liberatory thinking, 128 libertarianism, 118 liberties, 38, 131 libraries, 167, 200, 235, 255 life moral, 202 real, 17, 79, 235 social, 78, 80, 86, 96 life forces, 240 life style choices, 15 life styles, 15 divergent, 15 lifestyles, 176 life world, 14, 69, 114, 137, 259, 261 cultural, 259 political, 69 linguistic famine, 141 linguistics, 48, 82, 83, 85–87, 89, 124, 138, 212, 239 linguistic turn, 85, 87 cultural, 85 literacy cultural, 46, 47 literacy levels, 209 literary studies, 24, 66, 189 literate, 166, 200, 234 local communities, 46

local content, 12 local content philosophies, 12 local histories/global designs, 68 locality, 49 hyper, 20 localization, 156 local languages, 56, 141, 188 banned, 141 location, 20, 49 body-political, 116 epistemological, 55, 68 geographic, 5 hyper, 20 intellectual, 91 particular, 21 personal identity, 188 locus distinct, 146 hidden, 139 multiple, 259 new, 261 privileged, 177 logic economic, 122 economistic, 122 fatalistic, 237 inner, 232 institutionalized learning, 245 internal, 122 managerial, 136 positivist-empiricist, 164 logical structure, 136 logocentric/logocentrism, 200 Long-term Education Reform, 169 long-term structuring, 99

M mainstream capitalist, 21 mainstream feminism, 120 management mechanism, 47 managerialism, 46, 55, 160, 161

INDEX

global corporate, 46 sheer, 55 Mandela, Nelson, 153 Manichaean world, 256 manifests/manifesto, 93, 116, 194, 254 manipulation, 191, 216 marginalization, 7, 236 marginalized positions, 260 marginalizing, 191 market advanced, 85 distant, 191 free, 217, 229, 246 global, 44 labour, 230 market forces, 40, 164, 217 free, 161 global, 216 market interference, 157 marketization, 164, 201 market monopoly, 164 market-oriented evaluation, 195 market reforms, 168, 169 markets, 161, 164, 168, 169, 176, 191, 215, 217, 229–231, 238 market value, 187 married couples, 205 Marxian, 115, 230, 246 Marxian ideologies, 100 Marxism, 41, 80, 86, 121, 138, 139, 146, 202 Marxist, 41, 42, 121, 172 Marxist ideas, 230 Marxist position, 41 Max, Karl, 138, 143 Mbembe & Balakrishnan’s position, 97 Mbembe, Achille, 55, 92, 95, 96, 98, 129, 156, 228, 243, 247, 248, 258 Mbembe gestures, 96

285

Mbembe gestures to Afrocentrism in Afropolitanism, 96 McBride Commission, 2, 71, 178 McBride Report, 2 media bourgeoisie, 218, 238, 258 capitalized, 190, 191 dominant, 190, 217 dominant Western news, 72 faces, 36 global, 19, 125, 134, 173, 239 impacted, 82 innocent, 211 internationalizing, 31, 42, 49, 51, 57 local, 12 mainstream, 10, 122, 190, 205 mass, 35, 44, 142 modern, 29, 70 multicultural, 13, 16, 24, 36, 227, 248 pervasive, 92 post-apartheid’s neoliberal, 175 prolific, 156 reconfigure, 145 reduced, 116, 156 shield, 229 small-scale, 190 strategic, 134 study capitalist, 127 study postcolonial, 128 teach, 48 technological, 191 transform, 4 transform/transforming, 164, 229, 240, 258 transforming, 4 typify, 88 white, 98 media Africanization polices, 56 media consumption, 12, 88, 210 media education curricula, 43

286

INDEX

media education policy, 57 media epistemologies, 115 media frame, 136 media imperialism, 66, 122 media institutions, 132, 231 media intellectuals, 2, 20, 114 media internationalization, 37, 38 media landscapes, new, 71 media misrepresentations, 125 media monopolies, 8, 105 entrenched Western, 237 media pedagogy, 256 media philosophies, 16 media-saturated society, 19 media scholar navigates, 180 media technologies, 34, 57, 58, 71, 73, 74 new, 34, 57, 58, 71, 74 turning, 71 media technology studies, 88 media theorization, 130 media theory, 181, 230, 254, 255, 257–259, 261 culture-blind, 132 decolonized, 145 liberatory, 21 new decolonial, 255, 256 radical, 118 radical critical, 19, 22, 131 radical Southern, 32, 131, 145 radical Southern critical, 127 transformative, 54 transformative Southern critical, 132 media theory building, 4 mega-corporations, 191 memory(ies), 176, 193 bad, 192 cultural, 209 historical, 22 local, 35 national collective, 176

non-West’s, 35 people’s, 75 menacing death worlds, 125 metaphor, 67, 88, 124, 125, 147, 154, 156, 236, 239 cartographic, 67 metaphysical/metaphysics, 93, 146, 255 methodology(ies), 189, 190, 195–204, 218, 220 anti-oppressive liberatory, 195 coloniality of, 194, 195, 199 deconstruct, 201 disinterested teaching, 230 interpretive, 89 qualitative, 201 quantitative, 195, 198 resistance media, 106 metropolis/colonies, 133, 155 metropolitan society, 18 Mexican diasporas, 125 Middle East and China’s media education internationalization projects, 31 Miike, Yoshitaka, 3, 4, 33, 34, 53–56, 129, 194 modern/colonial, 123, 126 modern/colonial/capitalist world system, 21, 22, 189 modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system, 132, 138 modern/colonial world system, 139 modern/gender system, 124 modernisation, 74 modernist, 42, 84 modernity-Eurocentrism-Coloniality, 143 modernity’s death worlds, 132 modernity/tradition, 135 modernization, 19, 66, 84, 170, 192–194, 198, 209 resisted, 192

INDEX

modernization thesis, 84 money, 23, 50 money system, 147 monocentric, 137, 140 modernity’s, 137 monocentric world system, 254 monocultural, 217 monoculturalism, 14, 228 monopoly, 199, 254 mono-sensory activity, 201 monotheistic colonial religions, 236 monstrosity, hidden, 125 moral coherence, 259 moral frameworks, potential, 218 moral guilt, 192 morality, 144, 164, 215, 216 moral justification, 79 moral monism, 14 moral panics, 254 moral philosophical underpinnings, 256 moral philosophy, 215, 216, 258, 262 alternative, 219 moral potency, 128 moral principle, 218 moral purpose, 45 moral worthiness, 244 multicentric, 116, 137, 254 multicentric world, 129 multicultural, 2, 3, 13, 15, 16, 24, 105, 116, 137, 140 multicultural approach, 3 multicultural bricks, 262 multicultural disciplinary space, 6 multicultural disciplinary theory, 32 multicultural interdiscipline, 18, 34 multicultural internationalization process, inclusive, 43 multiculturalism, 177, 227–229, 246, 247, 255, 256, 258 academic, 13 book Rethinking , 14

287

conventional, 246 critical, 15, 246, 247 decolonized, 18 heart, 16 true, 11, 14, 18, 24, 98 multicultural media theory, 259 multicultural society(ies), 16 planetary, 260 multicultural theory, 254 true, 254 multicultural theory building, 255 multicultural turn, 1 multiculturism, 247 multidimensional, 74 multidisciplinarity, 189 multidisciplinary, 34 multiversalism, 18, 219 multiversal onto-epistemic, 247 multiversal world, 114 myth-makers, 134 myths, 163, 170, 172, 176, 178, 181, 191, 200, 208, 211, 215, 217, 243 convenient, 8, 34 cultural, 92 foundational, 17, 258 narcotizing, 32 repressive, 241 self-gratifying, 143 self-serving, 22 techno-inspired, 58

N Namibia, 102 narcotizing capitalist lullabies, 176 national culture, 16, 17, 72, 171, 176 singular organic, 17 national customs departments, 158 national economic adjustment programme prescriptions, 168 national emergency, extreme, 180

288

INDEX

nationalism, 14, 17, 104 nationalist, 257 nationalistic broadcasting systems, 73 nationality, 97 nationality line, 147 National Plan for Medium and Long-term Education Reform, 169 national struggle, 179 nations, 17, 49, 72, 166, 173, 242, 257 darker, 125 nation-state, 43, 52, 71, 170, 179, 247 liberal white, 247 nativization, 135 NATO, 216 natural custodian, 102 natural disaster, 135 naturalization, 124, 125 naturalized position, 32 natural representatives, 204 Nazi, 192 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S., 5, 9, 13, 38–41, 91, 100–102, 128, 162, 180, 195, 257 necropolitical/necropolitics, 13, 156, 157, 199, 243 necropower, 157 Negri, 76 Negritudism, 91, 128 neo-capitalist, contemporary, 118 neoclassical, 172 neocolonial/neocolonialism, 23, 41, 125, 133, 193, 207, 228, 229 neocolonial dependences, 99 neocolonialist trends, 99 neo-colonial onslaught, 176 neo/colonial sin, 213 neo-colonial wound, 178

neoliberal, 159, 161, 163, 165, 169, 170, 173, 175, 176, 198, 217, 228, 256 neoliberal accent, 44 neoliberal agenda, 39, 168 neoliberal choruses, 155 neoliberal expropriation, 101 neoliberal forces, 169 neoliberal fundamentalism, 89, 119 neoliberal globalization, 8, 9, 39, 43, 105, 117, 141, 178, 193, 207, 215, 229 neoliberal hegemony, 217 neoliberal imperial university, 154 neoliberalism, 43, 104, 117, 124, 161, 169, 201, 214 neoliberal policies, 217 neoliberal policy soundbites, colourful, 176 neoliberal populism, 174 neoliberal project, 45 neoliberal reforms, 168, 169 neoliberal soundbites, 175 neoliberal thinking, 165 New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), 70 New York City, 205 New Zealand, 189, 207 Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, 4, 75, 78, 104, 129, 141, 162, 172, 173, 177, 209, 257 Nigeria, 48, 71, 164 Nkrumah, Kwame, 100, 128, 172 Nollywood, 71 nomenclature, 34 non-ethics, 9, 125, 194, 216 non-Europeans, 53 nonexistent, 9 non-geographical space, 7 non-geographic category, 21 non-geographic concept, 7

INDEX

non-linearity, 190 non-maleficence, 217 nonsensical, 49 non-transcendental, 90 non-Western contexts, 1 non-Westerners, 21, 53, 69, 142 non-Western subject, 165, 166, 173, 175, 192, 193, 232, 236, 255 located, 193 non-Western ways, 195 non-Western world, 67 non-Western worldviews, 162 non-West thinking, 216 Nordic media scholars, 30 normative argument, 43 normative assumptions, 57 normative claim, 198 normative foundation demands, new, 256 normative foundations, 255, 256, 258 new, 256 strong, 130 normative reasoning, 128 norms, 40, 144, 154 oppressive, 144 social, 206 North America, 73, 84, 91, 92, 163, 217, 262 Northern and Southern epistemologies on multiculturalism, 15 Northern archive, 48, 102, 132, 138, 167, 200 Northern archive and Southern archive, 242 Northern concept in terms, 247 Northern epistemologies, 2, 14, 132 Northerners, 67 Northern ideological, 69 Northern imperial, 115, 127 Northern media, 67 Northern media theory, 139 Northern philosophers, 127

289

Northern research epistemologies, 202 Northern theory, 104, 127, 128 decentre, 104 Northern theory of globalization, 30 North’s dehumanizing, 89 North’s news, 178 North/South, 69, 133, 262 North-South apparatus, 105 North-South binaries, 90 North-South categories, 76 North-South concept, 67, 76 North-South dialogue, 119, 259 much-needed, 119 North-South dialogue in media and communication, 6 North-South dialogue point, growing, 24 North-South dichotomy, 86 North-South engagement, 19 North-South framework, 66, 76 North-South geo-political and cultural entanglements, 77 North-South geo-political entanglements, 77 North-South problematique, 67 North university, 154 Nostalgia, 54 nothingness, 9 Nyamnjoh, Francis, 4, 228 Nyerere, Julius, 100

O objectification, 218 objective facts, 92 objective postcolonial scholar, 174 objective world, 211 objectivity, 193, 198, 210, 217 scientific, 203 obliteration, 190 Occidentalism, 38 Oceania, 102

290

INDEX

oil, 102, 134 oligopolies, 46 Olympian detachment fantasy, 171 omnipotence, 85 omnipresence\omnipresent, 85, 138 ontological existence, 164 ontological line, 9 ontologies, 6, 9, 11, 32, 70, 77, 93, 127, 163, 180, 189, 210 material/spiritual, 94 silenced non-Western, 159 onto-Manichean colonial line, 167 oppression defeat, 243 direct, 170 internalized, 244 neocolonial, 8 racial, 9 violent, 165 oppressive system, 243 oppressor, 69, 74, 104, 119, 127, 166, 175, 257 orality, 207, 234, 235 oral traditions, 190, 191, 207–209 non-Western, 209 viewed non-Western, 209 oral traditions folktales, 191 oral traditions undergird, 207 orature, 200, 207, 209 organic ideas, 116 organic push, 73 organization, 11, 37 social, 37 orient, 71, 125, 126, 175, 202, 213, 234 orientation, 47, 79, 90, 95, 122 liberal, 47 shifts in, 79 technological, 90 originality, 116, 123, 204, 215, 254 overarching decolonial attitude, 74 overarching episteme, 132

overarching hegemonic epistemology, 136 overarching prism, 231 overarching purposes, 104

P Palestinian, 192 Pan-African agency, 94 Pan-African/black/decolonial internationalisms, 4 Pan-African/black/decolonization internationalism, 40 Pan-Africanism, 91 Pan-Africanist theory, 91 paradigm of authorial individualism, 204, 215 paradigms characterized, 80 critical, 241 dominant, 84, 123 dominant Western positivist-empiricist, 208 empiricist, 84 epistemological, 51 hegemonic Eurocentric, 138 historical-economistic, 82 historical materialist, 80 intellectual, 48 methodological, 214 modernity’s enduring, 135 new, 244, 255 new trans-epistemic knowledge, 2 poststructuralist, 119 scientific, 163, 208 situated, 80 social-scientific, 83 structuralist, 89 sustain modernity’s, 219 universal, 5, 66 paradigm shift, 46, 81 parochialism, 52

INDEX

parrotry, 33, 163 Participatory Action Research Methodology, 202 Participatory Action Research (PAR), 202–207 patriarchal/patriarchy, 21, 147, 177, 206, 214, 236, 246, 247, 257 dominant, 206 patriarchy, 12, 15, 68, 69, 77 feminists attack, 15 pedagogy alternative indigenous, 240 anti-capitalist, 231 contraband, 232 decolonial/border, 229, 232–235, 239–241, 243, 244, 248 essentialist, 232 logocentric, 234 neo/colonial, 243 nepantla, 235, 238 oppositional counterhegemonic, 235 post-Cartesian, 234 red, 235, 238, 239 renegade, 232 rights-based, 242 sound, 46 transformative, 41, 233 pejoratively, 193 people colonized, 99 conscientize, 205 dehumanized, 23 everyday, 200 groups of, 101 local, 219 oppress, 69 relations, 214 white, 187, 247 people experience, 76 people flows, 68 people meter, 210

291

people of color, 41, 135 people’s humanity, 17 people’s thinking, 203 people’s way, 178 peripheral entities, 261 peripheralization, 121, 195 peripheral position, 32 periphery, 21, 22, 34, 40, 77, 105, 123, 126, 147, 256, 257 often-distant colonized, 134 permeate, 86, 143 pernicious, 71, 232, 247 extended apartheid’s, 247 pernicious ideological prescriptions, 89 perpetrators, 125, 193 perpetual servitude, 165 perpetuated relations, 241 persistence, 117, 243 personal choices, 15 personal practices, 15 personhoods, 32, 218 perspectival, 6, 17 perspective analytical, 53 contested, 35 cultural, 56 decolonial studies, 247 decolonial thinking, 35 distinctive, 19 epistemological, 10, 136, 194, 213 ethnic/racial, 101, 127 liberal, 35, 45 local, 209 narrow, 43 national, 73 native, 194, 213 particular, 197 racist, 166 scientific-empiricist, 164 social, 16 student’s, 194

292

INDEX

teacher’s, 194 theoretical, 45 phatic communion, epitomized, 85 phenomena, 49 complex, 208 cultural, 208 new, 49 symbolic, 93 philosophy analytic, 83 hidden, 232 liberatory, 215, 241 place of exteriority, 9, 10 Plagued, 173 pluralism, 46 national cultural, 17 pluralist universalisms, 248, 259 plurality, 16, 203 pluriversal/pluriversalism, 114, 219, 242, 247, 248 pluriversality, 18 pluriversal media education, 246 pluriversal order amounts, 248 pluriversity accommodating, 156 polarised world system, 12 policing mechanism, 102 policy deliberate, 12 educational, 42 foreign, 39 public, 168 policy arena, 169 policy gaps, 203 policy ideals, 98 policy interventions, 203 policy recommendations, 205 policy research, 217 political activism/political activists, 158, 206 political baggage, 243 political blocs, 261 political character, 103

political economy, 24, 43, 117, 121, 122, 134, 161, 168, 180 political economy approaches, 122 dominant, 122 political economy perspective, 168 political economy scholarship, 133 political ferment, 42 political-historical approaches, initial, 100 political imaginary, new, 75 political pacification, 174 political passions, 175 political projects, 8 political resentments, 103 political resistance, 42, 68 political resistance concept, 70 political society, emerging, 70 political structure, 76 political struggles, 37, 90 political superpower, 159 political systems, 158, 172 Political Theory, 14 politics, 5, 6, 9–11, 14, 15, 18, 20, 22, 24, 32, 33, 36, 38, 41, 43, 44, 50, 53, 103, 104, 115, 116, 123, 126, 136, 144, 172, 175, 177, 189, 197, 209, 216, 228, 230, 232, 246, 247 polycentric, 4, 37 polycentric world, 116 polycentrism, 18 polychromatic, 50 populist neoliberal activism, 175 Portuguese, 141, 259 Portuguese decolonial scholar Boaventura, 114 Portuguese decolonial thinker Boaventura, 9 Portuguese imperialism, 165 positivism, 24, 82–85, 180, 191, 217, 218 contested, 83

INDEX

unbridled, 82 positivist, 80, 82–84, 113, 198, 200, 217, 220, 238 positivist claims, 198 positivist-empiricist approaches, 119 positivist ethics, 217 positivistic, 191 positivist obsession, 210 positivist paradigm, 85 post, 98 postcolonial, 44, 55, 99–101, 129 Postcolonial and decolonial epistemologies, 103 postcolonial beings, 47 postcolonial conditions, 121 postcolonial discursive, 99 postcolonialism, 99, 118, 128 postcoloniality, 7 postcolonial methodologies, 207 postcolonial neoliberal state, 164 postcolonial populations, 219, 239 postcolonial studies, 99 postcolonial theory, 7, 96, 99–103, 127 contemporary, 101 signified, 101 postcolonial trauma, 178 postcolonial turn, 91, 99, 101, 102 postcolonial whiteness, 13, 247 post-colonies, 35, 42, 127, 141, 207, 229 post-colonization, 99 post-development, 194 post-developmentalist, 134 post development studies, 66 post-disciplinary turn, 123 post-Enlightenment period, 42 post-humanism, 118 post-human turn, 82 post-independence, 99 post-invasion, 99 post-invasion thesis, 99

293

post-isms, 118 post-literacy, 234 postmodern critique, 5, 53, 127 postmodern critiques, internal, 5 postmodern fantasy, 231 postmodernism, 1, 96, 100, 101, 117, 118 postmodernist approaches, 122 postmodernist critique, 143, 246 radical, 143 postmodernist frame, 127 postmodernists, 8, 86 postmodern lingo, 201 post-political economy thinking, 122 post-racial dispensation, 147 poststructuralism, 1, 86, 100, 117, 118 poststructuralist, 202 poststructuralist cannon, 127 poststructuralists, 86 power analytical, 8 automatic, 121, 146 colonial matrix of, 131, 136 colonizing, 53 cultural, 3, 214 cultural male, 206 degrading, 41 delimiting, 19 disciplining, 156 dispersing, 50 domesticating, 78 economic, 50, 84 emancipatory, 82 explanatory, 38, 65, 76, 82 invisible, 76 overbearing, 57 pre-emptive, 166 progressive, 82 real, 181 redemptive, 244, 248 researcher’s, 214

294

INDEX

restoring cognitive, 53 soft, 38 symbolic, 67, 124 track, 214 transformative, 242 power balance, 245 power disequilibrium, 244 power geometry, 15 power imbalances, 244 institutionalized, 244 power/knowledge, 139 power relations asymmetrical, 206 asymmetrical academic, 50 economic, 121 equal, 214 fortifying, 247 negotiating, 206 political, 83 student-teacher, 244 power-seeking politician, 179 power structures broader hegemonic, 231 capitalist transnational, 230 colonial world, 132, 133 economic, 50 entrenched, 97 global capitalist, 231 global knowledge, 32, 51, 126 global/western-centric knowledge, 32 hegemonic knowledge, 188 hierarchical, 69 social, 15 preconceptions, 209 precondition, 55 predetermines, 198 predicament, 195 predicating, 160 predisposes, 256 preeminence, 168 premises, 31, 33, 218

pre-occupation, 96, 194 preponderance, 68, 241 preposterous, 104 prescribed Eurocentric rules, 199 prescriptions, value-free, 35 presentation, 94 presentist problems, 35 President Zuma, 213 pretentious language, 55 primitive accumulation, 257 primordial ways, 97 privileges/privileging, 41, 96, 122, 127, 128, 197, 202, 214, 229, 243 unwarranted, 122 white, 247 privileges knowledge, 214 privileges males, 236 privileging class analysis, 233 proclaimed managerial revolutions, 19 professional ethnography, 210 scientific, 211, 212 professionalism, 164 professions, 216 profit maximization, 170, 176, 230, 255 progress, 165, 169, 191, 198, 215, 256 continuous, 136 cultural, 70 human, 172 social, 193 progressives, 120, 178, 201, 208, 213 progressive ways, 254 project academic, 42, 47, 78, 84 anti-Eurocentric Eurocentric, 5 anti-racist pedagogy, 241 broader, 170 communication technology, 21 continuous, 143 cosmopolitan, 255

INDEX

counterhegemonic, 74 critical, 67, 101 critical pedagogy’s anti-Eurocentric Eurocentrism, 241 cultural exchange, 261 democratic, 168, 179, 216, 239 deterritorialized empire’s hegemonic, 217, 261 educational, 238 emancipatory, 239 ethnocentric modernization, 142 finished, 239 generating multiple, 37 global, 255 historical, 145 intellectual, 162 internal, 5 paternalistic, 244 studies internationalization, 41 theoretical, 254 transnational media, 261 proliferation, 72, 144 unprecedented discursive, 144 propaganda, 73 ephemeral jingoistic, 73 political, 191 propaganda films, 84 propagandist, 191 propagation, gradual, 124 protracted struggle, 163 proverbial fool, 143 provincialism, 116, 143 provincialization, 7, 10, 235 provincialized community folklores, 21 provincializing, 9 Provincializing Europe, 138 pseudo-humanism, 167 psycho-cultural anguish, 260 psycho-cultural defeat, 175 psycho-cultural frame, pre-existing, 79 psychological behaviour, 84

295

psychological traumas, 205, 207 psycho-neurosis, 135 psychopathology, 174 psycho-therapy, 92 public affirmation, 228 public communication questions, 140 public culture, 168, 229 animated, 229 public funding, 48, 169, 217 Puritanism, 102 purity, 4, 55, 92, 210 cultural, 55, 92, 210 Q Qatar, 72 qualitative data, 204, 205 gathered, 205 Quan-Baffour, K.P., 235 quantification, 208 Quantitative content analysis, 198 quintessential evil, 256 quotations, 171 R Rabaka, 120, 128, 146, 147, 181, 260 Rabaka’s observation, 147 race, 3, 22, 56, 72, 75, 88, 89, 97, 105, 120, 121, 131, 134, 135, 145, 146 race boundaries, 154 race/ethnicity, 81, 154, 177, 178, 181, 197, 212, 213, 231–233, 243, 246, 247, 257, 258, 260 race question, 97, 205 racial modernity intersects, 146 racial prejudices, 11, 179 racial selection, 69 racism, 5, 12, 22, 41, 68, 69, 92, 97, 98, 102, 105, 121, 124, 131, 137, 140, 146, 147

296

INDEX

racism question, 205 racism/racist, 155, 165–167, 196, 205, 214, 228, 232, 237, 246, 247, 257 racisms, new, 23 racist, 12, 121, 142, 147 racist blindness, 247 racist classifications, 70 racist stereotypes, 135, 209 radical anti-colonial, 100 radical civil rights movement leaders, 86 radical discursive terrains, 47 radical epistemologies, 117 rationality, 5, 9, 82, 165, 181, 191, 208, 230, 243, 256 instrumental, 164 substantive, 164, 230 rational judgements, 243 rational person, ideal, 233 reaffirmation, 258 realigning/realignment, 159, 201, 216 realities, 31, 45, 155, 159, 163, 164, 168, 174, 175, 177, 178, 196, 198, 204, 215, 217, 227, 231, 232, 235, 237, 241, 245, 254, 261 diverse, 45 global, 237 new, 31 realization, 24, 130 reason, 158, 162, 165, 166, 191, 197, 215, 220, 233, 237, 258 cunning of, 139, 197 scientific, 102 secular, 82 re-awaken class consciousness, 231 re-awakening, 86, 89 reciprocity, 247 recitational, 78 reclassification, 135

redefined Western ideas, 40 redemptive politics, 238 Red Indians, 235 rediscovering, 238 reflective process, 2 reflexive, 8, 46, 126, 202, 204, 206, 212 reformist, best, 239 reforms democratic, 158 gradual economic, 169 re-formulation, 89 regimes, 58, 70, 192 non-democratic, 70 region(s), 34, 39, 67, 97, 125, 128, 198 geographic, 128 impoverished Southern, 67 non-Western, 190, 217 Renaissance and Enlightenment projects, 216 Renaissance and Enlightenment pseudo-humanism, 167 renaming buildings, 155 re-orientation, 100, 210 cultural epistemological, 100 repertoires, 37, 71, 88 replications, 56 replication studies, 116 repository, 33, 145, 209, 218 representations, 79, 87, 125, 146, 147, 205, 208, 210, 211, 214, 260, 261 dehumanizing, 146 disingenuous, 50 media’s ideological colonial, 125 representations intersect, 146 representation systems/representational systems, 93, 99 reproducing, 53, 245 reproduction, 84, 101

INDEX

reputations, 216 research, 21, 24, 33, 34, 37, 44, 49, 84, 88, 93, 115–117, 132, 142 centuries, 216 collaborative, 49, 202 conduct, 187, 193 critical, 198 emancipatory, 208, 219 ethical, 218 global, 190 labelling, 197 modernization, 192, 194 necropolitical, 199 positivist, 198, 217 scientific, 189, 193, 197, 198, 203, 216 social, 204 transformative, 203 unethical bio-medical, 216 utilitarian, 217 research agenda, 170, 180, 199, 239 academic, 170, 239 global, 190 research episteme, 196 research epistemologies, 195, 201, 215 researchers, 30, 94, 188, 189, 192, 194, 196–198, 201–206, 208, 210, 211, 214, 219, 220 anti-oppressive, 189 situated, 188 research ethics, 188, 216–219 re-animate, 217 traditional, 219 research ethics pope, 188 research gender stereotypes, 205 research methodology occupies, 220 research methods, 188, 195, 196, 201, 206, 255 modern scientific, 208 research problems, 113, 205

297

resistance, 7, 8, 10–12, 35, 68, 73–79, 85, 91, 103, 121, 136, 144, 155, 173, 176, 193, 195, 200, 208, 220, 230, 236, 238, 244, 246 resistance epistemologies, 78, 89, 119, 120, 198, 255 resistance ideology, 100 resistance imaginary, 8, 12, 77 necessary sociocultural, 105 resistance methodology, 195, 207 resistance movements, 42 resistance pedagogy, 230 resonates, 2, 34, 168, 229, 239 resources, 8, 23, 75, 77, 122, 132, 176, 177 critical, 243 intellectual, 77 political, 42 resurgent ethnocentrisms, 4 resuscitate, 237 Rethinking Multicultural and Antiracist Education, 236 revered American educationists, 230 reverse-Westernization, 56 revolution, 41, 96, 114 industrial, 175 proletarian, 41 revolutionary, 5, 67, 69, 77, 104 revolutionary action, 230, 241, 242 revolutionary break, 81 revolutionary capabilities, 234 revolutionary concept, 47 revolutionary method, 55 revolutionary nature, 235 revolutionary praxis, 35, 101, 229, 242 revolutionary scholarship, 78 revolutionary transformation, 53 romanticization/romanticizes, 97, 176, 206

298

INDEX

S Samir Amin’s observations, 12 sanitize, 134, 192, 206, 208 schizophrenia, 145, 174 schizophrenic, 11, 147 scholars, 3–5, 13, 20, 24, 33, 38, 40, 44, 45, 48, 52, 56, 66, 67, 80, 84, 85, 87, 90, 91, 94, 100, 116, 123, 128–130, 132, 133, 138, 156, 157, 162, 164, 165, 172, 181, 194, 201, 207, 217, 231, 235 key, 199 young, 87 science experimental, 86 human, 144 natural, 80, 82, 83 physical, 80 political, 66 viewed, 82 sciences naturalize, 197 scientific approach, 84 scientification, 36 false, 208 scientific explanation, 80, 86 supposed, 86 scientific inquiry, 83 scientificism, 84 scientificity, 45 scientific method, 103 scientific perspective, 138 mythologized, 164 scientific thinking, 90, 167 scientific thought, 83 scientistic, 83 Scolari, 7, 31 secular reasoning, 82, 163 self, 33, 78, 93, 131, 141, 143, 162, 167, 168, 172, 178, 202, 210, 230, 249, 257 field’s, 189

self-absorption, 52 self-administered form, 31 self-analysis, 33 self-conceptions, 33 self-conceptualization, 33 self-constituted dialogic attitude, 256 self-determination, 236, 239 self-disclosure, 6 self-discovery, 257 self-dramatizing apostasy, 179 self-emancipation, 8 self-idolatry, 79 self-interest, 174 self-interested rationalization, 163 self-isolation, 37 self-perception, 33 self-propelling neocolonial system, 131 self-reconstitution, 105, 257 self-rehabilitate, 256 self-re-humanization, 8 self-re-writing, 8 self-sense-making inquiries, 210 self-serving liberal myths, 131 self-surveillance, 157 semi-literate, 209 semiotic structure, 86 Senghor, Leopold, 91, 172 service, 33, 47, 50, 72, 102, 131, 161, 164, 165, 170, 171, 174, 198, 200, 215–217, 245 strategic, 169 sexism, 11, 68, 147, 214, 234, 237, 241, 246, 247 sexism interlock, 69 sexuality, 81, 121, 146, 211, 212, 231–233, 243, 260 sexuality line, 147 sexual minorities, 206 silence, 157, 179, 192, 242 dominant internationalism, 35 silenced majority, 176

INDEX

silenced worldviews, 255 silence knowledges, 137 silencing, 7, 10, 94 society experience, 207 skills, 170, 230 business communication, 46 cognitive, 209 communicative, 46 economic, 47 much-needed critical thinking, 164 much-romanticized intercultural, 46 normative, 47 vocational, 46, 159, 164, 229 slavery, 8, 23, 41, 75, 89, 92, 94, 101, 125, 133, 193, 207, 213, 215, 260 mental, 175 modern, 236 sloganeering, empty, 246 social change, 82, 119, 203, 242 social character, 241 social cohesion, 98 social conditions, 255 emerging, 117 social consciousness, 55, 154 deliberate heightened, 55 social constructionism\social constructions, 82, 210, 245 social death, 13, 145, 156 slow, 157 social ethnologies, 92 social existence, 120, 156, 218 social experience, 21, 31, 58, 75 animate, 209 social justice, 41, 42, 56, 119, 159, 168, 170, 176, 179, 195, 198, 205, 207, 216, 227, 229, 239, 247, 260 international, 42 social justice agenda, 105, 260 social justice method, 207

299

social justice pedagogy, 243 social justice projects, 258 social justice struggles, 262 social location, 6, 138, 139, 188, 260 particular, 138 social movements, 81, 173, 235, 262 social orders, 58, 143 alternative, 241 social relations, 35, 191, 212, 238 social re-ordering, 136 social sciences, 29, 31, 37, 42, 54, 67, 78, 81, 118, 124, 129, 143, 189, 202, 217, 254 social-scientific analysis, 120 social-scientific approaches topsy-turvy, 82 social theories, 132, 137, 142–144 constitutive, 132, 143 robust, 18 social theory project, 144 society, 159, 161, 163, 166, 169, 170, 172, 173, 175, 176, 199, 206–209, 218, 229, 230, 232, 245, 256, 259, 262 broader, 228 civil, 161 contemporary, 96 democratic, 158, 163 given, 205 global, 58, 105 industrial-centric, 218 mass, 85 non-European, 114 oral, 191, 209 particular, 81 postcolonial, 209 society research, 192 society’s struggles, 119 socioeconomic background, 197 sociological analysis, 85 sociological approaches, 84 sociological theories, 144

300

INDEX

sociologist, 133, 143 sociology, 24, 116, 143, 189, 207 soil, 4, 144, 156 epistemological, 144 native, 209 South Africa, 155, 164, 175, 192, 213, 228, 229, 247 apartheid, 155 post-apartheid, 175, 247 South Africa’s top universities, 155 South African Universities, 155 South American scholars, 32 South Americas, 73, 191 South critical freedoms, 35 South demands, 228 Southern Africa, 73, 207 Southern archive, 242 Southern critical media theory, 125, 127, 130–132, 136–138, 141, 144–146 Southern critical theorist, 132 Southern critical theory, 118, 126, 127, 130–132, 137, 139, 142 Southern critical theory demystifies claims, 147 Southern critical theory for media and communication, 115 Southern critical theory in media and communication, 130 Southern critique, 135 Southern cultures, 249 Southern decolonized learning institutions, 199 Southern economic resistance, 73 Southern episteme/Southern epistemic, 8, 92 Southern epistemologies, 10, 15, 90, 91, 102, 104, 128 coherent, 34 Southern epistemologies of imperial resistance, 10

Southern epistemologies on multiculturalism, 15 Southern epistemology of media transformation, 53 Southerners, 126 Southern intellectual movements, 248 Southern liberatory agenda, 199 Southern media, 32, 66, 79, 138, 195 Southern media and communication critique, 127 Southern media theory, 21, 114, 127, 134 Southern resistance epistemologies, 100, 201 Southern Rhodesia, 192 Southern theory, 21, 22, 68, 126 radical, 32, 131, 145 Southern theory heralds, 21 Southern theory in media and communication, 19–21 Southern thinking, 104 Southern voice and epistemic resistance and liberation, 126 South’s ontologies, 32 South-South Co-operation, 73 South-South co-operation in internationalization and partnerships, 155 South-South cultural exchange, 73 South’s revolutionary praxis and transnational solidarities, 35 South’s yearning for cultural freedoms, 201 South wield, 103 sovereign, 7, 98, 180, 247 sovereign choice, 39 sovereignty, 53 sovereignty, academic, 53 Soviet Union, 36, 37, 40, 42 Soviet Union and socialist imagination, 231

INDEX

Spanish and Portuguese colonization of South America, 102 spatial epistemic break, 10 spatiality, 67, 68, 81 references, 68 spatiality discourses, 96 spatial margins, 97 spiritual inheritance, 92 spirituality, 92, 237, 240 state, 6, 11, 12, 19, 37, 39, 43–45, 72, 74, 85, 97, 136 bourgeoisie, 216 captured, 12 liberal, 39 modern, 217 nation, 72 neoliberal, 161 predatory, 256 state apparatus, 135 statues, 12, 155 status quo, 50, 55 Stefancic, 120 stereotypes cultural, 70, 89 negative, 71, 205 racial, 94, 236 stereotypes modernization, 142 stereotypical, 166, 178, 219 structuralism, 1, 117, 202 students admiring, 20 black, 155 female, 234 local, 48 marginalized, 238 minority, 246 more like the, 245 producing, 170 prospective, 44 subaltern, 8, 11, 69, 77, 89, 104, 121, 123, 125, 144, 220, 228, 235, 236, 239, 257

301

subaltern agencies, 69, 89 Subaltern Knowledges, 32 subaltern groups, 115 subalternity, 19 subalternization, 134 subaltern resistance, 77 subaltern studies, 129 subcultural, 16, 17 subcultures, 15 sub-disciplinary, 55 subgroupings, 206 sub-interdiscipline, 10 subject active, 200 conscious, 85 ex/colonized, 101, 204 free, 142 human, 216 irrational, 233, 234 liminal, 145 living, 88 postcolonial, 240 scientific, 234 subject formation, 232, 233 subjectification, 57 subjectivity, 7, 9, 11, 55, 67, 121, 131, 257 subordination, 50 subservience, 89 superficiality, 86 superior argumentation, 233 superiority, 53, 85 superstition, 9, 22, 166 superstitious, 203 support decolonization struggles, 100 suppression, 35, 218 suppress race prejudice, 121 supremacist hallucinations, 104 supremacy, 41, 133, 205, 232 racial, 232 white, 41, 133, 146, 205 systemic problem, 132, 230

302

INDEX

global, 132, 217 systemic racism, 146 systems, modern, 105

T techno-capitalist media research focus, 190 technocentric, 190 technologies computational, 248 digital, 167 network, 30 new, 13 new political, 57 telecommunications, 97 temporalities, 40 temptation, 75, 233, 262 ten-percenter, 174 territoriality, 68, 96 theft, 68 theoretical positions, 171 theorist, 18–20, 29, 83, 122, 128, 139, 194 cultural, 83 theorization, 4, 20, 93, 130 innocent, 20 theory academic, 43 alternative, 129 alternative dependence, 122 anti-imperial, 4 blunt, 132 critical race, 246 decoloniality and postcolonial, 102, 103 decolonizing, 145, 147 de-provincializing, 145 dialogue of, 18 disciplinary, 29 emancipatory, 2 ethnocentric modernization, 121

futuristic, 56 home-grown, 129 imperial, 20, 32, 132 liberal, 31 liberal-pluralist, 57 new, 117, 132, 256, 258, 260 non-transformative, 13 normative, 135 organic, 254 political economy, 121 progressive, 181 pussyfooted, 103 racist, 121 radical anti-colonial, 100 reception, 88 reconnected, 118 regional home, 7 re-humanization, 257 re-unite, 130 revolutionary, 104 revolutionize, 114 scientific, 103 social science, 80 true radical, 21 theory building, 2, 7, 14, 21, 52, 53, 113, 130, 255 project of, 258, 259, 261 Third World, 66, 71, 101, 122, 135, 198 Third World poverty, 198 Third World status, 70 time domesticating, 204 time multiculturalism, 13 time revitalizing society, 33 time warp, 22, 136 permanent, 136 Tlostanova, M., 173 togetherness, 218 tokenism, 14, 32, 53, 192, 228 normative multicultural, 53 Torres, 167 totality, 136, 238, 259

INDEX

totalizing, 142, 215 totalizing claims, 66 tourism, academic, 94 tourists, academic, 188 township, neglected, 205 toxic colonialities, 189 Toyin Omoyeni Falola, 129 traditions alternative knowledge, 173 complex, 209 critical theoretical, 121 incommensurable intellectual, 7 liberal, 202 mainstream research, 202 neocolonialist, 99 often-occulted, 99 Trans-Atlantic solidarities, 39 transcend/transcendent/ transcendental, 12, 71, 73, 75, 76, 92, 116, 123, 132, 138, 189, 205, 238, 240, 245, 254, 259 transcendental emancipatory hybridities, 11 transcendental emancipatory theory, 175 transcontinental, 73 transcultural/transculturalism/ transculturality/transculturation, 242, 255 transdisciplinary, 45, 66 transformative concept, 46 transformative impact, 227 transformative politics, 201 transformative social practices, 238 transformative struggles, 74, 219 transformative theory, 104, 127, 130, 136 real, 127 transformative ways, 168, 238 transform curricular, 238 transforming media industries, 240

303

transgenerational grief, 194 transgenerational traumata, 193 translations, 56 transmission, 235 transmitted diseases, 205 transmodernity, 14 transnational much-romanticized, 38 multidirectional, 11 new, 178 unbalanced, 12 transnational capitalism, 231 transnational corporations (TNCs), 46, 57, 169 transnational cultural flows, 12, 19, 38, 55, 96, 105, 177 transnational discursive formations, 37 transnational education, 46 transnational flows, 43, 68, 98 over-celebrated, 98 transnationalism, 39 transnational media monopolies, 19 transnational monopolies, 46 transnational phenomena, 30 transnational solidarities new, 75 truth axiomatic, 17 enduring, 171 exacting, 126 freestanding, 87 scientific, 9 speaking, 159 transcendent, 31 truthfulness, 172 twin counter-strategies, 145 tyranny, 218, 241

U ubuntu, 18 ubuntu/botho, 218, 219, 238

304

INDEX

ubuntu breaks, 238 ubuntu paradigm, 238 ubuntu pedagogy, 235, 238 contributed, 235 ultra-liberalism, 15 underdevelopment, 50 undergirds decolonial multiculturalism, 258 underpinning epistemology, 115 unemployment, 205 UNESCO, 216, 238 United Kingdom Royal Anthropological Institute, 192 United States (US), 19, 29, 41, 87, 101, 237 universalism, 2, 5, 6, 9, 14, 18, 137, 197, 218 abstract, 18, 197 monocultural, 2 particularistic, 137 universalistic observations, 52 Universities based privately-owned franchise, 48 competitive, 169 corporatized, 46, 154 decolonized, 156, 229, 245, 261 funding, 161, 180 globalized Western, 46 postcolonial, 55 private Egyptian, 44 public, 48 reduced, 161 transnational imperial, 47 university autonomy, 158 university bureaucrats, 168, 170 university education, 229 university employers, 244 university institutions, 168 university learning, 245 university level, 169 unscientific cultural passions, 197

US Communication studies, 119 uselessness, 170 US tradition, 24 utilitarian, 84, 85 utilitarian/utilitarianism, 191, 216, 217 utilitarian philosophical underpinnings, 47 utopic level, 156

V values aesthetic, 177 cosmopolitan, 46 counterhegemonic, 218 cross-cutting, 94 cultural, 7, 199, 248, 257 defining, 118 democratic, 20 enduring, 231 fundamental, 230 globalization’s neoliberal, 46 humane, 218 humanist, 216 indispensable, 233 inestimable, 180 instrumentalist, 216 intellectual, 175 new, 240 normative, 121 political, 159 radical transformative, 242 scientific, 217 sentimental, 141 shared, 17 spiritual, 240 symbolic, 132 true, 260 universal, 139 value system(s), 14, 33, 38, 143 ethico-political, 236

INDEX

liberal, 165 social, 33 vantage point, 23, 73, 79, 168, 189, 190, 192 privileged hermeneutic, 117 variations, 8, 53 time-space, 53 variegated terrains, 146 vernaculars, new, 118, 130, 260 victimhood mentality, 193 victimization, 158 victims, 125, 144 black, 125 Victorian middle-class readerships, 144 violence black, 257 cultural, 66 gender-based, 205 symbolic, 8, 205, 256 systemic, 256 vocationalism, 229, 230, 246 free market, 246 voice cultural, 10 field’s enduring prophetic, 24 formidable, 73 inaudible, 188 master’s, 163 mediated, 215 new, 1 real, 215 silenced, 89 spawned decolonial, 119 subjugated, 215

W Wang’s observation, 3 war, 18, 39, 124, 125, 134 cultural, 156 escaping, 198

305

paradigm of, 18, 39, 191 Weberian metaphor, 85 Weberian model, 139 well-resourced Westerners, 89 well-respected philosophers, 166 wellsprings, 1, 92, 117 much-needed, 92 West’s colonial libraries, 130 West’s disposition, 19 West’s way of self-idolatry and moral justification, 79 Western-based TNCs, 134 Western bias, 19 Western canon, 233 Western capital, 190 Western capitalistic-cum-militaristic approaches, 190 Western-centred global power structure of knowledge production, 7 Western-centred world system, 14 Western-centric, 2 Western-centric discourse, 35 Western-centric global knowledge economy, 47 Western-centric unidirectional forms of internationalization, 49 Western-centric ways, 197 Western-centric world, 66 Western civilization, 136 Western code, 37, 164 Western colonialisms, 16 Western colonizers and missionaries, 166 Western concept, modern, 167 Western concepts, 215 Western conceptual idioms, 166 Western conferences, 192 Western constructs and values on material, 140 Western contradiction, 116 Western countries, 40, 56

306

INDEX

Western critical media theory, 117, 118 Western critical pedagogy, 234 Western critical theorists, 117 Western critical theory, 82, 117, 231, 240, 241, 256 Western critical traditions, 181 Western critique, 6, 134 Western cultural beliefs, 135 Western cultural gaze of difference, 189 Western cultural stereotypes, 198 Western cultures, 46, 176, 177, 190, 193, 194, 198 exporting, 46 selling, 176 Western democratic rhetoric, 70 Western domination, 73, 133 Western domination in international communication, 73 Western donors, 159, 170, 180 Western education, 78 Western education systems, 58 Western engineered coups, 216 Western epistemological fundamentals, 48 Western epistemologies, 162, 197, 201 Western ethnographic accounts on Africa, 212 Western Eurocentric, 116 Western Europe, 101 Western frame, 212 Western gaze, 178, 258 Western governments, 237 Western hegemonic project, 43 Western historiography, 37 Western humanism, 215 Western human rights-based approaches, 218 Western imperial belief, 143

Western imperial states and Anglo-American capital, 191 Western imperial university, 46 Western institutions, 48 Western intellectual traditions, 30 Western internal critique, 6 Western invention, 166 Westernization, 51, 176 Westernize, 20 Westernized Global South, 78 Western journalists, 79 Western knowledge, 46 Western knowledge order, 5, 199 Western liberal capitalism, 37 Western liberal perspective, 35 Western logic, 104 Western Marxist, 133 Western media, 9, 30, 38, 52, 115, 118, 139, 164, 194, 236, 254 Western media and communication, 20, 44, 116 Western media corporations, 134 Western media internationalization, 38 Western media monopolies, 105, 237, 255, 261 Western media monopolies-work, 255 Western media representational discourses, 67 Western media scholars, 138 Western media theory, 52 Western method and epistemes in media and communication, 34 Western methodology, 200, 201 Western methods, 123, 204, 210, 214 Western minds, 124 Western models, 36 Western modern/colonial, 21 Western modernist discourse, 22 Western modernity, 23, 54, 69, 101, 121, 124–126, 132, 136, 143–146, 165, 175, 181, 193, 232, 233

INDEX

darker side of, 101, 124, 125 Western modernity perse, 137 Western modernity Rene Descartes, 143 Western modernity’s logic, 233 Western modernity thinking, 9 Western multiculturalism, 15 Western multiculturalism difference, 15 Western myth, 162 Western myth of progress and development, 170 Western ontologies, 58 Western paradigms, 7, 118, 234 Western particularism, 52 Western pedagogic models, 46 Western pedagogy, 21, 235 Western perspective, 174, 198 Western philosophical pedigree, 101 Western philosophy, 101, 139 draws from, 101 western philosophy, 197 Western political projects, 261 Western postmodern critique, 5 Western problem of relocating, 191 Western publishers, 212 Western research, 194 Western research’s paternalistic, 194 Western researchers, 192, 193, 197 Western research methodology, 193, 197, 201, 220 Western scholars, 32, 159, 192, 199 Western scholars blind, 192 Western social philosophy, 143 Western social theories, 144 Western social thought, 143 Western stereotypes, 71, 198 Western structuralist, 127 Western subject, 20, 21, 38, 92, 101, 104, 142, 147, 165, 166, 197, 216 Western superiority, 181

307

Western systems and world ordering, 37 Western theories of communication, 1 Western theorists, 139 Western theory, 12, 19, 52, 53, 131, 138, 255, 256 decentred, 131 Western theory’s interpretive horizon, 255 Western thinkers, 101, 127 Western thinking, 248 Western thought, 10, 124 Western TNCs, 177 Western trained local graduates, 48 Western transnational corporations, 44 Western universalism, 3, 5, 14, 248, 256 Western universalism amounts, 3 Western universalism in media and communication, 254 Western universalistic paradigms in media and communication, 52 Western universities, 44, 159 Western values, 70, 102 Western virtual knowledge order, 57 Western ways of cultural representation, 211 Western world, 2 Western worldview, 212 West master, 125 West-the global power structure of knowledge, 115 West viewed oral traditions, 209 white atrocity, 192 White European, 188 White Man/White, 125, 237 whiteness, 16, 97, 147, 166, 173, 232, 246, 248, 254 embracing, 147 universalizes, 248 White patronization, 72 white pigmentation, 247

308

INDEX

white supremacist, 39, 147 white supremacist ideologies, 39, 41, 146 global, 146 Wit proffers de-internationalization, 50 Witwatersrand, 155 woman, 156 women, 120, 200, 205, 206, 234, 257 women’s movements, 86, 235 wondered Charlotte, 188 words coloniality, 101 words Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, 104 words spirituality occupies, 240 word structure Afro/cosmo-politanism, 96 work ethnic/racial perspectives, 101 world arena, 55 world bank, 168, 169 world capitalism, 31 world cultures, 46, 248, 255 diverse, 46 world cultures bloom, 248 world markets, 133 world order, 40, 117, 215 bipolar, 117 world populations, 135, 136

worldviews, 5, 12, 22, 23, 32, 33, 49, 56, 71, 72, 78, 81, 105, 118, 122, 131, 140, 141, 143, 144, 157, 160, 163, 164, 167, 172, 173, 178, 190, 193, 194, 196, 197, 207, 209, 218, 219, 232, 243, 247, 257 wretchedness, 12, 256 X Xenophobia, 97 Y Yin, 90, 116, 118, 132, 194 Young Urban Women, 205 Z Zabus, C., 99 Zanu PF, 158 Zavala, M., 201 Zeleza, 34, 37, 43–45, 48 Ziai, A., 194 Zimbabwe, 56, 158, 187, 205 zone, 9, 69, 157, 166, 167, 174, 217, 256 Zurmuk, 7