Postcolonial Studies Meets Media Studies: A Critical Encounter 9783839432945

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
Part I: Global Media
Media Convergence
Media Globalization. The ‘Global Public Sphere’ – A Critical Reappraisal
Transcultural Subjectivity. Beyond the Global/Local Divide – Towards a Transcultural Understanding of Mediated Subjectivity
Diasporic Media. Global Media and the Emergence of ‘Lonely Sojourners’ and ‘Passive Transnationals
Part II: Media Politics
Inter/National Media Politics. Approaches to Postcolonial Studies
Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony in Postcolonial Media Theory and Culture
Performing Regulation. The Politics of Postcolonial Film Exhibition and DVD Distribution
Postcolonial Piracy
Sound Cultures
Commodification
The Marketing of Postcolonial Literature
Media History
Postcolonial Media History. Historical Arguments for a Future Field of Research
Notes on Contributors

Citation preview

Kai Merten, Lucia Krämer (eds.) Postcolonial Studies Meets Media Studies

Postcolonial Studies | Volume 23

Kai Merten, Lucia Krämer (eds.)

Postcolonial Studies Meets Media Studies A Critical Encounter

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2016 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Printed in Germany Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-3294-1 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-3294-5

Contents

Introduction

Kai Merten and Lucia Krämer | 7

PART I: GLOBAL MEDIA Media Convergence

Terry Flew and Bonnie Rui Liu | 25 Media Globalization The ‘Global Public Sphere’ – A Critical Reappraisal

Kai Hafez | 43 Transcultural Subjectivity Beyond the Global/Local Divide – Towards a Transcultural Understanding of Mediated Subjectivity

Brian Creech and Anandam Kavoori | 67 Diasporic Media Global Media and the Emergence of ‘Lonely Sojourners’ and ‘Passive Transnationals’

Uriya Shavit | 85

PART II: MEDIA POLITICS Inter/National Media Politics Approaches to Postcolonial Studies

Barbara Thomass | 103 Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony in Postcolonial Media Theory and Culture

Rinella Cere | 125

Performing Regulation The Politics of Postcolonial Film Exhibition and DVD Distribution

Monika Mehta | 143

PART III: MEDIA INDUSTRIES Postcolonial Piracy

Lars Eckstein | 161 Sound Cultures

Carla J. Maier | 179 Commodification

Oliver Lindner | 197 The Marketing of Postcolonial Literature

Ana Cristina Mendes | 215

MEDIA HISTORY Postcolonial Media History Historical Arguments for a Future Field of Research

Sven Werkmeister | 235

Notes on Contributors | 257

Introduction K AI M ERTEN

P REMISE

AND

AND

L UCIA K RÄMER

A IMS

The basic premise of this volume is the assumption that Postcolonial Studies and Media Studies can and should challenge each other successfully to produce new insights. The reason for putting the book together is our conviction that the fields can enrich each other further than they have done so far. Although Postcolonial Studies has broadened its interest onto other media since the 1990s, literature is still over-represented as the discipline’s subject of textual criticism, and the theoretical and analytic postcolonial terminology for engaging with other media is still being developed (cf. for that kind of criticism from a Media Studies perspective, Imre 2014). At the same time, the postcolonial approach is still underrepresented in Media Studies. This book brings the two fields together in the hope of working out overlaps, points of contention as well as productive interactions. In a world of ever-increasing complexity, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are a central means of combining and exchanging ideas. As all those who have tried to collaborate with colleagues from other disciplines well know, however, combining fields that have diverse methodological, theoretical, thematic and ideological traditions as well as different subjects and aims is a challenging endeavour. It is rendered more difficult by the growing internal diversification of critical fields and academic disciplines, which is leading to ever narrower fields of specialization. Moreover, the external boundaries of many academic fields and disciplines are becoming increasingly porous, thus seemingly eroding difference and borders and encouraging overlaps but at the same time destabilizing fixed notions about what individual disciplines are and do. Especially the instability of the term ‘postcolonial’ is by now nothing less than infamous. All those working or even moderately well-read in Postcolonial

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Studies know that, as a consequence of this instability, it has become something of a topos, at least in book-length publications from the field, to outline the various meanings that have been ascribed to the term over the years and the criticism it has evoked. On this basis, authors and editors then position themselves and explain their own usage and interpretation of the term as well as the nature of their critical project. Although it would go too far to call ‘postcolonial’ an empty signifier, it has accrued so many meanings that, as Benita Parry has wryly observed, “the word has come to indicate a historical transition, an achieved epoch, a cultural location, a theoretical stance, and indeed in the spirit of mastery and impenetrability favored by Humpty-Dumpty in his dealings with language, whatever an author chooses it to mean” (2002: 72). This introduction is no exception to the rule and starts with a brief discussion of the term in order to situate our project. This is not simply a matter of paying homage to critical tradition but necessitated by the particular theoretical and disciplinary inflection of the volume. For the subject matter dealt with in the various contributions to this book – ranging from the content and gestalt of selected media texts and the history of particular media to the production, usage and especially the dissemination of media and texts in industrial and media-political environments whose reach ranges from the local, regional and national to the international, transnational and global – is most readily associated with the disciplines of Media Studies, Communication Studies and Globalization Studies. We want to test what kind of new questions, ideas or even problems and contradictions a postcolonial point of view at such media phenomena might produce, and how Postcolonial Studies, on the one hand, and Media Studies, Communication Studies and Globalization Studies, on the other hand, might challenge each other to produce new insights. We have therefore asked our contributors to approach their topics with a critical eye on the fields of discussion and fresh perspectives that are opened up by complementing Media Studies analyzes with theoretical paradigms from Postcolonial Studies, and vice versa. In a sense, the present volume thus joins a row of post-millennial studies motivated by the wish not only to preserve but to revive the ‘postcolonial’ and ‘postcolonialism’ as effective critical paradigms. This status had and has been called into question by critics who think that Postcolonial Studies as a discipline has been eclipsed by Globalization Studies. They doubt that the concept of postcolonialism is an efficient tool for coming to grips with the increasingly rapid transnational flows, rhizomatic exchanges and impulses of decentering in the face of global capitalism that Hardt and Negri have theorized as ‘Empire’. Some books wear their agenda to restore postcolonialism and Postcolonial Studies literally on their sleeves, in titles such as Relocating Postcolonialism

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(Goldberg/Quayson 2002), Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Loomba et al. 2005a) and Rerouting the Postcolonial (Wilson/Şandru/Welsh 2009a). Identifying the points of criticism that have been made against postcolonial criticism and theory and acknowledging the ambiguities at the heart of the discipline of Postcolonial Studies (cf. Quayson/Goldberg 2002: xi-xvi), they nonetheless assert their enduring potential. In their argumentation, they follow five main strategies. One, they emphasize the transdisciplinary potential of Postcolonial Studies by situating it at the intersection of various disciplines and by characterising it as a still developing and spreading set of intellectual enterprises rather than a bounded discipline (Wilson/Şandru/Welsh 2009b: 1, 2; Loomba et al. 2005b: 3, 4), much in line with Bhabha’s description of postcoloniality as “less a name or a topic, and more a way of making connections or articulations across a range of topics and themes, a locus for theoretical and political reflection rather than a label” (Bhabha/Comaroff 2002: 30). Strategy two is the critical observation that, due to this ‘porous’ nature of Postcolonial Studies (cf. Loomba et al. 2005b: 3; Wilson/Şandru/Welsh 2009b: 11), postcolonial thinking has spread beyond Literary and Cultural Studies, Sociology and Political Science into a multitude of fields, but that in spite of this, the resulting specialist niches have seldom entered into interdisciplinary communication or exchange (Wilson/Şandru/Welsh 2009b: 11), which therefore needs to be encouraged. This is the starting point for the collected edition Postcolonial Media Culture in Britain (Brunt/Cere 2011), for example, which attempts to establish the missing link between Postcolonial and Media Studies in order to “rescue media studies from cultural and political inertia in relation to postcolonial experiences and representations” (Cere 2011: 3). A third strategy embraced by scholars to re-validate Postcolonial Studies lies in the expansion of its traditional fields of investigation, for example by addressing colonial encounters beyond the scope of European colonialism. Just as an expansion of this kind exposes the traditional Eurocentrism in postcolonial research, strategies of transcending the binaries of West and East, West and Rest and metropolitan centre and periphery can infuse the field with new vigour. Questioning and expanding what is commonly considered the canon of postcolonial literature and theory is considered a further strategy to achieve this effect (Wilson/Şandru/Welsh 2009b: 7, 9; Loomba et al. 2005b: 4, 33, 24-28). A fourth way suggested by critics to revive Postcolonial Studies lies in what Rønning and Johannessen call “the concern with the particular” (2007: ix), that is an emphasis on temporal and geographical specificity in analyses of colonial situations. The demand for specificity extends not only to analyses of historical colonial encounters, moreover, but also applies to contemporary colonial or

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imperial relations in the guise of globalization. This is manifest in warnings against, on the one hand, “a shallow embrace of the contemporary notion of the global” (Loomba et al. 2005b: 4), and, on the other hand, a simplistic equation of globalization with neocolonialism (Loomba et al. 2005b: 15; see McCallum/ Faith 2005: 3). The widest-reaching strategy that critics have suggested for revitalizing Postcolonial Studies, however, lies in its restoration as a pragmatic, ethical and pedagogical, rather than an abstract or theoretical project weakened by the textualist turn in Postcolonial Studies (cf. Parry 2002: 73). For them, it is as a materialist and historical enterprise, as a politics of solidarity that provides a bottom-up perspective on exploitation and as an oppositional political agenda of resistance that Postcolonial Studies emerges as “more necessary than ever” (Loomba et al. 2005: 1, 5, 23; cf. Krishna 2009: 2). In this sense, Postcolonial Studies appears indispensable in the face of rampant neo-imperial ideologies (Wilson/Şandru/ Welsh 2009b: 6, 8) and the fact that the decentring tendencies of power and influence in today’s world order are clearly outweighed by its recentring tendencies (Xie 2006: 62-65). The present volume tries to mobilize several of these strategies. It explores the transdisciplinary potential of postcolonialism by bringing together concepts and approaches from Media Studies, Communication Studies and Globalization Studies, on the one hand, and Postcolonial Studies on the other hand. By concentrating on issues of media production, reception and distribution alongside textual analysis, we have tried to encourage temporal, geographical and cultural specificity in our contributors’ analyses. Even though the project is more analytic than interventionist and its motivation not quite as utopian as that of more openly politically committed postcolonial works, it is nonetheless motivated by the notion of the postcolonial as an oppositional, anti-hegemonic stance against the symbolic and material manifestations of inequality, oppression and exploitation resulting from colonialism or imperialism. In keeping with this, most of the articles in the present volume focus, ultimately, on inequalities of power, be they in representations and negotiations of differences, asymmetric media flows, media policies or forms of media access, consumption and appropriation. The volume thus presents twelve articles that combine the discussion of critical concepts with case studies from the contemporary global mediascape. Even given the limited scope of this volume, they show that the field of Postcolonial Media Cultures (as one might call it) is potentially so large but, up until now, also so little cultivated (notwithstanding the work that has already been done as mapped out in the next section), that both Postcolonial and Media Studies should stake a claim to it in order to turn it into an interdisciplinary success story.

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M APPING THE R ELATIONS OF M EDIA S TUDIES AND P OSTCOLONIAL S TUDIES Postcolonial Studies Meets Media Studies touches upon Media Studies in all the various aspects the term is usually thought of as containing, i.e. it engages with creative media practice as well as with media theory, and it also deals with Media Studies in its twofold institutional structure: one kind of Media Studies has a strong Social Science slant and is strongly related to, sometimes even synonymous with, Communication Studies. This brand of Media Studies deals with media as social phenomena, e.g. in their role of agents of social identity, in their power to establish and maintain communication within and between societies, or in their relationship to questions of ethics and political power. The second type is more strongly marked by Media Studies’ historical (albeit sometimes hostile) kinship to Literary Studies and its (less fraught) relationship to Cultural Studies. It is interested in the ‘texts’ created in different media and genres, their aesthetics, production contexts, artistic conventions and therefore also, for example, in questions of representation raised in these texts or the social functions media and genres fulfil through their content. This kind of media research is often connected to both an analysis and a valorisation of what is commonly called ‘popular culture’ or ‘mass media’. So far, this type of ‘cultural’ Media Studies has dealt with concepts of Postcolonial Studies mainly in the initiative of ‘internationalizing Cultural Studies’ as a whole, in the eponymous anthology edited by Ackbar Abbas and John Nguyet Erni (2005). The editors aim to internationalize Cultural Studies by offering a range of geographically, methodologically and thematically diverse case studies under the headings of themes central to Cultural Studies, such as “Gender and Sexuality”, “Popular Practices”, “Cities and the Urban Imaginary” or, particularly important in our context, “Media Production and Consumption”. In doing so, they abstain from both a “totalizing coverage” of global culture (ibid.: 8) and from a “dominant dogma, direction or method” (ibid.: xxvi) of how Cultural Studies should be pursued from an international perspective. Postcolonial Theory is a central methodological framework of the book, even if there are other methodologies involved such as anthropology. Therefore, even if it does not belong to Postcolonial Studies in the narrow sense, the anthology is strongly inspired by this field in its careful, differentiated and problematized attempt to relate Cultural Studies, with its origin in the English academia, to an “elsewhere” (ibid.: 2) in several senses. Related to this project is the demand, formulated in a related publication (Dines/Humez 2011: 7), of a multicultural perspective for the study of national popular or mass cultures. The most interesting book pub-

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lication in this context is Brunt and Cere’s Postcolonial Media Culture in Britain, already mentioned in this introduction, which develops a multicultural and postcolonial angle on British popular culture. Postcolonial Studies Meets Media Studies: A Critical Encounter is in some senses a companion piece to Internationalizing Cultural Studies in that it incorporates a far stronger Media Studies perspective. Another field in ‘cultural’ Media Studies with strong affiliations to Postcolonial Studies is Film Studies. Film has proved the most popular research object in Postcolonial Studies after literature and has therefore already encouraged extended research activities on local cinemas and video industries worldwide. Leading on from there, a field of Postcolonial Film Studies with more general theoretical interests and more overarching concerns beyond the local has developed, the most prestigious exponent of which is Ella Shohat. Shohat has also been part of the critical movement which strove for the right definition of ‘postcolonial(ism)’ from the early 1990s and is hence an important voice in the definition of the field of Postcolonial Studies in general. Apart from this, she has been mainly interested in what she has termed, in two important collections edited together with Robert Stam (Shohat/Stam 1994 and 2003), ‘multicultural media’ (although the focus of these volumes is clearly on film). The fairly young area of Sound Studies, in contrast, has more or less neglected (or been neglected by) Postcolonial Studies, as Carla J. Maier complains in her essay on sound culture in this volume. The initial spark for the more sociological brand of Media Studies to deal with Postcolonial Studies came from a 2002 volume of the journal Communication Theory, which was dedicated to “Postcolonial Approaches to Communication” as the paper by the editors Raka Shome and Radha S. Hegde was entitled. This article is still worth reading for scholars and students interested in this rapprochement, as it discusses the premises for such mutual involvement in clear and basic terms and has consequently taken central position in the first handbook article on Media Studies and Postcolonial Theory (Kumar 2014). What is more, in the shape of Global Media Studies, Communication Studies has developed a field in some proximity to Postcolonial Studies. In a sense, Global Media Studies exemplifies both the existing rapprochement of Postcolonial and Media Studies and the necessity of further research in that interface. Global Media Studies emerged from research both in Globalization Studies and Media Studies and has therefore been promoted from two disciplinary sides. This is the reason for its considerable academic success, which is testified e.g. by the Global Media and Communications Handbook Series starting with publishers Wiley-Blackwell in 2011. The terms ‘global’ and ‘postcolonial’ have been rubbing shoulders for

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quite some time now, as can be glimpsed e.g. from Krishnaswamy and Hawley’s influential 2008 collection of essays The Postcolonial and The Global. To an extent, Globalization Studies, by way of the very terms treated and perspectives taken, has inevitably always carried some postcolonial implications, so that Global Media Studies have been – or should have been – postcolonial from the very beginning. However, as Krishnaswamy wryly observes in the same collection, the two fields have often exchanged terms without sharing perspectives (2008: 2), and it is only recently that Postcolonial Studies has started taking issue with Global Media Studies. Consequently, two major publications of Global Media Studies from a postcolonial perspective, Divya C. McMillin’s International Media Studies (2007) and Ramaswami Harindranath’s contribution on “Post-colonial Interventions on Media, Audiences, and National Politics” in The Handbook of Global Media Research (2012), drawing on a large body of earlier work by the author, both delineate an already existing research field and bemoan its relative absence. Both are correct in a sense, because even if some scholars of Global Media Studies are aware of the postcolonial implications and the valid postcolonial critique of what they are doing, this kind of research is quite scattered and still awaits the kind of conceptual and systematic overviews required by both scholars and students and represented by our volume. Another bone of contention is the term ‘global’ itself, which, despite being a point of contact between Global Media Studies and Postcolonial (Media) Studies, smacks for many postcolonial scholars (among them some of the contributors to this volume) of a lack of conceptual and perspectival differentiation or even of silently condoning Western cultural superiority and homogenization. What critique there has been of this homogenization, e.g. based on the Frankfurt-school inspired cultural imperialism paradigm, is in turn attacked from a postcolonial angle as being itself too homogenizing (cf. McMillin 2007: 42-46 or Harindranath 2012: 384). Further perspectives demanded from Global Media Studies by a postcolonial approach are ‘history’ and ‘situation’: Global Media Studies must be aware of the (colonial) history of the media culture it analyses, present in the geopolitical situation (or situatedness) of each particular analytical example – token of the fact that all media and media usages are only accessible in specific sites. Concomitant with this historicisation is a postcolonial critique of the Western-centric notion of modernity, which posits the historical development of the West as a global pattern of cultural and social progress. Against this kind of homogeneous and monolithic modernity, Postcolonial Studies holds the notion of a field of asynchronous and differentiated modernities in the plural, which only in its entirety could be called ‘global’ (cf. Eisenstadt 2003, Appadurai 2005 and

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Wollaeger/Eatough 2012). To achieve such situational and historical specificity, both McMillin (2007: particularly 134-178) and Harindranath (2012: 389) demand that postcolonially informed Global Media Studies analyze the specific media receptions in different areas of the world in a nuanced and contextually sensitive way. This kind of reception analysis confirms that media consumption is generally not passive but that many local contexts produce countermanding appropriations or even hostile rejections of globally powerful media products. A final example critiquing Global Media Studies, and one that touches upon most of the positions summarized here, is Arvind Rajagopal’s work. In his “Notes on Postcolonial Visual Culture” from 2011, he qualifies the claims of Global Media Studies by pointing out the specificity of regional contexts, but in doing so he refers to media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan and Guy Debord. Vis-à-vis the media-theoretical and media-historical grand récits of these theorists, he develops a succinct notion of postcolonial mediality and one that heeds the specificity of the (particular) postcolonial situation. For him, postcolonial mediality is characterized by the inclusion of religious media(lity) into the media realms conflictually negotiated in postcolonial societies. Therefore, he neatly fuses a sociological with a cultural perspective on media, while subjecting both to a postcolonial critique.

P RINCIPLES

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S ELECTION

The present volume aims to contribute to and expand the disciplinary exchange just outlined. To this purpose it brings together scholars with an established track record in Postcolonial Studies, who here apply their approach to texts and media phenomena that are still a growth area in their field, with scholars from the fields of Media and Communication Studies who would not consider themselves as postcolonialists but have nonetheless agreed to test the potential of a postcolonial perspective stance and of selected theoretical paradigms from Postcolonial Studies for the work in their fields. Before outlining the resulting structure of the volume, however, we wish to point out what the volume does not try to be or do. Most importantly, it is not meant to be exhaustive. The book has a keyword structure that maps what we consider especially important areas of the interrelational field of Media Studies and Postcolonial Studies, so that it can function as an introduction to this field for both students and scholars. Its approach is not encyclopaedic but openly selective, and the choice of key terms on which it is based was governed by the goal that the volume should be a meeting ground for scholars with different backgrounds. This led to a selection of rather open,

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though not general, terms which denote concepts rather than specific media practices and which can serve as a contact zone (though not in Pratt’s sense) for different disciplines. We have therefore deliberately avoided articles on concepts that are first and foremost associated with Postcolonial Studies or Postcolonial Theory, such as ‘Orientalism’, ‘Hybridity’, or the ‘Subaltern’. This also means that while types of media (e.g. film, photography, Internet, television, literature, theatre, music, art, (mobile) telephony, radio, video games, DVD/Bluray), global genres (e.g. hip hop, bhangra, ‘world music’, telenovela, game shows), media institutions (e.g. CNN, Al Jazeera, literary NGOs, Mapping Global Media Policy project) or movements (e.g. Arabian Spring, Anti-ACTA Movement) and specific production and distribution environment (e.g. Hollywood, Bollywood, Nollywood, African video halls) are all analyzed and discussed in this volume, this always happens within a keyword framework where they either feature as examples mentioned more in passing or as the subject of longer case studies. The concepts that we have selected for discussion pertain, with one exception, to three thematic fields, which also structure our book. Section one contains articles on the interaction of the global and the local in the global mediascape as well as its transnational dimensions. The articles in section two are devoted to questions of media politics and their implications. Section three highlights the status of media texts as commodities and of media as economic agents and posits them as objects of the cultural industries. The distinction between these three sections naturally cannot be entirely clear-cut. Their overlap mirrors the complexity of the interrelations at play on the levels of media production, distribution and reception. The last article in the book stands outside the three sections and complements their concentration on contemporary issues by a diachronic perspective that emphasizes the significance of Media Studies’ branch of Media History for a postcolonial study of media. The book opens with an article on one of the most central phenomena of the contemporary mediascape: media convergence. Terry Flew and Bonnie Rui Liu underline the intricate relation between communications media and empirebuilding that derives from communication technologies’ indispensability for establishing and maintaining systems of power. The digital transformations of new media, which are often conceived in terms of media convergence, are only the latest significant development in a history of media employed in environments of highly unequal power relations. In development communication and global media politics, various theories and international political agendas have been championed over the decades to engage with these inequalities. Flew and Liu map the rise and fall between the 1950s and mid-1970s of the modernization paradigm, which conceived of media modernization in developing countries in

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terms of an assimilation to Western conditions. It was shaken when demands arose for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), which in turn suffered several set-backs. The modernization paradigm, according to Flew and Liu therefore continues “to have a significant, if unheralded, role in thinking about both global media and the relationship between media and development”. Flew and Liu impressively demonstrate this in a case study that examines the Information and Communications Technologies for Development (ICT4D) agenda, which was initiated as an attempt to bridge the so-called ‘digital divide’ between Western and developing countries. Discussing whether the ICT4D agenda is adequate to deal with the participatory communication typical of media convergence, the authors address postcolonial critiques of the agenda as well as convergent media’s potential of enabling decentralization, participation and grassroots activity. Flew and Liu’s assessment of media convergence is followed by a piece on media globalization from Kai Hafez. We have asked for permission to reprint this piece because of its critical stance towards established concepts of media globalization, which Hafez, considers something of a “myth”. Moreover, despite the growth of Internet connectivity and changes in broadcasting since the text was written, its arguments are still valid. Discussing the often so-called ‘globalization’, ‘glocalization’ and ‘localization’ of media and media products as well as the interconnectedness, changes and interdependence of media systems, the article draws particular attention to the ambivalences in international media exchange processes and thus presents a more nuanced and critical view of media globalization than allowed for by the dominant conversion and diversity theories. Brian Creech and Anandam Kavoori introduce the novel concept of transcultural mediated subjectivity in their contribution to the volume. Situating their article in the field of Transcultural Media Studies, the authors adopt a perspective that investigates globalized modes of meaning-making alongside economic modes of international media production and distribution. The essay argues that material, semiotic, historical, geographic and political tensions are often given intelligible form through the production of transcultural media products that eclipse traditional global/local framings of international media and offer modes of expression that reveal hybridized, postcolonial identities existing within a mode of global exchange. Drawing on literatures of globalization and postcolonial media criticism as well as concepts of subjectivity, the authors theorize their concept of transcultural subjectivity, which they then illustrate by means of a case study of how journalist and Google executive Wael Ghonim became one of the central figures in the international media representations of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt. The nuances and contradictions within these represen-

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tations illustrate that a transcultural understanding of media subjectivity requires attention and adherence to the conditions that such mediated figures as Wael Ghonim emerge in. Uriya Shavit closes the first part of the book with an article on diasporic media, in which he explores how advanced media impact the relations between migratory communities and their homelands. Drawing on Media Studies as well as Postcolonial and Nationalism Studies, the article challenges concepts and emphases on the relation between migration, media and globalization. Local and national media have expanded far outside their traditional geographical scopes. In combination with an almost universal desire to consume mainly local and national-based media, this has led to an international media landscape that is made up of ‘global villages’ and sees new forms of diasporic media use. Drawing on empirical research, Shavit identifies two salient types of migrants, the ‘lonely sojourner’ and the ‘passive transnational’, on the basis of their distinctive patterns of media use. While studies on migration in the age of globalization tended to stress how distant communities come closer and how the impacts between peripheries and centres are enhanced, Shavit’s examples illustrate that an intensification of exposure to homeland media from afar does not necessarily result in greater communal cohesion among migrants or in greater political involvement in the affairs of the homeland. The perspective beyond individual nations or cultures as well as the concepts of the interrelatedness of nations and cultures that run through these first four chapters continue in part two of the book. However, the focus here is narrowed onto concepts relating to media policy. Barbara Thomass opens this section with an article on the possible mutual enrichments of Media and Postcolonial Studies in engaging with international and national media politics and their interrelations. Conceding that research on media politics has been dominated by Eurocentrism so far, Thomass systematically maps this field’s subjects of investigation (media systems, markets, regulation; actors of national and international media politics; aims, fields and possibilities of media politics) with an eye to their potential for postcolonialist discussion or intervention. Thomass presents media “as a heavily contested field of power where structures, regulations, actors and their policies create a space of negotiations” whose outcome determines who holds the power of dissemination and representation. Inter/national media politics emerge from the article as an interdisciplinary meeting ground of Postcolonial Studies and a politically committed type of Media Studies, which would be united in the political goal of cultural diversity. Rinella Cere, who has already joined together Postcolonial and Media Studies in her earlier work, contributes an article on the political concept of

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hegemony to the section. Cere presents hegemony as the overarching principle in what she calls the ‘postcolonial cognitive map for the study of media cultures’, as hegemony and counter-hegemony ultimately pervade other key ideas of postcolonial media analysis, such as the colonizer-colonized relationship, hybridity, Orientalism and subalternity. Drawing on a variety of primarily audio-visual texts, among them most prominently several works by French film-maker Claire Denis as well as British television documentaries about the British Empire, Cere concentrates specifically on questions of representation and the ways they are shaped by hegemonic and counter-hegemonic positions and impulses. Monika Mehta closes part two of the book with an article on media regulation that combines a Transcultural Media Studies perspective with questions of representation and the analysis of micro-practices of power. Mehta analyzes forms of media regulation on the national and international level and the ways in which they affect media texts when they are disseminated internationally. Taking Karan Johar’s Hindi film My Name Is Khan (2010) as her example, she analyzes the uneven relations amongst states, nations, and film industries as they jostle to define citizens, nationals, and audiences and illustrates how the film in its theatrical and DVD versions, when crossing state boundaries, was certified according to specific state or non-governmental guidelines before it could be screened. My Name Is Khan and its representation of Muslims were tailored to meet ‘national’ demands through the application of censorship, rating guidelines and exhibition norms. In decentering the state and in moving beyond simple dichotomies of ruler and ruled, Mehta shows that multiple participants engage in this uneven play of power, contributing to discourses on cinema and censorship and ‘cutting’ the films in all kind of contexts, from the production room to various self-regulating bodies of national and transnational film industries. Mehta’s paper draws attention to the importance of the distribution level in media communication, and by analyzing My Name Is Khan as an example of travelling goods (cf. Huck/ Bauernschmidt 2012), it establishes a link to the third part of this volume, which contains five essays on concepts relating to media texts as objects of the cultural industries. Questions of ownership, adaptation and appropriation lie at the base of Lars Eckstein’s essay on piracy, which he approaches from an explicitly postcolonial perspective. He discusses dominant discourses on piracy in the global North that range from condemning piracy as criminal theft, to discussing it in the light of freedom and creativity, to celebrating its anti-capitalist resistance. Eckstein argues for the necessity of re-orienting the discussion by suggesting that the two examples he investigates – the cassette culture of Indian popular music in the 1970s and 80s as well as the effects of piracy on northern Nigerian video culture

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in the 1990s and 2000s – should instead be regarded principally as a basic strategy of obtaining access to global modernity. Eckstein proposes that we may best understand postcolonial piracy as a range of practices connected to older and new technologies which negotiate ‘provisional compromises’ between global designs of property, capitalism, personhood and multiple local “ways of being human” (Chakrabarty 2000: 70). Carla J. Maier, in her essay on ‘Sound Cultures’, investigates sound as a set of complex social, and mediatized practices, which is culturally shaped rather than a natural given. Noting that explorations of sonic cultures are still underexposed within Postcolonial Studies, she presents two case studies to indicate ways by which this lacuna might be closed. Her analysis of Apache Indian’s track “Arranged Marriage” points out how the sound practices of cutting, looping and layering create sonic constellations in which received cultural, social and gendered inscriptions are constantly contested and renegotiated. She also looks at the role of pirate radio practices as alternative spaces of musical expression and social participation for Black and Asian post-migrants in post-2000 London. In doing so, she outlines an example of a postcolonial cultural practice offering opportunities of cultural expression beyond a mainstream media industry that is still ethnically confining. However, when the same industry attends to postcolonial culture, the result often cannot but be described as ‘Commodification’, as addressed by Oliver Lindner in his contribution. In literature, the phenomenon has already drawn the attention of scholars exploring how the canonical authors and texts of so-called postcolonial literature are deployed for financial profit by international publishers in turning their ‘difference’ into a selling point (cf. Graham Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic (2001) or Sarah Brouillette’s Postcolonial Writers and the Global Literary Marketplace (2007)). Lindner discusses the role of commodification within postcolonial media cultures in more general terms and presents the field as a whole as a growth industry. In doing so, he uses the concepts of ‘exoticism’, ‘imperial nostalgia’ and ‘staged marginality’ in order to analyze key factors that shape processes of commodification and to accentuate the role of cultural prestige and stardom in the marketing of postcolonial media culture. The film Life of Pi (2012) and Taiye Selasi’s novel Ghana must go (2013) serve him as two quite different examples to illustrate specific mechanisms of the commodification of ‘postcolonial’ cultural texts and its crucial role for their circulation. While Lindner widens the notion of ‘commodification’ to include nonliterary media, Ana Cristina Mendes’ essay, which ends the third section of the book, deepens the aspect of the marketing of postcolonial literature by applying a more thorough understanding of ‘economy’. Using the methodology of the

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‘new sociology of literature’ on the example of recent South Asian writing in English, Mendes shows the positionality of so-called postcolonial authors whose access to the global literary market is based on the decisions of editors and publishers in metropolitan centres like London and New York. Fascinatingly, economic aspects, such as Southern Asian ‘tiger economies’ and their setbacks, are centrally addressed within the texts also. Theirs, therefore, is a particularly ripe example of the global marketing of postcolonial literature, since global economic issues become pertinent both in the texts and by them – in what is an interesting collision whereby the texts economically are driven by the same logics of global capitalism they internally critique. The volume closes with an essay by Sven Werkmeister that argues powerfully for the concept of a media history as a source of new insights on colonial and postcolonial histories. Werkmeister illustrates that the difference between Europe and its colonial ‘other’ has, since the seventeenth century, been shaped by a media difference that prompted Europeans, on the basis of their written culture, to define themselves as superior to ‘primitive’ people without writing; the alphabet was thus a central part of the legitimizing discourse of colonialism. While media history formed colonial and postcolonial history, however, colonial encounters in turn influenced the history of media, since they were inevitably characterized by interchanges of gestures, images, sounds and symbols. In Werkmeister’s fascinating example of so-called ‘primitivist’ modernist writing, European literature comes to be challenged in its mediality by the nonalphabetical Other it has itself constructed. While non-European Primitivism is undoubtedly a discursive construction undertaken by European ethnographers, art historians, and fictional wsriters among others, Werkmeister shows how the colonial encounter comes to haunt a media system and media history that must be seen as global. After this line-up of the book, we are happy to leave it to the readers to discover the various chapters for themselves. It remains for us to thank our contributors for their input and to express our gratitude to Chaniga Chaipan, research assistant at the University of Erfurt, whose energy, diligence and circumspection in putting the manuscript together were invaluable.

R EFERENCES Abbas, Ackbar/Erni, John Nguyet (eds) (2005): Internationalizing Cultural Studies: An Anthology, Malden: Blackwell.

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Appadurai, Arjun (2005): Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bhabha, Homi/Comaroff, John (2002): “Speaking of Postcoloniality, in the Continuous Present: A Conversation”, in: David Theo Goldberg/Ato Quayson (eds), Relocating Postcolonialism, Oxford: Blackwell, 15-46. Brunt, Rosalind/Cere, Rinella (eds) (2011): Postcolonial Media Culture in Britain, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Cere, Rinella (2011): “Postcolonial and Media Studies: A Cognitive Map”, in: Rosalind Brunt/Rinella Cere (eds), Postcolonial Media Culture in Britain, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 1-13. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000): Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Dines, Gail/Humez, Jean MacMahon (eds) (2011): Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Critical Reader, Los Angeles: Sage. Eisenstadt, Shmuel Noah (2003): Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities, vol. 2, Leiden: Brill. Goldberg, David Theo/Quayson, Ato (eds) (2002): Relocating Postcolonalism, Oxford: Blackwell. Hardt, Michael/Negri, Antonio (2001): Empire, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Harindranath, Ramaswami (2012): “Post-colonial Interventions on Media, Audiences, and National Politics”, in: Ingrid Volkmer (ed.), The Handbook of Global Media Research, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 381-396. Huck, Christian/Bauernschmidt, Stefan (eds) (2012): Travelling Goods, Travelling Moods: Varieties of Cultural Appropriation (1850-1950), Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Imre, Anikó (2014): “Postcolonial Media Studies in Postsocialist Europe”, Boundary 2 41.1, 113-134. Krishna, Sankaran (2009): Globalization and Postcolonialism: Hegemony and Resistance in the Twenty-first Century, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Krishnaswamy, Revathi/Hawley, John Charles (eds) (2008): The Postcolonial and the Global, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kumar, Shanti (2014): “Media, Communication, and Postcolonial Theory”, in: Robert Fortner/Mark Fackler (eds), The Handbook of Media and Mass Communication Theory, vol. 2, Chichester: Wiley, 380-399. Loomba, Ania/Kaul, Suvir/Bunzl, Matti/Burton, Antoinette/Esty, Jed (eds) (2005a): Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, Durham: Duke University Press.

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— (2005b): “Beyond What? An Introduction”, in: Ania Loomba/Suvir Kaul/Matti Bunzl/Antoinette Burton/Jed Esty (eds), Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, Durham: Duke University Press, 1-38. McCallum, Pamela/Faith, Wendy (2005): “Introduction Linked Histories in a Globalized World”, in: Pamela McCallum/Wendy Faith (eds), Linked Histories: Postcolonial Studies in a Globalized World, Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1-19. McMillin, Divya C. (2007): International Media Studies, Malden: Blackwell. Parry, Benita (2002): “Directions and Dead Ends in Postcolonial Studies”, in: David Theo Goldberg/Ato Quayson (eds), Relocating Postcolonialism, Oxford: Blackwell, 66-81. Pratt, Mary Louise (1992): Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London: Routledge. Quayson, Ato/Goldberg, David (2002): “Introduction: Scale and Sensibility”, in: David Goldberg/Ato Quayson (eds), Relocating Postcolonialism, Oxford: Blackwell, xi-xxii. Rajagopal, Arvind (2011): “Notes on Postcolonial Visual Culture”, in: BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 2.1, 11-22. Rønning, Anne Holden/Johannessen, Lene (2007): “Introduction”, in: Anne Holden Rønning/Lene Johannessen (eds), Readings of the Particular: The Postcolonial in the Postnational, Amsterdam: Rodopi, vii-xiv. Shohat, Ella/Stam, Robert (1994): Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, New York: Routledge, 1994. — (eds) (2003): Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Shome, Raka/Hegde, Radha S. (2002): “Postcolonial Approaches to Communication: Charting the Terrain, Engaging the Intersections”, in: Communication Theory 12.3, 249-270. Wilson, Janet/Şandru, Cristina/Welsh, Sarah Lawson (eds) (2009a): Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, London: Routledge. — (2009b): “General Introduction”, in: Janet Wilson/Cristina Şandru/Sarah Lawson Welsh (eds), Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, London: Routledge, 1-13. Wollaeger, Mark/Eatough, Matt (eds) (2012): The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Xie, Shaobo (2006): “Is the World Decentered? A Postcolonialist Perspective on Globalization”, in: Clara A. B. Joseph/Janet Wilson (eds), Global Fissures: Postcolonial Fusions, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 53-75.

Part I: Global Media

Media Convergence T ERRY F LEW

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I NTRODUCTION : M APPING

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G LOBAL M EDIASCAPE

There has long been a connection between communications media and empires, as communication technologies have enabled the establishment and maintenance of systems of power over distance. The first wave of European colonial expansion coincided with the development of the movable type printing press, particularly as it helped to develop the foundations for the modern nation-state, including the codification of law, mass literacy, mass circulation of books and newspapers, and the modern postal service (Eisenstein 1983). As the rise of print media enabled “imagined communities” of nations to be constructed in Europe (Anderson 1991), colonial expansion saw the European languages of Portuguese, Spanish, English and French become the main vehicle for communication as these powers extended their empires in Asia, the Americas, Oceania, Africa and the Middle East. As the European languages were the languages of colonial administration, this in turn created hierarchies within the colonies, as the capacity to share in the spoils of colonial trade and power was tied to mastery of the language, values and culture of the colonizers. The nexus between communication technologies and empire was further consolidated with the development of the telegraph. James Carey has argued that the telegraph has been of vital significance to the history of global capitalist modernity, as it “allowed symbols to move independently of and travel faster than transportation” and not only “altered the relation between communication and transportation”, but also “changed the fundamental ways in which communication was thought about” (Carey 1989: 204). The period from 1875 to 1914 saw a massive expansion in global telegraphy, driven by massive programs of undersea cabling that enabled messages to be sent across the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian

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Oceans. The number of international telegraphic transmissions rose from 29 million in 1868 to 329 million by 1900 so that, by the turn of the twentieth century, international messages accounted for more than 20 per cent of the total (Mattelart 1994: 11). International telegraphy meant that “for the first time in history, colonial metropolises acquired the means to communicate almost instantly with their remotest colonies”, and telegraphy was central to “the network of communication and transportation that arose to link Europe with the rest of the world” (Headrick 1981: 130). This was also the period where the great global news agencies emerged, such as Havas (France), Wolff (Germany), Reuters (UK), Associated Press and United Press (US). The relationship between communications and empire was analyzed by the Canadian economist Harold Innis (1951), who argued that the technical properties of different media gave them a bias towards preservation over time, as with print, or the distribution of information across space, as would be the case with broadcast technologies as they evolved in the twentieth century. The formation of empires in modernity was, for Innis, grounded in their capacity to rapidly distribute messages across great distances, thereby being able to maintain centralized rule over geographically dispersed spaces. This realization of the nation building and propaganda power of media would be important not only to colonial power, but to anti-colonial struggles. The leaders of newly independent nations in the ‘Third World’ would place a great emphasis upon constructing a modern communications infrastructure as a means of unifying and developing their nation-states. The ‘Cold War’ from the 1950s to the 1980s was also in many important respects a media and information war, with both the United States and the former Soviet Union developing international broadcasting services, such as Moscow Radio, the Voice of America, and Radio Free Europe, designed to win the psychological and propagandistic struggles for the allegiance of peoples around the world, and particularly in the “hot spots” of South-East Asia, India and Pakistan, and the Middle East (Thussu 2006: 16-26).

M EDIA C ONVERGENCE : N EW C HALLENGES AND O LD D EBATES This historical introduction to the topic of communication and empire indicates that an understanding of communications technologies and infrastructures is as central to understanding postcolonial media cultures as analyzing media content and audience reception. Within the field of Communication Studies, it has been

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in the area of development communication that the strongest affinities exist to postcolonialism more broadly. Development communication emerged around the question of broadcast communication, and whether it enabled new opportunities for economic development and social modernization. This perspective, known as the modernization paradigm, was dominant from the 1960s to the 1980s, although its top-down approaches were challenged by those seeking more participatory, democratic and self-reliant approaches to development. One way of understanding the digital transformations of new media is through the concept of media convergence. Convergence refers to the interlinking of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and communications networks, new forms of media content enabled by the Internet and digital media technologies, and the convergent platforms, services and activities that have emerged as a result. Media convergence has been defined as “a historically openended migration of communicative practices across diverse material technologies and social institutions” (Jensen 2010: 15), and as “the process whereby new technologies are accommodated by existing media and communication industries and cultures” (Dwyer 2010: 2). In his highly influential book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Henry Jenkins defined convergence as involving “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behaviour of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want” (Jenkins 2006: 2). Media convergence occurs at the levels of technologies, platforms, devices and services, industry structures, cultural practices, and audience/consumer behavior. Meikle and Young (2011) have proposed that media convergence can be understood as operating across four dimensions: • •

•

•

technological—the combination of computing, communications and content around networked digital media platforms; industrial—the engagement of established media institutions in the digital media space, and the rise of digital-based companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft etc., as significant media content providers or as enablers of access to user-created content; social—the rise of social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube that promote content sharing and peer-to-peer communication and the large-scale distribution of user-created content; textual—the re-use and remixing of media into what has been termed a ‘transmedia’ model, where stories and media content (for example sounds, images, written text) are dispersed across multiple media platforms.

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To these four dimensions of convergence can be added two other key elements: (1) the rise of user-created content, which generates a growing convergence of media producers and consumers, to the point where traditional distinctions between professional media content creators and media audiences are becoming increasingly blurred; and (2) the question of policy convergence, as laws, policies and regulations designed for particular discrete media platforms, such as print and publishing, film, broadcasting and telecommunications, have to be rethought as longstanding relationships between particular forms of content and associated media platforms are quickly changing, merging and transforming. Media convergence has been linked to modernization theories of communication through what have come to be known as Information and Communications Technologies for Development (ICT4D) programs. Drawing upon the premise that earlier models of development communication had been overly reliant upon top-down, centralized approaches to communication, and a linear, communication-as-transmission approach to audiences, convergent digital media platforms are seen as providing new scope to enable more participatory, decentralized and inclusive approaches to development communication. Postcolonial critics contend, however, that such approaches simply replicate the underlying dependencies associated with relations between the Global North and the Global South, particularly around controls over technologies, the financial implications of ‘lock-in’ to ICT hardware and software provided by the global digital media giants, and assumptions about how local institutions and cultures need to be ‘adjusted’ for the global information society. Critics of the global information society, such as Mattelart (2003), contend that such visions of integration of the Global South into a global information society simply “breathe new life into the diffusionist concept of development, which should have been considered obsolete with the failure of strategies inspired by the quantitative ideology of modernization” (Mattelart 2003: 161). We will critically appraise such arguments below, in the context of the initiatives of international agencies such as the World Bank and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to promote economic development through convergent media, as part of the ICT4D agenda.

M ODERNIZATION T HEORIES C OMMUNICATION

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Development communication emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, as a research field that was strongly shaped by the context of the ‘Cold War’, and the

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importance being attached to media and communications in newly independent nations. It was particularly concerned with developing research models for the use of mass media as a tool of economic, political and cultural modernization, in the countries of Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. The dominant paradigm of development communication emerged through the works of Daniel Lerner (1958; 1963; 1968), Ithiel de Sola Pool (1963), Wilbur Schramm (1964), and Everett Rogers (Rogers/Svenning 1969; Rogers 1974), and it was disseminated worldwide during the 1950s and 1960s through development programs supported by US foreign aid, as well as through bodies such as UNESCO (United Nations, Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) with its “Decade of Development” programs in the 1960s (see Shah 2011 for an overview). Also important in this period were frameworks developed to understand global communications systems, of which the most significant was Four Theories of the Press (Siebert et al. 1956). The ‘four theories’, or more accurately four paradigms for state-media relations, were: free press; social responsibility; authoritarian; and Soviet-Communist. The first two were associated with the capitalist West – with the United States in the first case and Europe in the second – and the none too subtle message of the authors was that those contemplating such issues in the postcolonial nations should gravitate towards these models rather than the authoritarian or communist models. Although this body of work was strongly linked to US foreign policy priorities in the context of the ‘Cold War’ with the Soviet Union, it would be wrong to view the modernization paradigm simply in terms of its service to US political interests. Like much of the work in mass communications research coming from the US from the 1940s to the 1960s, it combined positivist methodologies that would endow the field with a scientific status with the desire for relevance to policy-makers and decision-makers in government and industry, along the lines of the ‘administrative’ orientation towards communication research. The modernization paradigm drew upon Weberian sociology, particularly the idea that the development of capitalism did not simply involve a system of property and economic relations but also the development of a ‘modern mental type’, prepared to challenge the forces of traditionalism and inertia; there was a related focus in modernization theories upon the role of education in cultivating new elites who would be prepared to manage social change towards preferred ends (Hernández-Ramos/Schramm 1989; Sparks 2007). Such models interpreted the task of development as involving the development of large-scale industry, application of the latest technologies, the setting of quantitative economic growth targets, the movement of workers from agriculture to manufacturing, and

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the migration of people from the countryside to the city, in order to overcome what was termed the “vicious circle of poverty” (Lerner 1963). The belief that the Western path of development was a universal model that pointed the way to overcoming poverty and backwardness was, for its key proponents, unequivocal and clear-cut. Daniel Lerner proposed that “the Western model of modernization exhibits certain components and sequences whose relevance is global”, since “increasing urbanization has tended to raise literacy; rising literacy has tended to increase media exposure; increasing media exposure has ‘gone with’ wider economic participation (per capita income) and political participation” (Lerner 1958: 46). The challenge was to establish a significant role for the mass media in modernization processes. Mattelart has observed that development communication theorists became “travelling evangelists” for the new paradigm (Mattelart 1994: 149). For example, Wilbur Schramm argued that “the task of the mass media of information and the ‘new media’ of education is to speed and ease the long, slow transformation required for economic development and [...] to speed and smooth the task of modernizing human resources behind the national effort” (1964: 27), while Ithiel de Sola Pool argued that commercial advertising, for example, was not simply about selling products, but was also “propaganda in favor of modernism”, and demonstrated how the mass media could “transform what would otherwise be the unrealized dreams of a few modernizers into the dynamic aspirations of a whole people” (1963: 253). Everett Rogers mapped out the influence of mass media on modernization processes and the adoption of innovations in the following manner:

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Figure 1: Mass Media and Modernization in Developing Countries

Source: Rogers 1974: 49.

T HE D ECLINE OF THE M ODERNIZATION P ARADIGM IN D EVELOPMENT C OMMUNICATION From the late 1960s, the modernization paradigm faced a growing crisis. In an important essay published in 1976, Everett Rogers, one of the pioneers of the field, referred to the “passing of the dominant paradigm” of development communication, reflective of both problems with the underlying development paradigm and assumptions about the relationship of communication to development. Rogers acknowledged the intellectual ethnocentrism of the dominant approach, devaluing non-Western forms of knowledge and applying what he termed an “individual-blame” approach to poverty and economic backwardness. He conceded that the failure to recognize external constraints on development aspirations, combined with the focus on large-scale capital-intensive technologies, promoted inappropriate development models that accentuated the distance between Western experts and the communities whose lives they sought to improve.

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In line with changing thinking about media and communication more generally, Rogers also observed that the application of a linear, communication-astransmission approach had resulted in insufficient attention being given to media content and how mass media messages were received and valued, as well as overstating the potential for mass media to generate social change (Rogers 1976: 227-228). Critical development communications scholars such as Huesca (2003) and Melkote (2010) argued that the ethnocentrism of the modernization paradigm was not only reflective of the methodological biases of the underlying communication paradigms, but that programs linked to the modernization paradigm came to actively serve elite interests in developing countries. Neglect of the historical context of colonialism and uneven development, combined with the Western experts actively aligning themselves with local elites in order to advance their agendas, were key factors underlying the inability of modernization approaches to effectively communicate to subordinate social groups such as the peasantry. The Latin American scholar Luis Ramiro Beltrán (1976) argued that the inattention to power relations in society was indicative of methodologies that combined a focus on the individual and how they should ‘adjust’ to social change, with an underlying functionalism that was based around adjusting the psychology of individuals and groups to the existing framework of existing power relations. He argued that, in the Latin American context, ‘development’ had long been seen by subordinate groups as requiring transformation of these power relations to achieve social change. The rise of the dependency critique also focused attention on the relationship between the history of colonialism, inequalities of access to power and resources, and the manner in which such external inequalities drove a distorted pattern of resource use and social inequalities in developing countries. The dependency paradigm had its origins in Latin America, where authors such as Andre Gunder Frank (1992) argued that the global capitalist world-system had produced the “development of underdevelopment”, where nations of the Third World were unable to develop along the lines of the advanced industrial nations due to the structure of the capitalist world system and because their local elites were aligned – both materially and ideologically – with the transnational capitalist classes rather than with their own people (cf. Palma 1978). The most significant theorist who applied the dependency paradigm to global media, Herbert Schiller, referred to the resulting relations with regard to media and communications as cultural imperialism, defined as “the sum of processes by which a society is brought into the modern world system and how its dominant stratum is attracted, pressured, forced, and sometimes bribed into shaping social institu-

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tions to correspond to, or even promote, the values and structures of the dominant centre of the system” (1976: 9). Increased attention to international inequalities in relation to information and communication saw demands emerge in the 1970s for a New World Information and Communications Order (NWICO). Whereas UNESCO had previously been a promoter of the modernization paradigm, publishing works by Schramm and others in the development communication field, the 18th General Conference of UNESCO in 1974 affirmed a need to “end the dependence of the developing world as regards information and communication”, and to “establish a new, more equitable and effective information and communications order” (qtd in Pasquali 2005: 292). The demand for an NWICO on the part of nations of the ‘Global South’ was connected to wider campaigns conducted through the United Nations in this period, such as the calls for a New International Economic Order. UNESCO established the International Commission for the Study of Communications Problems, chaired by Irish-born Amnesty International founder Sean MacBride. Its final report, Many Voices, One World (also known as the MacBride Report) was highly critical of what it saw as the ‘one-way flow’ of information from the developed Western nations to the Third World that arose from the control by multinational corporations over information technologies and resources (The MacBride Commission 1980). The MacBride Report saw arguments that promoted the ‘free flow of information’ as needing to be balanced against the rights of national governments, particularly in the developing world, to be able to manage such flows in order to maintain national sovereignty, build national cultural identity, and harness communication resources more effectively to development goals. The recommendations of the MacBride Report were adopted by UNESCO at its twenty-first General Conference in 1980. The UNESCO campaign for a NWICO suffered a slow and painful death over the course of the 1980s. Of particular importance was the United States withdrawal of all financial support from UNESCO in 1984, followed by Great Britain and Singapore, on the basis that the NWICO was perceived as a threat to the global free flow of information through state controls that were at odds with liberal values (Mattelart 1994: 179-86). The US would not return to UNESCO until 2004. In the course of the 1980s, and more particularly the 1990s, the crisis of UNESCO and the withering away of the NWICO agenda was accompanied by forum shifting, as policies towards international communications were increasingly aligned with global agendas to promote international trade in services. The US in particular was increasingly pursuing its interests through more promarket agencies such as the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), as well as through trade negotiations that led to the formation of the General

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Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) in 1994 an the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 (Ó Siochrú/Girard/Maham 2003). In the field of development communication, the modernization paradigm had been largely superseded by theories of participatory communication. Participatory models of communication sought a more community-driven approach to development, rejecting universal models of development or the primacy of Western communications models. They understood communication more as process and dialogue, and less as transmission and the imposition of expert knowledge, and sought to achieve development combined with social equity, rather than economic growth for its own sake (Waisbord 2001; Huesca 2003; Melkote 2010). One leading proponent of the participatory approach would argue that it was based upon the premise that “there is no universal development model, that development is an integral, multi-dimensional, and dialectic process that can differ from society to society” (Servaes 1989: 32). Despite the apparent unfashionability of the modernization paradigm, it continued to have a significant, if unheralded, role in thinking about both global media and the relationship between media and development. Sparks (2007) has argued that many of the underlying assumptions of the modernization paradigm have remained significant in development communication, such as the idea of a ‘knowledge gap’ between experts and the communities targeted for behavioral change, and the role that media can play as instruments of behavioral change. Many assumptions about the modernizing potential of mass media have now been reframed in terms of the liberating potential of digital technologies and personal computing, in the context of global capitalism and the global information society (Mattelart 2003).

I NFORMATION AND C OMMUNICATION T ECHNOLOGIES (ICT4D): A R EVIVAL OF M ODERNIZATION A GENDAS ? A central feature of development communications in the 2000s has been the rise of the Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) agenda. From the late 1990s, a range of international agencies, NGOs, corporate interests and academic researchers began to focus on the potential of ICTs for development, both through their contribution to economic growth, and the ability to empower poor people and communities. The United Nations Millennium Summit in September 2000 proclaimed eight Millennium Development Goals, of which Goal 8 was to “Develop a Global Partnership for Development”, with Target 8F being “in cooperation with the private sector, [to] make available

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benefits of new technologies, especially information and communications” (United Nations 2013). In 2000, the World Economic Forum launched its Global Digital Divide Initiatives, while the Group of Eight nations created a Digital Opportunities Taskforce (DOT) (Unwin 2009: 126-127, 132-134). The United National Development Program (UNDP) Human Development Report for 2001 was titled Making Technologies Work for Human Development (UNDP 2001), and in the same year a UN ICT Task Force was created. These initiatives for making better use of ICTs for development and poverty eradication, as well as later events such as the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) events organized by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in Geneva in 2003 and Tunis in 2005, formed the basis of what came to be known as the ICT4D agenda. An important contextual factor in driving ICT4D initiatives was the question of the digital divide. The term “digital divide” was first used in the United States during the Clinton Administration to identify gaps between ‘haves’ and ‘havenots’ in relation to access to computers and the Internet, and associated concerns about “unequal advantage being derived from [the] benefits” of new media access (Rice/Haythornthwaite 2006: 93). On a global scale, it was believed that unequal access to ICTs mattered “because of the widely held belief that inclusion and involvement in the global information and knowledge economy is an important measure of the ‘quality of life’ in the 21st century […] [and] being excluded by this emerging economy is deemed a significant deprivation” (Thomas 2009: 332). Wade observed that organizations such as the World Bank and the OECD came to be very focused on the role that ICT4D could play in both addressing the “digital divide” and enabling development that could “leapfrog institutional obstacles […] on the ground” (Wade 2002: 445). An interesting feature of the ICT4D agenda was the extent to which it sought to avoid the errors of previous development communications programs. The limits of these earlier modernization programs included their focus on top-down solutions imposed from outside, lack of engagement of local populations, excessive dealings with (sometimes corrupt) developing country governments and local elites rather than grass-roots community participation, and the failure of funds to reach the poorest sections of the community that are most in need. Associated with this was the focus upon a multi-stakeholder approach to development that was not simply government-to-government, but involved NGOs, civil society organizations and community leaders, as well as corporations in the ICT and related sectors. The DOT Report presented to the 2001 Genoa Group of Eight summit gives a sense of both the potential and the pitfalls identified with the new ICT4D approach:

36 | T ERRY F LEW AND B ONNIE R UI L IU ICT can thus help to ignite a virtuous circle of sustainable development. But misapplied, they can result in marginalization of the poor and the unconnected. In order for their development potential to be realized, all stakeholders – governments and their citizens, business, international organizations, civil society groups and individuals – need to work together towards achieving real change. As with all other development challenges, ownership by developing countries themselves and other relevant stakeholders will be indispensible (DOT 2001, n.p.).

The focus on multi-stakeholder approaches is consistent with the growing influence of NGOs and civil society organizations on development projects and the “participatory turn” in development communication (Sparks 2007: 75-80), which relates to the assumption that media convergence can foster a culture of participation. It also paralleled a turn towards developing world markets among the world’s leading ICT corporations. Programs such as One Laptop Per Child, established by MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, were able to get support from companies such as Google, eBay and Nortel, as well as from the UNDP, to provide very basic laptop computers valued at 100 USD to children in the least developed countries. In The End of Poverty, the economist Jeffrey Sachs emphasized the need to empower villages to take up ICTs, arguing that “rapid economic development requires that technical capacity suffuses the entire society from the bottom up” (2005: 257). The seeming enthusiasm of business leaders for ICT4D has led critics to refer to it as “Modernization 2.0” (Shade 2003) and “Developmentalism Redux” (Sundaram 2005). It has been compared to the earlier modernization approaches to development communication, infused with theories of an “information society” and notions of the “end of ideology” (Mattelart 2003). Agencies such as UNESCO have been anxious to disavow any sense that they are resurrecting older modernization discourses, substituting an earlier technological faith in “tractors for all” with a new belief in the transcendent power of “laptops for all” (Wade 2002: 450). The United Nations has made the point that the take-up of ICTs can only be seen as an enabler of development, and is only part of a multifaceted approach to achieving development goals: The worldwide spread of the Internet and ICTs has massively expanded opportunities for the creation, transmission and dissemination of information. Yet, inequalities in access to ICT networks, education and technological progress and to innovation systems remain vast, within and among countries. Rapid loss of traditional knowledge and its non-formal channels of transmission is further widening the gap. Limited access to knowledge hampers progress towards inclusive growth and employment creation, technological progress

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for sustainable development and health improvements. Greater knowledge sharing will be critical to induce the transformative changes needed to achieve food, nutrition and energy security in sustainable ways and to contain the threat of climate change (United Nations 2012: 13).

Many of the tensions in the ICT4D agenda were manifest in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) forums. The WSIS forums in Geneva in 2003 and Tunis in 2005 brought together representatives of government, international organizations, the private sector, and NGOs or civil society organizations from 175 countries, and the Geneva WSIS Declaration of Principles statement called for “a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society, where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and knowledge” (WSIS 2003). The WSIS identified the key principles of an ‘Information Society For All’ as including: a multi-stakeholder approach, with the private sector, civil society, international organizations and the UN all having a role in promoting ICTs for development through co-operation and partnerships; capacity building, and extended ICT knowledge and literacy throughout the population, particularly among disadvantaged and marginalized groups; and promoting the benefits of ICTs in all aspects of life, including e-government, e-health, e-learning, and other ICT applications for economic and social progress and well-being (WSIS 2003). The WSIS Final Report was contested by civil society organizations. These NGOs circulated an alternative Civil Society Declaration to the WSIS, titled Shaping Information Societies for Human Needs (Civil Society WSIS 2003). The Civil Society Declaration argued that communications rights must be linked to questions of social justice on both a local and a global scale, and that this required the transfer of funds to the least developed nations for poverty eradication, the broadening of access to the means of communication, and sustainable, community-based models for ICT development and use. It was also argued that cultural and linguistic diversity are only guaranteed by measures to inhibit the rise of media and information monopolies, including monopolies over software licenses, as well as a review of intellectual property and patent rights to see if current regimes are inhibiting creativity, innovation, and promotion of the public good. Civil society organizations also questioned what they saw as undue faith being placed upon technological solutions to social, cultural and political problems, and called upon the institutions of global governance to make their primary goal the more equitable distribution of the benefits of ICT development across nations and social groups.

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Postcolonial critics of the ICT4D Agenda such as Wade (2002), Sundaram (2005) and Leye (2007) have argued that the ICT4D agenda proposes “integration” of the Global South into a global information economy on highly unequal terms, where “the developing world is adequately and sufficiently connected [and] will become fully integrated into the global economy and hence become an equal partner of the rich countries” (Leye 2007: 978). The emphasis upon acquiring computer hardware and software, which require regular systems upgrades in order to be compatible with leading users, locks developing country users, and particularly their governments, into highly unequal contractual arrangements, with scarce foreign exchange needing to be used on ICT investments rather than meeting basic needs. Moreover, debates on the shape of global ICT remain dominated by the rich countries: global internet governance sites such as ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) are not transparent in their operations, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has only shown limited engagement with developing country concerns about global software monopolies. As Wade puts it, “the technologies and ‘regimes’ (international standards governing ICTs) are designed by developed country entities for developed country conditions” (2002: 443). In all of these ways, then, the net effect of the ICT4D agenda to bridge the “digital divide” may “have the effect of locking developing countries into a new form of dependency on the West” (Wade 2002: 443). In this respect, as postcolonial theorists have argued, the unequal terms on which global technological and economic integration are proposed in developmental models such as ICT4D come to ultimately reproduce patterns of uneven development and unequal exchange that were and are at the heart of colonial and neo-colonial power relations.

C ONCLUSION In this chapter, we have argued that while the first wave of modernization theories of the influence of mass media on society had largely exhausted itself by the 1970s, the 2000s has seen elements of the modernization paradigm return through the ICT4D agenda. We do, however, need to be careful about simply seeing this as the reassertion of Western political and economic power over postcolonial states and peoples. The ability of convergent media to be used in a more decentralized manner than traditional technologies of mass communication has an important fit with the turn towards participatory communication and the enabling of grass-roots, community-based initiatives. Whereas one of the limitations of the modernization paradigm was its dependence upon government-to-

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government actions, with associated risks of corruption and the waste of resources on a large scale, the ICT4D agenda is one that can be more readily taken up not only by NGOs, but also by ICT corporations themselves, who have significant commercial opportunities in building new markets in the developing world. At the same time, despite the optimism of ICT4D advocates about the capacity of convergent media to leapfrog existing institutional divides, the promotion of investment in ICTs runs the risk of reinforcing longstanding patterns of economic and technological dependency. Strategies to address global poverty and systemic inequalities need to be focused upon much more than the ‘digital divide’: by defining inequality in terms of unequal access to digital technologies, the danger is that policy solutions invariably appear as ones that require a technological fix.

R EFERENCES Anderson, Benedict (1991): Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Beltrán, Luis Ramiro (1976): “Alien Premises, Objects, and Methods in Latin American Communication Research”, in: Communication Research 3.2, 107134. Carey, James W. (1989): Communications as Culture: Essays in Media and Society, New York: Routledge. Civil Society World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) (2003): “Shaping Information Societies for Human Needs”: Civil Society Declaration to the World Summit on the Information Society, WSIS Civil Society Plenary, 1-23, accessed via ‹itu.int/net/wsis/docs/geneva/civil-society-declaration.pdf›, accessed on 1 October 2015. Digital Opportunities Taskforce (DOT) (2001): Digital Opportunities for All: Meeting the Challenge, Toronto: G8 Information Centre, 11 May, n.p., accessed via ‹g8.utoronto.ca/summit/2001genoa/dotforce1.html›, accessed on 13 September 2015. Dwyer, Tim (2010): Media Convergence, Maidenhead: Open University Press. Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. (1983): The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frank, Andre Gunder (1992): “The Development of Underdevelopment”, in: Charles K. Wilber/Kenneth P. Jameson (eds), The Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment, New York: McGraw-Hill, 107-118.

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Headrick, Daniel R. (1981): The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, New York: Oxford University Press. Hernández-Ramos, Pedro/Schramm, Wilbur (1989): “Development Communication: History and Theories”, in: Wolfgang Donsbach (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Communication: Bad News in Medicine, Communicating – Communication Networks, vol. 2, New York: Oxford University Press, 9-12. Huesca, Robert (2003): “From Modernization to Participation: The Past and Future of Development Communication in Media Studies”, in: Angharad N. Valdivia (ed.), A Companion to Media Studies, Malden: Blackwell, 50-71. Innis, Harold Adams (1951): The Bias of Communication, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Jenkins, Henry (2006): Convergence Culture: When New and Old Media Collide, New York: New York University Press. Jensen, Klaus Bruhn (2010): Media Convergence: The Three Degrees of Network, Mass, and Interpersonal Communication, London: Routledge. Lerner, Daniel (1958): The Passing of Traditional Society, Glencoe: Free Press. — (1963): “Towards a Communication Theory of Modernization”, in: Lucian W. Pye/Frey W. Frederick (eds), Communication and Political Development, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 327-350. — (1968): “Modernization: Social Aspects”, in: David. L. Sills (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 10, New York: Macmillan, 386-388. Leye, Veva (2007): “UNESCO, ICT Corporations and the Passion of ICT for Development: Modernization Resurrected”, in: Media, Culture and Society 29.6, 972-993. Mattelart, Armand (1994): Mapping World Communication: War, Progress, Culture, trans. Susan Emanuel, James A. Cohen, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. — (2003): The Information Society: An Introduction, trans. Susan Taponier, James A. Cohen, London: Sage. Meikle, Graham/Young, Sherman (2011): Media Convergence: Networked Digital Media in Everyday Life, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Melkote, Srinivas R. (2010): “Theories of Development Communication”, in: Daya Kishan Thussu (ed.), International Communication: A Reader, London: Routledge, 105-120. Ó Siochrú, Séan/Girard, Bruce/Maham, Amy (2003): Global Media Governance: A Beginner’s Guide, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Palma, Gabriel (1978): “Dependency: A Formal Theory of Underdevelopment or a Methodology for the Analysis of Concrete Situations of Underdevelopment?”, in: World Development 6.7-8, 881-924. Pasquali, Antonio (2005): “The South and the Imbalance in Communication”, in: Global Media and Communication 1.3, 289-300. Pool, Ithiel de Sola (1963): “The Mass Media and Politics in the Modernization Process”, in: Lucian W. Pye/Frey W. Frederick (eds), Communication and Political Development, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 234-253. Rice, Ronald E./Haythornthwaite, Caroline (2006): “Perspectives on Internet Use: Access, Involvement and Interaction”, in: Leah A. Lievrouw/Sonia M. Livingstone (eds), The Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs, Los Angeles: Sage, 92-113. Rogers, Everett Mitchell/Svenning, Lynne (1969): Modernization Among Peasants: The Impact of Communication, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Rogers, Everett Mitchell (1974): “Communication in Development”, in: The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 412.1, 4454. — (1976): “Communication and Development: The Passing of the Dominant Paradigm”, in: Communication Research 3.2, 213-240. Sachs, Jeffrey (2005): The End of Poverty: How We Can Make It Happen in our Lifetime, London: Penguin Books. Schiller, Herbert I. (1976): Communication and Cultural Domination, White Planes, NY: International Arts and Sciences Press. Schramm, Wilbur (1964): Mass Media and National Development: The Role of Information in the Developing Countries, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Servaes, Jan (1989): One World, Multiple Cultures: A New Paradigm on Communication for Development, Leuven: Acco. Shade, Leslie Regan (2003): “Here comes the DOT Force!: The New Cavalry for Equity?”, in: Gazette: The International Journal for Communication Studies 65.2, 107-120. Shah, Hemant (2011): The Production of Modernization: Daniel Lerner, Mass Media and the Passing of Traditional Society, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Siebert, Fred S./Peterson, Theodore/Schramm, Wilbur (1956): Four Theories of the Press: the Authoritarian, Libertarian, Social Responsibility and Soviet Communist Concepts of What the Press Should Be, Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

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Sparks, Colin (2007): Globalization, Development and the Mass Media, Los Angeles: Sage. Sundaram, Ravi (2005): “Developmentalism Redux?”, in: Geert Lovink/Soenke Zehle (eds), Incommunicado Reader: Information Technology for Everyone Else, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 115-121. The MacBride Commission (1980): Many Voices, One World. Paris: UNESCO, accessed via ‹unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0004/000400/040066eb.pdf›, accessed on 30 September 2015. Thomas, Pradip N. (2009): “Digital Divide”, in: Stephen W. Littlejohn/Karen A. Foss (eds), Encyclopedia of Communication Theory, vol. 1, Los Angeles: Sage, 310-312. Thussu, Daya Kishan (2006): International Communication: Continuity and Change, London: Hodder Education. United Nations (UN) (2012): Realizing the Future We All Want: Report to the Secretary-General, New York: UN System Task Team on the Post-2015 UN Development Agenda, ‹un.org/millenniumgoals/pdf/Post_2015_UNTT report.pdf›, accessed on 1 October 2015. — (2013): We Can End Poverty: Millennium Development Goals and Beyond 2015, ‹un.org/millenniumgoals/2015_MDG_Report/pdf/MDG%202015%20rev%2 0(July%201).pdf›, accessed on 1 October 2015. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (2001): Human Development Report 2001: Making New Technologies Work for Human Development, New York: Oxford University Press. Unwin, Tim (2009): “ICT4D Implementation: Policies and Partnerships”, in: Tim Unwin (ed.), ICT4D: Information and Communication Technology for Development, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 125-175. Wade, Robert Hunter (2002): “Bridging the Digital Divide: New Route to Development or New Form of Dependency?”, in: Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations 8.4, 443-466. Waisbord, Silvio (2001): “Family Tree of Theories, Methodologies and Strategies in Development Communication”. Unpublished Paper Prepared for the Rockefeller Foundation, Washington D.C.. World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) (2003): Declaration of Principles: Building the Information Society: A Global Challenge in the New Millennium, United Nations and International Telecommunications Union, ‹itu.int/dms_pub/itu-s/md/03/wsis/doc/S03-WSIS-DOC-0004!!PDF-E.pdf›, accessed on 1 October 2015.

Media Globalization The ‘Global Public Sphere’ – A Critical Reappraisal1 K AI H AFEZ

A clear theoretical model is vital if we are to take stock of the international and intercultural effect of media and forms of reporting of such different types as television, radio, print media, Internet, direct broadcasting by satellite, international broadcasting and international reporting. In the literature on globalization dealing with international communication, models of any kind are thin on the ground. Manuel Castells’s famous three-volume work The Information Age does without almost any schematic models (Castells 1996/97). The same goes for multi-authored volumes in this field (Sreberny-Mohammadi et al. 1997; Held/ McGrew 2003; Hepp/Löffelholz 2002). The present work draws on systems theory to describe the globalization of mass communication. We may divide the key characteristics and conceptual tools deployed here into three fields: system connectivity, system change and system interdependence. Before discussing more closely the core concepts of ‘connectivity’, ‘change’ and ‘interdependence’ linked with the concept of system, it is vital to shed light on the frequently ambiguous concept of system itself. Cross-border communication is defined very unsystematically in the globalization literature, sometimes as inter- and transnational and sometimes as inter- and transcultural communication. ‘Cross-border’ thus describes those processes of information exchange in

1

This text was first published as “The ‘Global Public Sphere’ – A Critical Reappraisal” in The Handbook of Global Media Research, ed. Ingrid Volkmer, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012 (translated for the author by Alex Skinner).

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the course of which system borders, of the nation-state or culture, are transversed. Almost all contemporary attempts to grapple with globalization theoretically that tackle issues of communication emphasize the nation-state or culture. The focus tends to be on the state, but sometimes it is on cultural areas, at times also labeled ‘civilizations’. The idea of ‘networking’ is anchored in the assumption that the world features a number of poles which can be networked; a web is ultimately nothing without its nodal points. The notion of network-like communication between actors who can be ascribed to states or cultures is problematic. This is apparent when one considers that these poles of the system are in principle equal. They can be regarded as subsets of one another depending on the situation. States may be parts of cultures – and vice versa. The resulting web of communication appears to resemble the kind of optical illusion whose content changes as one changes one’s perspective. When the Uighurs, a Muslim minority in western China of Turkmen origin and thus related to the peoples of Central Asia, use media from beyond the national borders, should we regard them as actors practicing international or intercultural communication? Quite obviously, it depends on which aspect of the analysis we wish to focus. A web emerges consisting of several dimensions. These complications are rooted in the fact that ‘state’ and ‘culture’ involve differing implications for communication, each of which has its own justification. In one case, communication between actors describable in terms of constitutional law or sociology (governments, NGOs, etc.) takes center stage. In the other, the focus is on exchanges between subjects and groups in their capacity as bearers of linguistically and historically imbued norms, ways of life and traditions. Both perspectives may be important, as is apparent wherever state and cultural borders are not identical and cultural identity rivals the power of the state. Tribal cultures in Africa, for example, often extend across state borders, which highlights the advantages of scrutinizing both the international and intercultural dimensions of cross-border communication processes. The existence of cultural areas such as the ‘West’, the ‘Islamic world’, the Indian subcontinent, and Latin or German-speaking Europe is an additional factor making analysis more difficult. Such areas gain cohesion across state borders only with the help of mass media, adding a third dimension of regionality to the theoretical model. A debate on globalization restricted to the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ while neglecting the ‘regional’ would lack complexity. The immigrant cultures that we hear so much about, which communicate across borders and form ‘virtual communities’, provide further evidence of the value of examining international and intercultural communication as a unity. The division into the

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spatial levels ‘global’, ‘regional’ and ‘local’, intended as a heuristic and relevant to both dimensions of state and culture, is not contradicted by migration. Immigrants also communicate either locally, regionally or globally, even if the spatial parameters are the reverse of those of settled populations, as their local culture (their home country) is, so to speak, located in global space and they can develop a second locality only slowly.

S YSTEM C ONNECTIVITY Phenomena of system connectivity, sometimes called interconnectedness in the literature, describe the extent, speed and intensity of the international or intercultural exchange of information. Connectivity may be generated between entities, however defined, through various means of communication. Alongside mediated interpersonal communication (telephone, email, letter, fax, etc.) we can distinguish the following fields of communication that depend on mass media: •

•

direct access to the range of communicative services produced by another country/culture (Internet; direct broadcasts by satellite; international broadcasting including special TV and radio services in foreign languages broadcast to other countries; imports/export of media); access to information and contexts in another country/cultural area conveyed by journalism (international reporting on television, radio, the press; corresponding media services on the Internet).

While this list makes no claim to completeness, it is clear that direct routes of access to cross-border communication are in the majority. One of the key factors shaping the globalization debate over the last decade was thus the fact that the number of means of transmission and the exchange of information beyond borders has increased dramatically. The ‘new media’ have set the overall tone of the debate since the 1990s, effectively distorting it, as the ‘old media’ have largely been ignored. In particular, the role of international reporting in the process of globalization has suffered a complete lack of systematic treatment. The technologically possible direct interleaving of national media areas, which people could previously experience only through the information conveyed by international journalism, has proven a fascinating and bothersome phenomenon for researchers. However, it is far from certain that the new media, regardless of their many new forms, characterize the processes of globalization more than national

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journalism and international reporting. We therefore have to take both fields into account when designing our theories. Despite the rise of the new media and the mounting flood of information available on the Internet, the significance of journalism as intermediary has by no means diminished. Foreign media accessible via satellites and cables also represent a form of journalism, though one that arises outside one’s own media system. This means that the media user receives direct access to foreign journalistic cultures. Not only this, but the Internet has failed to oust even domestic journalism: journalistic mediation is in fact ever more significant to how people organize their lives at a time when the quantity of information is growing. If at all, online information services can replace the international reporting provided by national media only among small informational elites. The concrete form of connectivity via the new media depends on a range of technological, socio-economic and cultural parameters: •

•

•

Technological reach and socio-economic implications of media technology. The nation-states and cultural areas of this planet are characterized by very different technological capacities for transmission and reception in the field of satellite broadcasting, depending on the prevailing political and financial parameters. The same goes for the Internet. Regardless of the strong increase in the number of connections, a ‘digital divide’ exists, above all between industrialized and developing countries, which restricts connectivity substantially. User reach. The debate on the globalization of the media all too often fails to distinguish between technological reach and user reach. The number of those who use a technology per se lies below the technologically possible use – and cross-border use is of course only one variant of the use to which the new media may be put. We cannot simply assume that it is the primary form. Our eagerness to wed globalization to a normative agenda should not blind us to the fact that the Internet may be a misjudged medium that is contributing far more to intensifying local connections (e-commerce, etc.) than to creating cross-border networks. Linguistic and cultural competence. To communicate with people in other states and cultural areas or to use their media generally requires linguistic competence, which only minorities in any population enjoy. To avoid dismissing cross-border connectivity as marginal from the outset, it is vital to distinguish between various user groups – globalization elites and peripheries. Connectivity is without doubt partly dependent on the nature of the message communicated. Music, image, text – behind this sequence hides a kind of magic formula of globalization. Music surely enjoys the largest global

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spread, and images surely occupy a middle position (for example, press photographs or the images of CNN, also accessible to users who understand no English), while most texts create only meager international resonance because of language barriers. This issue is central to the evaluation of global connectivity as a more or less ‘contextualized’ globalization. Images in themselves do not speak. They require explanatory text to transport authentic messages – and it is questionable to what extent such messages can overcome borders. Connectivity in the field of international reporting also depends on the international department’s printing or broadcasting capacities, the quality and quantity of technical equipment and correspondent networks. All these resources have an influence on the presence of other countries and cultures in the media of one’s own country. Foreign reporting has always been a struggle because of lack of resources, particularly in terms of staff and funding. Even the largest Western media have, for example, no more than one or two permanent correspondents in Africa, a continent with more than 50 states. CNN, seemingly the exemplary global broadcaster, has no more than a few dozen permanent correspondents. International journalism should be seen as a virtual odyssey. More than domestic journalism, it struggles daily to reduce the mass of newsworthy stories from the two hundred or so states of the world to a manageable form. In principle, the notion of a world linked globally through the media assumes that different media systems increasingly deal with the same topics. Moreover, the lines of reasoning deployed in this process would also have to ‘cross borders’. Homogenous national discourses, with their quite unique ways of looking at international issues, would increasingly have to open up to the topics and frames of other national discourses (which does not mean standardization of opinion, as this would involve a more advanced form of cultural change and the development of a global ‘superculture’, which is another issue) (Hafez 2002: 35-44). To increase the connectivity of the journalistic systems of this world, the resources available to the media are just as important as the linguistic and cultural competence of the journalists (Hafez 2002: 72-73, 88-91). In some ways, the issue of the connectivity of journalism appears in a new light under conditions of globalization. While media may compete in a destructive fashion, as described above, multimedia collaboration may help improve the quality of each individual medium. The Internet as a source for journalism is surely the perfect example. Yet here too it is crucial to distinguish theoretically between technologically possible and actually practiced use.

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Connectivity may ultimately occur within global communication not only between producers and consumers in various nation-states and cultural areas – that is, internationally and interculturally – but also via a transnational (or cultural) media system. Here, media and media businesses would no longer have a clearcut national base, but would emerge as ‘global players’. The idea of a world linked through communication is anchored in the assumption that globalization is more than the sum of the links between its components. The structure of the system underlying the global media landscape would change if new supersystems similar to the United Nations or large NGOs such as Greenpeace developed in the media field. The media are in principle also capable of transnationalization, so that, alongside national systems networked with one another, a second global system might also arise. Contemporary notions of what such a transnational media system consists of are, however, still very nebulous. Apart from a few global agreements brought into being by the major transnational trade organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) (in the copyright protection field for instance), there are only a few transnationally active corporations that can be called ‘global players’. Regardless of the existence of such businesses, transnational media, that is, programs and formats, are extremely rare. CNN, frequently mentioned as the perfect example of a leading global medium that encourages exchange of political opinion worldwide, by concentrating on transnational programs, seems to come closest to fitting this vision. Yet even this case is problematic, for CNN is no uniform program, but consists of numerous continental ‘windows’. There are many ‘CNNs’, but no complete global program. Through the proliferation of satellite programs in the last decade, CNN has lost its elevated position and is now merely a decentralized variant of an American TV program, whose country of origin remains easily recognizable in its agenda and framing. CNN tends to be a mixture of characteristics of the American system and the target system of the specific window; it is thus at best a multinational but not a global program. For want of concrete role models, a transnational media system remains largely a utopia. Individual large national media systems such as the American or binational services such as the Franco-German broadcaster Arte can supplement but by no means replace their national counterparts. The transnational media field is still largely devoid of formal diversity. In the first theoretical field, that of international and transnational connectivity, a number of counter-tendencies characteristic of global communication are having such disastrous effects that the necessity for cross-border communication is more apparent than ever, particularly after the events of September 11, 2001. When all

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is said and done, transnational media, which might in theory constitute supranational global institutions and the key media within a ‘global public sphere’ liberated from specific national and cultural influences, are as yet non-existent. This applies even to the American TV network which claims to be the global opinion leader, CNN. Even today, national media agendas are in synch with the world only in a very superficial way. A small number of major international events are reported all over the world. Such reports should not, however, be mistaken for a profound knowledge of developments across the world. Moreover, even in the modern ‘media age’, such events can be ‘domesticated’ by national interest groups almost at will. The worldwide coverage of the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the Iraq War of 2003 have revealed the paucity of evidence of a communicative integration that supposedly helps alleviate conflicts and liberates the media from the traditionally strong influence of belligerent governments and patriotic cultural influences. Through one-sided coverage in wartime and highly fragmentary discourses, it is still possible to literally seal peoples and entire world regions off from one another and mobilize them for war. We have little reason to assume that a global media network has significantly reduced the susceptibility of societies, even democratic ones, to war propaganda. Quite the opposite happens. The technology of direct broadcasting by satellite became widely established at around the same time as the techniques of war propaganda reached the peak of perfection – during the Second Gulf War of 1991. Since then, as the unremittingly critical literature produced by the time of the Third Gulf War of 2003 lays bare, while changes have taken place, there has been only minor progress in making war-time communication truly global. Despite increasing the global exchange of images, even the televisual revolutions in the ‘South’ – in the Arab world for example – were unable to prevent September 11 from becoming the defining event for highly insulated and conflictual media discourses on Middle Eastern and world politics. Only in cases where, as in the case of British war coverage in 2003, the state is already in retreat as a result of multinational integration (the European Union in this case), is there any sign of a slow turning away from particularistic national war coverage (Hafez 2004). In general, however, at a time when the nation-state is poised to set the tone for generations to come, the notion that the wholesome influence of the media is ridding us of wartime deception as it opens up to the world is a truly out-oftouch aspect of the myth of globalization. We should have nothing more to do with it. Cross-border media use by large numbers of people is largely limited to specific linguistic regions. Foreign language media use, meanwhile, remains the

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privilege of small knowledge elites or special groups such as immigrants. Alongside the still dominant production and use of media within national media areas, contemporary developments in the media are marked by a regionalism of a geolinguistic hue. At present, it is impossible to state with confidence whether this is open to globalization or not. Major language areas such as those of the Spanish, Chinese, Indian and Arab are currently experiencing a boom in native-language media. When national borders get in the way, satellites and other types of smallscale border traffic ensure that there is no escape. Under such circumstances, there is a danger that major cultural regions may act as a kind of ‘insulation’ against global influences. This is the media policy substance of the ‘Clash of Civilizations’. Samuel Huntington, who came up with the slogan, failed to ponder this issue, although it is at least as significant as the essentialist differences that he claims typify the major cultures and religions of the world (Huntington 1993; 1996). The Internet has introduced a new subtlety to the global array of information, but cross-border linkage is obviously growing more slowly than local and national interactions in many areas. The new uncertainties of the information flow are generating an often ‘virtual’ knowledge of the world, which is almost impossible to harmonize with verifiable reality. This is ‘virtual cosmopolitanism’, which has little in common with the attitude of the ‘true’ cosmopolitan, who has got to know the world and knows the global ropes. The increasing linguistic diversity of the Internet is creating new Babelesque dividing lines. The potential of some political campaigns to mobilize people on a global scale may be impressive, but this occurs only when very specific conditions and alliances are in place. The ‘digital divide’ between industrialized and developing countries raises doubts about whether the comparative political advantages of a global civil society are making themselves felt to any real extent and are managing to change policies when faced with the power of governments.

S YSTEM C HANGE In the second theoretical field, the focus is no longer on grasping the extent and type of cross-border communication through mass media. The point here is to ascertain whether these processes of border crossing are significant enough to bring about changes in the political, social and cultural systems of the countries involved. Is the nature of these interactions such that they are not simply ‘domesticated’ by the receiving systems but influence and change them substantially?

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For both the major realms of connectivity – direct communication through new media and mediated communication by means of journalism – we need to clarify •

•

whether receiving cultures are changed by transmitting cultures in the process of cross-border communication through the Internet, satellite broadcasting, international broadcasting or through media imports and exports; whether the media content of foreign coverage passed on by national journalism systems to their domestic populations is up to the task of changing the world-views and attitudes of the receiving cultures.

From whatever theoretical angle we look at changes that are the results of global communication – the Global Knowledge Society, Global Governance, or Cosmopolitanism – all these effect theories are based on the assumption of internal cultural changes through external influences (and vice versa) (Hafez 2011). Three forms of cultural change are mentioned again and again in the globalization debate: • • •

the adoption of the ‘other’ culture (above all in the form of ‘Westernized’ globalization); the emergence of ‘glocalized’ hybrid cultures (Robertson 1994a; 1994b; Kraidy 2003), which are influenced both by global and local elements; the revitalization of traditional and other local cultures as a reaction to globalization.

Theoretical concepts that lack a functional explanatory system and thus fail utterly to explain their own core concepts of ‘global’, ‘glocal’ and ‘local’ inevitably hinder rather than advance theoretical progress. Yet the tripartite division has taken hold as a kind of minimal consensus in the globalization debate, because it attempts to grasp the role played by external influences in internal change. The biggest problem consists not in determining (a) external global or (c) internal traditional character, but in determining the content and dynamics of the hybrid category (b) ‘glocalization’. How are hybrid cultures ‘measured’? How do we determine the significance of internal and external influences? Is Far Eastern pop music really evidence of a national or regional culture increasingly able to connect to the wider world? Or is it an example of local modernization, certainly with recognizable global influences, but nonetheless primarily deployable at the local level and hardly ‘re-exportable’?

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It is crucial at this point to take temporal dynamics into account. We must bear in mind that all societies and cultures pass through different epochs, characterized either by willingness to accept external influences or a tendency to seal oneself off from them. David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt and Jonathan Perraton have, for example, quite rightly distinguished between forms of transparent and hermetic regionalization (Held et al. 2000: 68). Global influences may be adopted by nation-states or regional cultures and then develop new forms of locality in processes of largely self-steered modernization. The resulting cultural forms often resemble global models to a certain extent, but in reality follow a logic of modernization present in all cultures, which is by no means inevitably compatible with globalization (Asian pop music, for example, may be the product of ‘glocalization’, but its acceptance levels are definitely higher in Asia than the United States or Europe). In other words, glocalization may promote the local culture in the long term and is not necessarily a step on the path towards a global ‘superculture’ (Lull 2002). It thus makes little sense to subscribe to concentric notions according to which the national and the regional are merely constitutive subsets of the global. Popular political slogans such as “Think global, act local” or “Europe of the regions” are an expression of a myth of globalization that imposes a downright artificial order upon the processes of change worldwide. This ignores the fact that the local systems of this planet are engaged in competitive modernization, which may be a long-term phenomenon. It also fails to notice the conflicts between these systems. Yet these factors are as important if not more important than alleged globalization. From a theoretical point of view, we must remember that it is as yet totally unclear to what extent cross-border mass communication is capable of representing societies and systems comprehensively in the first place. We can work from the assumption that each form of media communication represents only a limited slice of social developments and that special ‘virtual’ cultures are being created that may not be significant outside the media. Other subsystems such as science, art, literature and ‘everyday culture’ as a whole, meanwhile, appear in the media to a much lesser degree. It is thus clear that change is occurring beyond the world of the media and, potentially, with quite different global or local implications. The cultural contact facilitated by mass media is based on a desideratum filtered and imagined through the media, whose significance can be elucidated only through a large-scale contextual analysis of globalization. Yet media do have the potential to change systems, and here the individual media differ, sometimes significantly. The areas in which the Internet can work to change systems are diverse, because its form is untypical of the mass media. It

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represents individual and mass culture, science, art, business, entertainment and political information. The Internet features a high degree of cultural storage capacity and flexibility. It is fast, yet stores cultural knowledge long term, unlike the fleeting medium of television. Highly complex knowledge cultures can cross borders in this way. The Internet can generate alternative publics. It can unite political actors and oppositional landscapes worldwide to form a ‘global civil society’. The CIA report Global Trends 2015 (NIC 2000) predicted new challenges for national and international politics. The report assumes that while the nation-state will remain the most important political actor, its efficiency will be measured on the basis of how it masters globalization and how it comes to terms with an increasingly articulate and well-organized civil society worldwide. On this view, civil societies are often better able to solve problems than are governments and they will therefore take on more and more societal tasks. The report predicts that a growing number of international and national non-profit organizations in the educational, health and social sectors will increasingly break down the classical division of labor between the state, which sets the parameters of policy making and represents the citizens, and society, which is restricted to a process of shaping public opinion without direct impact on political decision making and to constituent elections (NIC 2000). This prognosis by the American secret service, with its downright communitarian tone, experienced a setback as a result of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Not least because of the failures of the secret services themselves, which failed to notice that the attacks were being planned despite available information, across the world the state again interfered more vigorously in citizens’ private lives (Patriot Act in the United States, etc.). The Internet, it could be argued, is becoming all the more significant as a platform capable of articulating and shaping the will of the citizenry, creating civil networks and even mobilizing people politically (Keck/Sikkink 1998). There is a certain absurdity in the fact that perhaps the most significant transnational movement identified with the Internet is none other than the so-called ‘antiglobalization movement’ (such as Attac). In view of the structures underlying television and radio worldwide, which tend to be commercial, government run or public, direct broadcasting by satellite is a downright elite medium in comparison to the Internet. It features formidable barriers to access, making it difficult to use it to articulate one’s views, and highly developed journalistic selection mechanisms. Nonetheless, the comparative advantage of satellite broadcasting is that large publics can form rapidly, including cross-border ones. The Internet is fragmenting into countless sub-publics; in

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everyday life, these can be fused only by political organizations and networks. The international and intercultural use of television programs, meanwhile, represents a genuine challenge to national publics. The structural transformation of the public sphere in the nineteenth century has been outlined by Jürgen Habermas (1990). He describes this as the formation of the bourgeois reasoning of developing democracies. It contains further – multinational, transnational, global – levels and may be growing beyond the narrow boundaries of the nation-state. Is the media forming a ‘global public sphere’, as this popular and central concept in the globalization debate suggests (Volkmer 1999)? The classic medium to which commentators so often refer to back up this thesis is CNN. As we have seen, however, with its strong links to the American system and to the target system of the regional window, CNN resembles a bi- or multilateral rather than a truly global discursive platform. How do things stand with the thousands of other programs now receivable via satellite? Are they capable of functioning globally? What kind of user behavior is associated with such services? US scholars in particular have claimed that we are dealing here not just with a philanthropic utopia but with a development anchored in real-world politics. The catch phrase ‘media diplomacy’ captures the capacity of media to act almost as representatives of the public and the peoples of the Earth, and to intervene in the traditional diplomacy between states, which is often stuck in a rut and conflictual in nature. Broadcasters that are clearly nationally based may perform such a function. Ideally, however, it should be taken over by formats of a transnational character. Media diplomacy has thus often been referred to as the ‘CNN effect’, joined in recent years by other models such as the ‘Al-Jazeera effect’. In all cases, the suggestion is that the media have global resonance and centrality; that is, within their specific spheres – Western or Arab – they enjoy a privileged position and thus have excellent prospects of changing the politics of international conflicts. A concept of truly visionary force, the CNN effect suggests that there may at last be a way to respond to the old cliché that it is politicians rather than peoples that make war, by promoting the politics of peace through the media. An increasing number of NGOs, which engage in parallel diplomacy involving the organized public and lobbyists, are supplementing classic state diplomacy. What is more, the silent majority, represented by a journalism oriented towards public opinion and with a democratic conscience, could even intervene directly in conflicts. Yet the fact that the number of violent conflicts worldwide shows no sustained decrease casts doubt on the reality of this notion. The entire academic world, more or less, has raved about this phenomenon for more than a decade. Where has it become a reality? The methodological

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problems involved in measuring media effects throw up numerous questions. The parallel and increasing tendency for the state to engage in public diplomacy does so as well. This has taken new forms since the Second Gulf War of 1991 and the establishment of American and British information pools, up to and including the ‘embedded journalism’ seen during the Third Gulf War of 2003. One wonders who will come out on top: television striving for independence and political influence or the state asserting itself through the media, and integrating every medium – the Internet as well as satellite television – into its propagandistic concepts. Will the media succeed in ending the era of reporting that separates political systems, in which every opponent is imbued with hostile imagery, which has accompanied every war, especially the world wars of the last century? International broadcasting appears, at first sight, a typical vestige of preglobal mass communication centered on nation-states. Regardless of their often propagandistic character, radio and television messages intended for foreign countries, composed by many states in numerous languages, nonetheless have an undeniable charm. This makes them attractive even to a normatively laden globalization debate. They overcome the linguistic and cultural chasm that still marks direct satellite broadcasting. Classics of the Second World War and the Cold War such as Radio Free Europe were predicted to die away rapidly after the end of the East-West conflict. Reports of its death were exaggerated. International broadcasting is currently more vital than ever, though how it will develop in future is far from clear. In most countries, state support structures are still highly developed, so that international broadcasting is generally becoming a medium transferring public diplomacy to crisis regions. Theoretically, however, the medium also lends itself to “feedback loops” and dialogic forms of journalism (Groebel 2000). Information on political developments in authoritarian states can, for example, be conveyed back to a particular public via the indirect route of international broadcasting produced by another state. International broadcasting may thus make up, to some extent, for the shortcomings of other media systems. Because it has strong linguistic capacities and is tailored to foreign broadcasting areas, it is in fact far better at reaching a mass audience than many new media. Dialogues may be established between the source and receiving country, though this requires some form of public broadcasting and a transformation of the model of state ownership. Whether the international coverage of nationally based media can be part of a global public sphere is subject to dispute. Existing interpretations can be grouped very roughly under ‘conversion theory’ and ‘domestication theory’. The locus classicus of conversion theory is Marshall McLuhan’s “global village”

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approach, according to which the mass media in particular are such a perfected form of the technological extension of the human sensory apparatus that a collective global consciousness is predicted to emerge in the twenty-first century (McLuhan 1967). McLuhan’s work has left traces of Conversion Theory in late Modernization Theory. This assumes, for example, that as global communicative relations develop quantitatively, the level of information in the media increases, particularistic conceptions of foreign countries and the world as a whole are dismantled and international conflicts minimized (Pool 1990). Critics of conversion theory have assailed it for overstating the globalizing tendencies of mass communication, by equating increasing technological networking and economic transnationalization with the universalization of media content. It also underestimates, critics suggest, the particularistic political, ideological and cultural influences affecting the international coverage produced by local, national and international media.2 The assumption that international reporting undergoes ‘domestication’ has crystallized as the ideal typical alternative to globalization. There is plenty of empirical evidence that the same event, reconstructed on the basis of the same information sources, can end up being presented in highly divergent and sometimes even contradictory ways in different national media systems. This indicates that parochial political, social, organizational and religious-cultural influences on international reporting may be a profound stumbling block to the kind of homogenization of worldviews that conversion theory has in mind (Gurevitch/Levy/Roeh 1993). From the perspective of conversion theory, the mediating role played by international reporting leads to conceptions of foreign lands that merge aspects of the country of origin and target country. From the perspective of Domestication Theory, meanwhile, international reporting reflects the influence of the journalists, media system and social system for which it is produced. A global public sphere worthy of the name, which involved more than simply ‘peering through the keyhole’ at foreign programs via satellite and included the domestic media of specific countries and their worldviews, would have to unite a diverse range of national discourses. The technological prerequisites for bringing national discourses together in international coverage certainly exist. Media across the world are generally present on the Internet and it would thus be feasible for both media and perspectives to converge. Such projects, however, can easily come to grief as a result of linguistic barriers and lack of awareness and for want of the key resources of ‘money’ and ‘time’.

2

On the link between international reporting and globalization, see also Hafez 1999.

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It is crucial to take the resource base of mass communication into account as the third factor influencing system change. Here, the theoretical foundations include not only the actors of ‘global civil society’ and the nature of their discourse (‘global public sphere’), but also the structural basis on which discourses can develop. Mass communication does not occur in a vacuum, but is anchored in the realities of market and political integration. For want of a more appropriate term and because the global media economy approach is overly economistic and thus best avoided, we may refer to the third dimension simply as the ‘global media system’. Film imports and exports, that is, trading links between national media systems, are the object of a global media system and form part of this system, which also applies to the activities of transnationally investing media companies such as Time Warner or News Corporation (Rupert Murdoch). The ‘global players’ of the media industry, rather like the creators of the Internet or the multiple, often national owners of satellite TV, are at the center of the globalization debate, in sharp contrast to another category of actors, which appears only on the margins: media policy makers. This imbalance, which crops up again and again, is underpinned by an implicit assumption that while the state is the main pillar of the old media, the transnational economy and the ‘market’ form the foundation of the new media. There is no theoretical justification whatsoever for refocusing the energies of media system research in this way. Alongside the media, such research has always taken the state into account and conceived the economy and society/public as influential factors (Hafez 2002: 123-37). Why should the economy alone emit cross-border impulses for system or cultural change rather than the state and its media policies? It is quite true that global regulatory policies created by nation-states have so far been rudimentary in the field of the media, while transnational firms undoubtedly have a major impact. Yet such arguments are skewed. Are transnational business cultures really having an impact and changing culture equally in all fields of connectivity? Are there in fact any major, irreversible interdependencies between media markets? If so, are they equally strong in all areas of content – in political news, entertainment products, cinema and radio? In light of the above sobering appraisal of connectivity, we clearly have to assess the influence of cross-border mass communication on system change with much care. Today, every political and social change, from the fall of the Berlin Wall through the political upheavals in Ukraine, Lebanon and Kyrgyzstan to the Pope’s funeral is thought to be molded by the global media. Yet we are clearly getting ahead of ourselves. Mass gatherings following the death of a Pope have

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been common throughout history, long before the modern mass media, and political revolutions and uprisings are nothing new either. Quite the opposite. During the era of the information revolution, with all appearances to the contrary, the number of free social and media systems has by no means increased. It has in fact decreased or at least stagnated. The information revolution has been left untouched by the ‘Third Wave of Democratization’, which basically finished with the upheavals in Eastern Europe before the New Media of the Internet and direct broadcasting by satellite had become established. So-called ‘demonstration effects’ are claimed to promote social change, cross borders by means of the mass media, serve as models of political action for people in other countries and help democracy, supposedly the best political order, to break through across the globe. Yet they have a latent influence and are in any case difficult to measure. The political impact of the media can be proven to exist, if at all, only during phases of political transition, that is, when long-term processes of transformation enter brief periods of radical change. Ultimately, as far as cultural change is concerned, the globalization debate has produced an internally inconsistent dual myth. This is the notion that culturally imperialist ‘Americanization’ or ‘Westernization’ may be accompanied by the ‘glocalization’ or ‘hybridization’ of cultures. The European film market as well as much of the pop music listened to worldwide are surely examples of Americanization. These individual pieces of evidence, alluded to again and again, do not, however, allow us to generalize. They permit no overall conclusions about cultural globalization. In many countries and in most world regions, American film imports are in the minority, not to mention TV films, produced in the vast majority of countries by national or regional industries. Even in Europe, a cultural stock-taking of film, music, the arts and science would by no means necessarily endorse the thesis of Americanization, which retains coherence only against the background of an inadmissibly narrow analytical focus on popular culture. The second variant of the myth of globalization asserts not only that American and Western cultural hegemony is expanding, but takes possible counterarguments into account by conceding that non-European cultures are capable of making local adaptations in response to globalization. Indian rap, for example, is claimed to be a typical hybrid culture. How very true. Many of these cultural fusions could not, however, be re-exported to Western markets. This points to the way the globalization debate confuses globalization and modernization. External stimuli may serve to spark off cultural change. What follows, however, is autonomous development on the basis of a universal logic of rationalization and renovation characteristic of all great literate cultures. Even today, without

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borrowing constantly from other countries, the most modern cultural productions in the non-Western world may trigger a sense of ‘strangeness’. The world evolves – as it always has done – through cultural developments, with a momentum of their own within language areas and nation-states. Neither ‘Westernization’ nor the simple notion of an all-embracing process of fusion can do anything to change this. In light of globalization, the challenge for scholars is to describe the cultural fusions that are in fact its main sphere of action, to analyze their extent and growth and to adequately grasp their role in a superculture taking in all of humanity. They ought, however, to refrain from exaggerating the nature of the alleged ‘transculture’. In this regard, it would be highly valuable to work out the very different global logics and rates of linkage typical of music, images and text. It is music and images that characterize entertainment culture as the core area of globalization – and it is text, news and interpretations of the world that are proving to be the basis of local resistance and independence. Are we seeing resistance ‘in our midst’ as well? In the 1990s, for a brief period, the notion of ‘virtual communities’ of immigrants, linking up with each other and with their country of origin across the world on the basis of a common language, was identified as a characteristic feature of communicative globalization. This interpretative trend then quickly abated. It was recognized that while they are indeed equipped with the instruments of technological globalization, such communities may ultimately encourage conservative, nation-based, even chauvinistic cultures. The Islamic fundamentalist Net-based International is but the tip of the iceberg. Yet the debate’s rapid change of direction, away from multiculturalism to the negative features of a parallel society, is also rash and poorly thought out. There is no causal relationship between integration and media use. The recent assumption that the local is simply relocated through migration and globalization is just as misleading as the old one that crossing borders works to open up cultures. A refined typology and enhanced theoretical work are urgent necessities.

S YSTEM I NTERDEPENDENCE The ability of mass media to change societies across state and cultural borders depends on a range of influencing factors that both affect the media and interact with them. A systems theory notion of international and intercultural communication would have to include the nation-state and its media system as a basic unit. Depending on the nature of the political system, there are differing relations

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of dependency with other societal subsystems such as politics, economy and society. In liberal democratic media systems the mass media enjoy a high degree of autonomy as long as they continue to play their essential role within society, that is, identifying and debating issues and refusing to be dictated to by other subsystems in this regard. The other systems, however, form part of system environments. These do not exist separately from media systems and force them to adapt to some extent. Media and other social subsystems oscillate between autonomy and system survival, sometimes leaning towards internal system complexity, at others adapting to the external environment. The notion of a world linked by communication extends and changes this model. It becomes increasingly difficult to demarcate the societal system within which the media operate. Publics can act transnationally, as can politics and the media itself. Alongside each national media system, there thus arises a second global system. To the extent that it becomes a component of the flow of information, it has great and growing influence. Interestingly, the emergence of this second global system not only has the potential to change the content of national media landscapes but transnational developments may also occur, and, indeed, on all levels: transnational political systems (EU, UN) may come into being as well as transnational media (Arte, CNN, etc.). Do these changes, however, allow us to speak of a communicative world system, as Emanuel Richter for instance has done (Richter 1992)? More important than the mere existence of other entities beyond national media systems is a deeper understanding of their fundamental relations. Are foreign political systems really as influential as domestic ones? Do journalists feel as keen a sense of duty towards their foreign public as they do to their domestic one and does this lead to changes in the journalistic product? Are global, market and capital interconnections as strong as national and regional ones? Cultural and societal change in a global system is not produced by connectivity alone, but is based on interdependence (Keohane/Nye 1977). In an interdependent global system, autonomous national systems change into partly autonomous subsystems of a global macrosystem. One system can no longer exist without the other. The question is whether the global media and communication system has already become interdependent and whether international and intercultural communication processes have become so extensive and important that the individual (generally national) subsystems change each other and – this would be a further step – a new transnational media system is taking shape. •

How important are foreign markets to national TV broadcasters whose reach extends to other countries via satellite? Who is winning the media policy

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battle over the opening or protection of markets – global capital or national media policy? The thesis that the state’s regulatory powers are waning in the age of globalization must be proven before it can be deployed as the basis for theory building. Which political restrictions does the nation-state impose on new media such as the Internet or satellite television and how successful is it in this? Is civil society really succeeding, by means of international linkages, in enhancing the status of society-society relations, making them a component of international relations? Which policy approaches are concealed behind international broadcasting? Which interactions, mutual dynamics and feedback exist between national foreign policy, public diplomacy and international broadcasting, on the one hand, and the political and cultural target system of international broadcasting, on the other? Are trust in and acceptance of the system becoming factors that change formats dialogically and that can thus influence both the system of origin and target system through new information policies? How can international reporting globalize as long as it is solely dependent on the home market and entirely detached from international markets, which represent the reporting countries without targeting them? What is the future of emerging transnational media use of the kind apparent in the Iraq War of 2003, when cross-border media use increased (Americans reading British newspapers on the Internet for example)? Are new forms of interdependence of global or at least regional scope developing here?

To explain the system- and culture-changing effect of the media, or their respective deficits, the key step is to analyze the political and economic interdependence of media at national, regional and global level and thus shed light on the true strength of global media policy and media economy vis-à-vis their local counterparts. The weakness of the interdependence approach, however, is that it is too focused on dependencies and fails to take into account accidental developments. System change, on the basis of cross-border mass communication, may also occur where interdependence does not yet run very deep. Here, the world functions as one big ‘demonstration effect’, a gigantic ‘template’ communicated by the media, sometimes featuring dysfunctional and anachronistic ‘modes’ extending around the world. It is chaos theory rather than functional systems theory that captures this best. Nonetheless, the strength of systems theory lies in its comprehensive analysis, anchored in basic patterns of social behavior such as the tendency to seek autonomy and adapt to the environment. To establish how realistic and signifi-

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cant the overall concept of media globalization is, it is vital to understand it better as a process, getting to grips with its dynamics and anachronisms. Ultimately, the key point is to lay bare the temporal disjunctions, variable pace and internal contradictions of the technological, economic, political and cultural developments characteristic of globalization; these have shaped all epochal paradigms from the Reformation through the Enlightenment to modernity. In striving to understand why cross-border processes of communication have palpably failed to generate connectivity and system change, it is essential to look at the fundamental relations between the transmitters and receivers of mass communication. When all is said and done, how interdependent are states or regional and national cultures when viewed from the perspective of communication? What would a theory of international relations spawned by communication science look like? The world media system undeniably features structural shortcomings that it will be no easy task to remedy. There is as yet no global communication system. Despite the extensive exchange of information and news, media systems are firmly in the grip of nation-states. National owners, investors and publics dominate; transnational media (such as the German-French TV network Arte) are hardly used; the transnationalization of media capital mostly ends at sub-regional borders. Entertainment may have a global hue in many respects. News and information, however, can be domesticated almost at will, because they are created for a very limited, usually national group of consumers typified by national interests, reservations, stereotypes and cultural expectations. The media have to respond to these. While doing so, they are constantly reproducing them. Who could expect global media diplomacy from such provincial systems? Nonetheless, there are signs of increasing structural interconnection. Large networks such as CNN are developing foreign-language spin-offs in other parts of the world or, like the Arab TV channel Al-Jazeera, an English homepage. Such measures may gradually free relations of interdependence from a one-sided attachment to the home base, though the implications for media content are unclear. It remains to be seen whether one and the same product – such as news – can catch on universally in the foreseeable future. American consumers, confronted with unrelenting criticism of US policy on the Middle East? Japanese putting up with Chinese reproaches regarding the Second World War? Ultimately, even supposedly transnational projects risk the fate which befell the music channel MTV years ago. Its programming has broken down into a decentralized form and remains linked with the parent company solely in an economic sense. In terms of content, it has long consisted of a patchwork of different audience interests. The transnationalization of the press, which found expression, for

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instance, in a growing interest among American consumers in European online snewspapers during the Iraq War of 2003, is also at a very early stage. Will the commercial and capitalist form of globalization that currently dominates the media system show the way here? Given how the big Western media companies such as News Corporation (owned by Rupert Murdoch), whose global influence is in any case vastly overrated, have conformed to political realities in the past, this seems very doubtful. What, though, are the alternatives? Do we need a new privileging of politics within global media communication, a new drive for global media governance? Why not? British coverage of the Iraq War of 2003 proves that the logic of closed mass communication, geared towards national borders and cultural boundaries, can be relativized when states move towards one another or grow closer together. At present, however, global media policy remains largely restricted to areas in which commercial interests demand regulation (such as copyright protection), leaving little prospect of a new approach. It is no accident that many commentators have evoked civil society as a third force alongside companies and governments. Many hoped that a ‘global civil society’ would spring into life – but here too there is no question of there being mature interdependence. Perceptual distortions and informational uncertainties typify global exchanges via the Internet as much as they do classical journalism. Societies’ enhanced ability to present themselves to the world has helped generate a flood of information, making the Internet surfer an isolated ‘laptop anthropologist’ and facilitating manipulation of every kind (up to and including cyber war). Here too, there is a dearth of binding and stable processes of informational feedback. Moreover, Net-based political alliances, typically casual in nature and characterized by arbitrary selection and random events, lag far behind ‘offline politics’, in other words the quotidian actions of national governments, which tend to feature binding and structured elements. It says something about the structure of the globalization of the mass media that one of the few media which is interdependent to some extent, international broadcasting produced for other countries, features a lack of interdependence in relation to civil society in the home country. No one there knows about or uses international broadcasting, leaving it at the mercy of the national government and making it susceptible to propaganda.

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R EFERENCES Castells, Manuel (1996/97): The Information Age, 3 vols, Oxford: Blackwell. Groebel, Jo (2000): Die Rolle des Auslandsrundfunks: Eine vergleichende Analyse der Erfahrungen und Trends in fünf Ländern, Bonn: Friedrich-EbertStiftung. Gurevitch, Michael/Levy, Mark R./Roeh, Itzhak (1993): “The Global Newsroom: Convergences and Diversities in the Globalization of Television News”, in: Peter Dahlgren/Colin Sparks (eds), Communication and Citizenship: Journalism and the Public Sphere, London: Routledge, 195-216. Habermas, Jürgen (1990, orig. 1962): Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Hafez, Kai (2002): Die politische Dimension der Auslandsberichterstattung, vol. 1, Baden-Baden: Nomos. — (2007): The Myth of Media Globalization, Cambridge: Polity. — (1999): “International News Coverage and the Problems of Media Globalization: In Search of a ‘New Global-Local Nexus’”, in: Innovation: The European Journal of Social Sciences 12.1, 47-62. — (2004): “The Iraq War 2003 in Western Media and Public Opinion: A Case Study of the Effects of Military (Non-) Involvement on Conflict Perception”, in: Global Media Journal 3.5, n.p., ‹www.globalmediajournal.com/›, accessed on 21 September 2015. — (2011): “Global Journalism for Global Governance? Theoretical Visions, Practical Constraints”, in: Journalism 12.4, 483-496. Held, David/McGrew, Anthony/Goldblatt, David/Perraton, Jonathan (2000): “Rethinking Globlization”, in: David Held/Anthony McGrew (eds), The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate, Cambridge: Polity, 67-74. Hepp, Andreas/Martin Löffelholz (eds) (2002): Grundlagentexte zur transkulturellen Kommunikation, Constance: UTB. Huntington, Samuel P. (1993): “The Clash of Civilization?”, in: Foreign Affairs 72.3, 22-49. — (1996): The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster. Keck, Margaret E./Sikkink, Kathryn (1998): Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Keohane, Robert O./Nye, Joseph S. (1977): Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition, Boston: Little, Brown.

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Kraidy, Marwan M. (2003): “Glocalisation: An International Communication Framework?”, in: Journal of International Communication 9.2, 29-49. Lull, James (2002): “Superkultur”, in: Andreas Hepp/Martin Löffelholz (eds), Grundlagentexte zur transkulturellen Kommunikation, Constance: UTB, 750-773. McLuhan, Marshall (1967): Understanding Media, London: Sphere. National Intelligence Council (NIC) (2000): Global Trends 2015: A Dialogue about the Future with Nongovernment Experts (2000), n.p., accessed via ‹fas.org/irp/cia/product/globaltrends2015›, accessed on 29 July 2015. Pool, Ithiel de Sola (1990): Technologies without Boundaries: On Telecommunications in a Global Age, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Richter, Emanuel (1992): Der Zerfall der Welteinheit: Vernunft und Globalisierung in der Moderne, Frankfurt: Campus. Robertson, Roland (1994a): “Globalization or Glocalization?”, in: Journal of International Communication 1.1, 33-52. — (1994b): “Mapping the Global Condition: Globalization as the Central Concept”, in: Mike Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, London: Sage, 15-30. Sreberny-Mohammadi, Annabelle/Winseck, Dwayne/McKenna, Jim/BoydBarrett, Oliver (eds) (1997): Media in Global Context: A Reader, London: Arnold. Volkmer, Ingrid (1999): News in the Global Sphere: A Study of CNN and Its Impact on Global Communication, Luton: University of Luton Press.

Transcultural Subjectivity Beyond the Global/Local Divide – Towards a Transcultural Understanding of Mediated Subjectivity B RIAN C REECH AND A NANDAM K AVOORI

I NTRODUCTION Transcultural Media Studies conceptually divorce the study of media from a strictly territorial understanding of culture. Traditionally, such a perspective investigates globalized modes of meaning-making alongside economic modes of international media production and distribution (King 1996). In one sense, transcultural media products offer modes of expression that reveal hybridized identities that exist within an internationally conceived mode of global exchange. In another sense, they offer a means for subverting dominant relations without overturning material conditions. As such, this essay argues that material, semiotic, historical, geographic, and political tensions are often given intelligible form through the production of transcultural media products that eclipse traditional global/local framings via the production of a transcultural subjectivity capable of apprehending these concerns. Various hybridized media products reveal the tensions and histories of domination underscoring internationalized systems of cultural production (Flew 2007; Dyer-Witheford 1999: 130-164; Greider 1997). For example, in popular music, the work of Maya Arulpragasam (M.I.A) aesthetically engages the complicated politics of Tamil identity from within a transnational music product, while bloggers in Egypt developed informal, international protest networks in the years leading up to 2011’s Arab Spring (Creech 2014). Still, the deployment of transcultural subjectivity as an analytic category within international Communication Studies remains fraught, at times retaining globalized determinisms locked in a West/rest or global/local binary. In order to

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develop a nuanced and useful understanding of mediated subjectivity as a transcultural phenomenon, bearing the burdens of modernity through its conditions of formation, this essay first attempts to recover deployments and notions of subjectivity from the broader field of postcolonial media research and important theoretical forebears. Because subjectivity and identity are central concerns in Postcolonial Studies, this literature offers a conceptual language for understanding how politics, culture, history, and geography configure individuals amid transcultural media practices. In the spirit of Hepp’s call to avoid ‘territorial essentialisms’, as well as ideological hegemonic notions of globalization, a focus on subjectivity allows researchers to see how material and discursive conditions construct individuals across international boundaries (Hepp 2006: 24). Problems of identity, expression and production are all taken as key concerns, yet at the core of these interrogations is an exploration of the relationship between seemingly overdetermined systems of media production and the individuals caught up in those systems, thus offering a means for interrogating the transcultural production of subjectivity (Kavoori 2009). The essay then turns to Wael Ghonim, a central figure in the media representation of the 2011 Arab uprisings, as an exemplary case study in the production of a transcultural subjectivity informed by local conditions, yet made sensible to international audiences. As an Egyptian citizen and an executive at an American Internet company, Ghonim reveals the ways individuals may be bound up within systems of identity that can be effectuated depending upon circumstances (Hall 1990). While Wael Ghonim offers an example immersed in a particular news story tied to a particular moment, this does not preclude the analysis of other figures from international entertainment media, activists connecting across digital platforms, or terrestrial media networks used to express indigenous concerns from within nationalized systems, to name just a few examples. The essay then ends with some preliminary conclusions about the contemporary construction of transcultural subjectivity and possibilities for analyzing media figures from within a globalized media system.

T HEORIZING T RANSCULTURAL S UBJECTIVITY In order to fully articulate what, precisely, may constitute a transcultural subjectivity, this essay now turns to the theoretical construction of subjectivity. In recent decades, the notion of hybridity has been a useful boon for those studying postcolonial media, offering a means for articulating how a postcolonial subject may bridge the gap between local and dominant cultures. Bhabha’s use of

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hybridity expresses the strategic necessity for a postcolonial other to combine elements from both traditional and dominant discourses in order to navigate between cultures (Bhabha 1994). Hybridity is an activity that occurs amid cultural ambivalence and captures phenomena ranging from the development of pidgin English to the use of hip-hop mash-ups to communicate the emancipation projects of repressed minorities. In Bhabha’s terms, hybridity occurs across a “space of splitting”, where an individual enters into a global system of exchange and representation that “is always the production of an ‘image’ of identity and the transformation of the subject assuming that image” (ibid.: 117). Underlying this notion, though, is the understanding that a position, whether cultural or political, occurs in reaction to a dominant system, thus preserving a key split between the dominant and resistant. For those attempting to reconcile tensions between notions of dominance and resistance in the construction of subjectivity, Foucault offers a key touchstone, particularly his work on governmentality and biopolitics (Foucault 2007: 47). In Foucault’s terms, forms of power strategically interpellate individual subjectivities via practices of knowledge production that give intelligibility to the discursive and material conditions and possibilities that surround an individual subject (Foucault 1994a: 201-223). By extrapolating Foucault’s direct interest in state actors to apply to other social actors like transnational corporations, media conglomerates, and national media institutions, scholars can in turn explore how these bodies structure a field of discourse beyond notions of strict dominance. Foucault’s understanding of power as not something that is essentially possessed, but as instead something manifested only as it is practiced within social relations allows scholars to investigate the specificity of media and communication tactics as they become transnational (Foucault 1994b: 111-133). Similar to Foucault, Soja opens up the possibility for understanding the construction of subjectivity amid forces of history, geography, politics, and economics, connecting conceptual, discursive possibility to the apprehension of material realities. What allows this theoretical leap is an acknowledgement of the uniquely human ability to abstract physical experiences into a mental symbolic order that can be reordered, analyzed, understood, destroyed, recreated, and resignified. Yet, this reorganization is never too far from its referent. “Human beings alone are able to objectify the world by setting themselves apart. And they do so by creating a gap, a distance, a space”, Soja says (1989: 132), illustrating that human ontology is at once separate from and reliant upon and understanding of malleable physical space. Soja also notes that human subjectivity arises as something gained by objectifying the physical word and material conditions. As he has argued, “To be human is to not only create distances, but to attempt to cross

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them, to transform primal distance through intentionality, emotion, involvement, attachment [...] the creation of meaning through direct relations with the world.” (Ibid.: 133) Here, in the uniquely human ability to abstractly characterize material conditions and to envision practices that traverse them, we find the critical lynchpin that allows for an understanding of subjectivity that is neither overdetermined by broader, global forces, nor completely emancipated from them. Appadurai’s work on global flows offers further theoretical language for understanding how communication practices operate dynamically within globalized space (Appadurai 1996: 27-47). He envisions finance, culture, media, ideology, society, politics, and technology as unique ‘landscapes’, each with its own particular form and situated rules of navigation. His conceptual schema does not discount discourse and discursive processes, but also offers the beginnings of understanding how material processes work on a global scale alongside discourse. His understanding of the various scapes across which global power and the processes of human activity and production play out offer a schema from which to understand the complexity of dispersed media activity. He argues that “cultural forms are fully fractal” (ibid.: 44), meaning that no cultural form is any longer a hermetic whole, produced and consumed within a singular cultural context. At any given time the forces of economy, cultural demands and ethnic identity act as a terrain that transcultural subjects may navigate amid the expression and production of culture. His metaphor of a landscape offers an understanding of global cultural production as a series of overlapping processes that influence each other, yet do not maintain a sense of primacy or determinism over one another. The landscape metaphor also imparts upon the transcultural subject a sense of mobility and potential rooted in their ability to navigate these forces. While there may be welltrodden paths, the topography often allows one to take alternate routes. Ultimately, what Appadurai suggests, through a novel engagement with Marx, is an accounting for cultural production that considers both economic and cultural forces as areas in need of critical attention. Taking the transcultural subject as an individual capable of understanding the synchronous valence of various global forces, Appadurai offers an understanding of media and culture that consciously avoids assigning analytic preference to any singular force, arguing, “we shall remain mired in comparative work that relies on the clear separation of entities to be compared before serious comparison can begin” (ibid.: 46). By offering an understanding of global power as it exists both through cultural reproduction and material infrastructures, Appadurai further identifies the multiple avenues of agency available to a transcultural subject.

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Without a conceptual mechanism for connecting transcultural subjects to broader regimes of production, the specter of determinism may still creep in from the periphery. In the following passage though, Appadurai imparts a particular role to the imagination, recasting it as a social practice that allows the individual subject to apprehend their own conditions: No longer mere fantasy [...] no longer elite pastime [...] no longer mere contemplation [...] the imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labor and culturally organized practice) and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility [...] The imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact. (Ibid.: 31)

The imagination here can be understood as constitutive of the social praxis an individual subject may find himself or herself in. Appadurai’s use of the word ‘imagination’ here reflects certain aspects of human existence incapable of being captured by the strict determinisms of global or transnational forces. In noting interconnectedness between material practice and discursivity at the site of the imagination, Appadurai frees human agency and the imagination from a completely discourse-based totality, wherein the rules and interaction that extend from discursive practice lock global practices within a deterministic logic. However, before leaning too heavily towards a completely emancipatory subject, it is worth taking into account Spivak’s writings on the subaltern and alterity, which give needed attention to the ways in which structures of domination converge on the colonial subject. For example, in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” she illustrates how imperialist structures, as well as local patriarchal structures converge on the bodies of Indian widows, revealing conflicting cultural and juridical regimes that nonetheless silence the female Indian subject (Spivak 1988). As an analytic precursor to the conditions facing contemporary transcultural subjects, Spivak’s analysis reveals that the relations of power that configure both colonial and postcolonial subjects are variegated and complex, not always reliant upon Western systems of economic exploitation and cultural domination. Though the various split subjectivities that may constitute a transnational subject offer different strategies of enunciation, a completely optimistic vision of emancipation may elide other, sustained forms of dominance or exclusion (Spivak 1999). Through the strategic and rigorous apprehension of historical, political, geographic, and cultural conditions, the transcultural subject may in turn offer a voice to their present conditions, but not without drawing attention to their precarious contingency amid these forces.

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F ACTORS E XTERNAL

TO THE

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Postcolonial Media Studies offer a bricolage of theoretical concepts that describe the operations of power and the material and cultural realities of those outside the traditional boundaries of the West. By shaking off global systems of production as necessarily determinative, scholars can in turn begin to see the ways in which transcultural subjectivities may begin to constitute themselves from within popular media artifacts that are not directly tied to a single geographic, political, or cultural space. Take, for instance, Punathambekar’s work on the global spread of Bollywood, which looks at how the expansion of the industry has followed a distribution pattern that can be mapped to the diasporic migration patterns of Indian culture (Punathambekar 2013). His understanding of diasporic media gives an initial understanding of how cultural identity interacts with media, providing form to its practice and topography to its global uptake. Cultural identity and a historical connection to the homeland form an important discursive impetus informing the consumption and distribution of Bollywood films, but there is also a key reflection of diasporic identity informing changing production patterns, distribution networks and the content of these films (Kavoori/ Punathambekar 2008). As these products circulate via established film distribution networks, they reflexively communicate a nationalized Indian identity while also reacting to the ways that diasporic experiences change the definition of ‘Indian identity’. These are the spaces where postcolonial cultural conflicts play out, as individuals attempt to craft their own communal experience within the bounds of Western cultures (Punathambekar 2005). The notion of the diasporic identity unites emotional and cultural connections to an Indian home while also accounting for historically and spatially embedded processes of migration (Hall 1990). The emphasis on Bollywood as both an industry as well as a media product whose ostensible purpose is to communicate and express the complexities of identity centers the analysis on an object, or series of objects, whose production is contingent on a variety of discrete cultural, material, and economic factors. By simultaneously interrogating how Bollywood films are made as well as what they mean, Punathambekar and other scholars studying the production of diasporic cinemas outside Bollywood are able to trace the flows of global media production while pulling apart both the discursive and material strands that make the production, distribution, and consumption of these objects possible without losing sight of the complex individuals involved in these practices.

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Shome expands upon this line of thought, positing that the products of mass communication exist as the result of particular forces of transnational production and distribution converging with the practices of representation and cultural expression (Shome 2012). As such, media products operate as a site of constantly contested forces, where scholars can intimate the consequences of transnational production as well as historically rooted processes of subjugation. The contingent practices of subjectivity creation as well as the transnational practices of commercial media production become intelligible to scholars through a contextual understanding of media objects. In the discourses of globalization and anti-globalization alike, individual subjectivity is often posited as subject to the monolithic processes of capital expansion. Research into international media practice tends to adopt these discourses of globalization, so it is worth taking a moment to dissect the logic undergirding their deployment in order to begin putting forth an alternative set of concepts. By loosening some of the determinisms found in the discourses of globalization, we may begin to find analytic purchase from which to address transcultural phenomena. As Couldry and Hepp argue, the multi-scalar viewpoint often required of Transcultural Media Studies is frequently hampered by an analytic turn to seemingly immutable structures that lie beyond the boundary of analysis (Couldry/Hepp 2012: 249-261). As such, it is perhaps useful to spend some time considering how to deal with the external forces that converge at the site of the subject. There is not enough space here to lay out the litany of arguments made for and against globalization, but it should at least be noted that discourses of globalization and anti-globalization echo a particular aspect of classical Marxism as they postulate a deterministic economic base influencing a reflective media sphere that fuels the inevitable expansion of global capitalism (Greider 1997). Gibson-Graham has argued that these discourses of globalization often posit the undeveloped world as a passive participant in the globalization process, often ignoring the various local factors that give shape to globalizing practices (GibsonGraham 1996: 120-147). Totalizing in its deployment, the political and economic forces undergirding globalization diminish state power at the service of spreading capitalistic interest (Herod 2009). Anti-globalization discourses act as a counter-point enmeshed in this logic, rooted in a base/super-structure model where the workings of economic interests determine the discursive expressions of culture, and can only be resisted by directly engaging in either milieu at the exclusion of the other (Gilbert 2008). In certain forms of anti-globalization research, media practices expand internationally and extend from the logic of a classical base/superstructure division, regardless of the specific conditions under

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analysis (Held/McGrew 2007). In traditional analyses, transcultural subjects, are often caught between these forces, though the scale at which globalization is discussed often precludes a more nuanced approach that attends to specific conditions and avoids certain determinisms. From a cultural perspective, globalization provides a useful heuristic for understanding the global expansion of Western cultural products and cultural hegemony by foregrounding culture as a singular aspect among a background of global economic forces. Stuart Hall notes that in a postcolonial world, dominance no longer stems from European administrative structures, but from American commercial and cultural systems of exchange (Hall 1997). As Hall notes, this commercial power is decentered, emanating not just from American cities, but urban centers in Asia and Latin America as well. Global cultural hegemony acts as an expression of capitalist values, imposing a commercialized logic on the production of global culture, he argues. Still, Hall is careful not to posit global systems as wholly deterministic, noting that history and geography create contingent realities from which possible transcultural subjectivities may emerge. This is an important theoretical move in Postcolonial Studies that connects external phenomena to the site of individual identity, allowing this chapter to put forward the construction of subjectivity as a key analytic category for the study of transculturalism. Returning to Hepp’s argument, in order to study the transcultural, researchers should maintain the complex interplay between territorialized and deterritorialized media cultures (Hepp 2009). Subjectivity, then, is a site where the tension between these forces plays out. The global forces that structure media-based subjectivity are fluctuating, particular, and dynamic, and as such, Shome and Hegde argue, postcolonial media scholarship becomes a necessarily emancipatory and progressive project as analyses track the forces that converge in the creation of identity as well as new modes of discourse embedded in media products (Shome/Hegde 2002). For Shome, and to a similar extent Paramesweran, communication texts operate as the sites where the convergence of transnational forces and concerns about the creation of identity open up the possibility for theorizing about the ways in which subjectivity and external, extra-national forces contest and influence one another (Shome 2011; Parameswaran 2008). As Spivak (1988) notes, postcolonial subjects are often caught between conflictual and overlapping discursive formations, yet are not precluded from exercising some form of negotiated agency despite these seeming strictures. Media objects exist as the simultaneous textual representation of identities as well as the discrete products of transnational media production networks. As argued elsewhere, the specific conditions of a media object’s production, distribution and

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consumption do not preclude the development of a singular or even resistant subjectivity from emerging (Creech 2014).

A RTICULATING A T RANSNATIONAL S UBJECTIVITY : T HE C ASE OF W AEL G HONIM After Hosni Mubarak resigned his power in Egypt, certain narratives began to emerge as American media outlets sought to explain the link between protests in the country, protesters’ use of social media, and international pressure urging the dictator to resign. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter were often cited as a key factor, as young Egyptians used these tools to coordinate protest activities, evade police, and publicize their dissent as well as police abuses to audiences beyond the immediate bounds of Tahrir square (Taylor 2011). Time magazine named ‘the protestor’ its person of the year and Wael Ghonim one of its 100 most influential people of 2011 (Andersen 2011; El Baredei 2011). As a journalistic source and media figure, Ghonim was often sought out to articulate the meaning of these protests to Western audiences (“Wael Ghonim CCN Interview” 2011). Yet many of the mainstream interviews and texts featuring Ghonim and his expertise do not critically interrogate his position beyond the rote terms of his identity as an Egyptian citizen and Google executive. These two aspects of Ghonim’s biography offered a discursively useful ‘authenticity’, bridging the specific historical event leading to the protests with its technological manifestation across social media platforms. With the benefit of hindsight, several scholars have pushed against early assertions that the uprisings in Arab countries were in part driven by the appearance of new media technologies, but for the sake of this chapter, the apprehension of technologies offers an important discursive move that allowed Ghonim to exercise a temporally contingent transcultural agency built from his role as a Google executive and Egyptian citizen (Markham 2014: 89-104; Aouragh/Alexander 2011: 1344-1358; Christensen 2011: 155157). Wael Ghonim’s status as a media figure – as both object and agent of transcultural media discourse – typifies the discursive practices surrounding the Arab Spring at work. Ghonim was often cited as the ‘spark’ of the protests in Egypt after Egyptian police arrested and detained him for two weeks for creating a Facebook page that commemorated the death of anti-Mubarak blogger Khaled Said and that encouraged other Egyptian citizens to gather in Tahrir square and protest against decades of repressive rule (c.f. Davidson 2011; May 2011; Husain 2011).

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In the months following the protests, Ghonim published a book about them and gave lectures explaining the link between social media tools and the new forms of protests and democratic politics emerging in the Middle East and North Africa (Ghonim 2012). In the broader regime of meaning-making surrounding the Arab Spring, Ghonim’s statements and the texts he produced offer a particular understanding of the events in Egypt amenable to Western democratic values. As a media figure and a source for explaining the importance of the events to a Western audience, he offers a way of articulating the event within a broader regime of liberal democratic values. Capturing the conventional wisdom surrounding Egyptian protests in a CNN interview, Ghonim said, “If you want to free a society, just give them Internet access. The young crowds are all going to go out and see the unbiased media […] This is the Internet revolution. I’ll call it Revolution 2.0.” (Ibid.) It is worth considering the collision of conditions that granted Ghonim relevance as a spokesman for the movement, especially as he put forth a vision of the movement directly connected to the protestors’ use of technology to articulate their concerns to a broader global audience. Journalistic sourcing practices that show a comprehension bias toward English-speakers, combined with a media system laced through with liberal democratic values, carved out a space for an individual capable of articulating the meaning of the event to a specifically Western audience. Though the Arab Spring, as a news story, begat changes in the way in which news was gathered over social media, these practices hewed closely to traditional ethics and news values, ensuring that the final products continued to display the traditional liberal democratic values associated with American journalism (Carvin 2013). Ghonim’s Khaled Said Facebook page offered a place for Egyptians to register their deep frustration with the government; as a forum and platform, it also offered Western media a record of people’s words and a way of giving language to the growing sense of unrest that presaged the Tahrir Square protests (We Are All Khaled Said [Weblog]; We Are all Khaled Said [Facebook Group]). Though these activities linked Ghonim to the movement from his office and home in Dubai and gave him a platform for coordinating protest activity, it was not until he traveled to Egypt, went to prison, and gave interviews upon his release that he began to function as a media figure capable of articulating meaning onto the events in Tahrir (“Profile: Egypt’s Wael Ghonim” 2011). In an interview granted hours after his release, Ghonim stated: I am not a hero. I was only used [sic] the keyboard, the real heroes are the ones on the ground. Those I can’t name. This is the season where people use the word traitor against

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each other. I wasn’t abused, I was jailed, kidnapped. I met some really intellectual people in jail, they actually thought that we were traitors, working for others. If I was a traitor I would have stayed by the swimming pool in my house in the UAE. What are called the ‘facebook youth’ went out in their tens of thousands on January 25th, talk to them […] I am proud of what I did. This is not the time to settle scores. Although I have people I want to settle scores with myself. This is not the time to split the pie and enforce ideologies. The secret to the success of the facebook page was use of surveys. (“Wael Ghonim’s First Interview After Jail Release” 2011)

Ghonim’s value as media source extended from his ability to explain the importance of the movement in terms that countered the dominant, Mubarakcentric narrative while simultaneously claiming to not speak for those within the movement. This ability to confer meaning without overtly precluding others, when combined with Ghonim’s role as the administrator of the movement’s online presence, made him an obviously appealing subject for Western news audiences. What is most telling about Ghonim’s persona is how readily it begins to conform to the expectations of a liberal democratic subject. In media appearances after the resignation of Mubarak, Ghonim further ascribed liberal democratic values to the technologies utilized in the Egyptian protests, as the following quote from a TED talk about the protests illustrates: This is Revolution 2.0. No one was a hero because everyone was a hero [...] If you think of the concept of Wikipedia where everyone is collaborating content, and at the end of the day you’ve built the largest encyclopedia in the world. From just an idea that sounded crazy, you have the largest encyclopedia in the world. And in the Egyptian revolution, Revolution 2.0, everyone contributed something. Small or big, they contributed something to bring us one of the most inspiring stories in the history of mankind. (Ghonim, “Inside the Egyptian Revolution” 2011)

By rhetorically linking the crowd-sourced construction of Wikipedia to the diffuse and dispersed activity of Egypt’s revolution, Ghonim connects the operations and logics of crowd-sourced digital social networks and the diffuse political power of a mass protest. Such an articulation typifies an understanding of the Arab Spring protests that circulated in American media throughout 2011. While the enhanced connectivity of social media tools enabled repressed and frustrated citizens from across the Middle East and North Africa to express their political discontent at a previously unconceivable scale, the effectiveness of the tools as part of a political strategy was (and still is) far from settled.

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Yet such understandings of the Egyptian protests and other activities that fall under the ‘Arab Spring’ moniker also advance a narrative of these events as seemingly natural extensions of the inherent capabilities of social media tools and mobile media devices. As a Google executive and politically active Egyptian citizen, Ghonim could uniquely articulate the meaning of the protests in a way that linked the power of social media to broader democratic ideals via a rhetoric and aesthetic accessible to American journalistic discourses. Such discourses locate the central meaning of the protests around a singular object at the expense of exploring and articulating other possible understandings, namely the cultural and historical factors that enabled an inequality and repression that gave protesters an abstracted condition to protest against (Applebaum 2011). In the year following Mubarak’s resignation, Ghonim portrayed himself as a source of the protests, citing his own Facebook page as evidence of social media’s ability to incite real political action, revealing an understanding of political power that locates political effectivity at the site of an individual articulating ideas to a disaggregated mass. In the following statement, he reveals this rationality at work: I kind of feel responsible for whatever I say on the page. I always ask myself, before every post, is that in the best interest of this country or not? I do not want to abuse a tool like this, because at the end of the day, it could lead to people dying, or it could lead to [...] bringing the country in the wrong direction. (Rose 2012)

As a media personality, Ghonim represents the contingent and fraught nature of transcultural subjectivity. The mixture of ethnic authenticity and communicative ability worked to translate activities in Egypt in terms that captivated Western interest, while at the same time conflating shifting political realities into a singular expression of human potential (Tolan 2011; Kholaif 2014). For the purpose of this chapter, understanding Ghonim as an individual media figure embedded within the broader context of the Arab Spring allows us to see how the practices of journalistic meaning production circulate around particular events and create the conditions by which individuals may give voice to their own political reality. Ghonim’s statements offer a schema for ordering the facts surrounding the Arab Spring, thus making it sensible beyond the immediate geographic bounds of the protest by conflating the protests with a democratic subjectivity evident in the use of social media and digital technologies. It is in the act of collecting this information and deeming it credible that journalistic practice gathers the ontological raw material from which meaning can emerge. These conditions are linked to particular times and places, and as

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such, individuals that resonate as meaningful voices may be dispersed once conditions change. As the politics in Egypt have continued to move beyond the Tahrir Square protests, Ghonim has slipped from the discourse as a credible perspective (Kingsley 2014). Currently living in exile and claiming to be marginalized by Egyptian political groups persecuting secular activists in the wake of the 2013 military coup deposing Mohamed Morsi, Ghonim’s role as a mediated transcultural subject currently exists amid a much more fractured discursive landscape than the one he appeared among in early 2011: The developments have led many leading members of the 2011 protests to express their despair at the situation. Mohamed Hashem, the head of Egypt’s leading progressive publishing house, and a hero to revolutionaries, threatened to leave Egypt last year after giving up hope about the political situation. ‘The revolution came out of a big dream – but it wasn’t this,’ Hashem told the Guardian at the time. But the revolutionaries’ desperation is not necessarily shared by large sections of the population, exhausted by the three years of economic and political chaos that have followed Mubarak’s fall. Many may welcome a return to strong and strict governance if it comes hand in hand with economic stability. (Ibid.)

Analysts from outside the country revise earlier opinions about social media’s role in international governance, questioning the agency ascribed to Ghonim and others in 2011 (Himelfarb 2014). As argued earlier in the chapter, reading the transcultural subject as always emancipatory may be tempting, yet it is important for scholars to attend to the myriad conditions that grant these subjects their agency. As the conditions shift, so too may a singular subject’s apprehension of those conditions, and thus their agency amid these conditions. As evidenced by the case of Wael Ghonim and other ‘Arab Spring’ leaders in Egypt, the ontological purview of international journalism rarely favors the perspective of one source for too long. While certain individuals may be able to articulate meaning and values onto events at certain points in time, journalism’s professional imperative to constantly catalog what is new, and thus ‘news’, creates a constantly shifting discursive practice around these figures that, when combined with, for example, the changing political realities in Egypt, begin to reveal the complex conditions any transcultural subject must apprehend in order to exercise any kind of relevant and consequential agency.

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C ONCLUSION This chapter has argued that the transcultural study of media should be connected to the study of subjectivity, and that postcolonial perspectives offer a particularly robust means for doing so. As Postcolonial Studies deploy theoretical tools often aimed at the construction of identity, it provides a conceptual language for attending to the complexities that surround transcultural figures, objects, and phenomena without resorting to structural determinisms often found in studies of globalization. While it is tempting to abandon these determinisms for an absolute sense of emancipation, subjectivity must be considered as at least partially informed by the cultural, political, social, geographic, economic, and mediacentric conditions that surround an individual subject. Appadurai’s notion of scapes offers a useful theoretical metaphor for discussing these conditions as navigable, while other theorists argue that subjectivity emerges from the ability to apprehend the conditions one is enmeshed within and make sense of them. Still, in the vein of Spivak, a bias towards a completely emancipatory subjectivity may obscure more complex forces at work. As the case of Wael Ghonim shows, no singular subjectivity may exist beyond the values and means of the system it emerges within, and as the material and political conditions shift over time, so too may the sense of agency ascribed to any particular subject. For the study of transculture, this renews a call for an analytic adherence to the myriad factors that surround objects of analysis. By noting and adhering to the complications inherent in their expression and existence, scholars may continue to break down West/rest, global/local, us/them binarisms inherited from a tradition of research that treats globalization as a monolithic and homogenizing force. While the expansion of global capital and the relations it portends do have real consequences, each transcultural subject emerges from a specific set of circumstances. By attending to these circumstances, scholars may begin to see how so-called globalized forces lead to divergent and varied expressions that radically depend upon context.

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R EFERENCES Andersen, Kurt (2011): “The Protester”, in: Time, 14 December, ‹content.time. com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2101745_2102132,00.html›, accessed on 5 September 2015. Aouragh, Miriyam/Alexander, Anne (2011): “The Egyptian Experience: Sense and Nonsense of the Internet Revolution”, in: International Journal of Communication 5, 1344-1358, ‹ijoc.org/›, accessed on 8 October 2015. Appadurai, Arjun (1996): Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Applebaum, Anne (2011): “Every revolution is different”, in: Slate, 21 February, ‹slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2011/02/every_revolution_ is_different.html›, accessed on 7 September 2015. Bhabha, Homi (1994): The Location of Culture, New York: Routledge. Carvin, Andy (2013): Distant Witness: Social Media, the Arab Spring, and a Journalism Revolution, New York: CUNY Journalism Press. “Charlie Rose talks to Wael Ghonim” (2012): Bloomberg Business Week, 16 February, ‹businessweek.com/articles/2012-02-16/charlie-rose-talks-to-waelghonim/›, accessed on 7 September 2015. Christensen, Christian (2011): “Twitter Revolutions? Addressing Social Media and Dissent”, in: Communication Review 14.3, 155-157. Couldry, Nick/Hepp, Andreas (2012): “Comparing Media Cultures”, in: Frank Esser/Thomas Hanitzsch (eds), The Handbook of Comparative Communication Research, New York: Routledge, 249-261. Creech, Brian (2014): “Refugee Status: Tracing the Global Flows of M.I.A.”, in: Communication Culture & Critique 7.3, 267-282. Davidson, Amy (2011): “Don’t Cry, Wael”, in: The New Yorker, 8 February, ‹newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2011/02/wael-ghonim.html›, accessed on 7 September 2015. Dyer-Witheford, Nick (1999): Cyber Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. El Baredei, Mohamed (2011): “Wael Ghonim: Spokesman for a Revolution”, in: Time, 21 April, ‹content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2 066367_2066369,00.html›, accessed on 7 September 2015. Flew, Terry (2007): Understanding Global Media, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel (2007): Security, Territory, and Population, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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—/Punathambekar, Aswin (2008): “Introduction”, in: Anandam Kavoori/Aswin Punathambekar (eds), Global Bollywood, New York: New York University Press, 1-14. Kholaif, Dahlia (2014): “Egypt Youth Disappointed Ahead of Anniversary”, Al Jazeera English, 25 January, ‹aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/01/egypt -youth-disenchanted-ahead-anniversary-20141238112819501.html›, accessed on 9 September 2015. King, Anthony D. (ed.) (1996): Re-Presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital, and Culture in the Twenty-First Century Metropolis, New York: New York University Press. Kingsley, Patrick (2014): “I’m no Traitor, says Wael Ghonim as Egypt Regime Targets Secular Activists”, in: The Guardian, 9 January, ‹theguardian.com/ world/2014/jan/09/wael-ghonim-egypt-regime-targets-secular-activists/›, accessed on 9 September 2015. Lim, Merylina (2014): “Clicks, Cabs, and Coffee Houses: Social Media and Oppositional Movements in Egypt”, in: Journal of Communication 62.2, 231248. Markham, Tim (2014): “Social Media, Protest Cultures and Political Subjectivities of the Arab Spring”, in: Media, Culture & Society 36.1, 89-104. May, Theodore (2011): “Regime won’t halt but Rallies must, Egypt’s VP says”, in: USA Today, 2 August, ‹usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/2011-0208-egypt-protests_N.htm›, accessed on 9 September 2015. Parameswaran, Radhika (2008): “The Other Sides of Globalization: Communication, Culture, and Postcolonial Critique”, in: Communication, Culture, and Critique 1.1, 116-125. “Profile: Egypt’s Wael Ghonim” (2011): BBC News, 9 February, ‹bbc.co.uk/ news/world-middle-east-12400529/›, accessed on 5 September 2015. Punathambekar, Aswin (2013): From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry, New York: New York University Press. — (2005): “Bollywood in the Indian-American Diaspora: Mediating a Transitive Logic of Cultural Citizenship”, in: International Journal of Cultural Studies 8.2, 151-173. Shome, Raka/Hegde, Radha S. (2002): “Postcolonial Approaches to Communication: Charting the Terrain, Engaging the Intersections”, in: Communication Theory 12.3, 249-270. Shome, Raka (2011): “Global Motherhood: The Transnational Intimacies of White Femininity”, in: Critical Studies in Media Communication 28.5, 388406.

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— (2012): “Mapping the Limits of Multiculturalism in the Context of Globalization”, in: International Journal of Communication 6, 144-165, ‹ijoc.org/›, accessed on 8 October 2015. Soja, Edward (1989): Post-modern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, London: Verso. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1999): A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. — (1988): “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in: Cary Nelson/Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 271-311. Taylor, Chris (2011): “Why Not Call It a Facebook Revolution?”, CNN, 24 February, ‹edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/social.media/02/24/facebook.revolu tion›, accessed on 9 September 2015. Thussu, Daya Kishan (2008): “The Globalization of ‘Bollywood’ – The Hype and Hope”, in: Anandam Kavoori/Aswin Punathambekar (eds), Global Bollywood, New York: New York University Press, 97-116. Tolan, Sandy (2011): “Visions Collide in a Sweltering Tahrir Square”, Al Jazeera English, 30 July, ‹aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/07/20117301 42651302182.html›, accessed on 9 September 2015. “Wael Ghonim CNN Interview” (2011): accessed via ‹youtube.com/ watch?v=KC_TQ-3m6xM›, accessed on 5 September 2015. “Wael Ghonim’s First Interview After Jail Release” (2011): TechCrunch, 7 February, ‹techcrunch.com/2011/02/07/wael-ghonims-first-interview-after-jailrelease-video/›, accessed on 5 September 2015. We are all Khaled Said, ‹www.elshaheeed.co.uk/home-khaled-said-full-storybackground-truth-what-happened-torture-in-egypt-by-egyptian-police›, accessed on 5 September 2015. We are all Khaled Said, ‹facebook.com/elshaheeed.co.uk›, accessed on 5 September 2015.

Diasporic Media Global Media and the Emergence of ‘Lonely Sojourners’ and ‘Passive Transnationals’ U RIYA S HAVIT

Possibly the least anticipated result of globalization has been the frustration of expectations that a ‘global village’ would gradually emerge, imposing homogeneous Western imageries on less affluent societies. Instead, many ‘global villages’ have been created – a plethora of national and sub-national media, directed primarily at local markets yet extended beyond their traditional borders to a worldwide reach. This development bears particularly dramatic potential implications on migrants, who for the first time in the history of migration have access to news and entertainment from their homelands almost as if they were still at ‘home’. To appreciate how overwhelming the potential of this development is, one need only be reminded that options considered fictional twenty years ago – for example: following on a daily basis live broadcasts of the homeland’s political talk-shows while residing on a remote island thousands of miles away – are considered today, by those born into to the world of ‘global villages’, as obvious as television itself. This article sets to explore how advanced media impact the relations between migratory communities and their homelands. By engaging with Media Studies as well as with Postcolonial and Nationalism Studies, it broadens and challenges concepts and emphases on the relation between migration, media and globalization. Studies on migration in the age of globalization tended to stress how distant communities come closer and how the impacts between peripheries and centers are enhanced. Examining two essential typologies of migrants, the sojourner and the transnational, the article theorizes that an intensification of exposure to homeland media from afar does not necessarily result in greater communal

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cohesion among migrants or in greater political involvement in the affairs of the homeland. Two new sub-typologies, encouraged by the increased accessibility of migrants to homeland media, are introduced: the ‘lonely sojourner’ and the ‘passive transnational’. One merit of sojourners and trans-nationalism as analytic concepts has been their relative clarity in a field of study that is burdened with many ill-defined and controversial terminologies. For example, the prolific literature defining ‘diasporas’ in the age of globalization offers broad definitions that include any community extensively engaging or affiliating with an ancestral homeland (Cohen 1997: ix, 174-5; Sheffer 1986: 3) as well as consciously narrower definitions which add other parameters, e.g., a sense of marginalization (Safran 1991: 83-4); the terms ‘sojourners’ and ‘transnationals’, on the other hand, have been applied as coherent and dichotomous reflections on the relations between sending countries, receiving countries and individual migrants. The former denotes firstgeneration migrants who are marginal in both sending and receiving societies and choose to live in enclaves that duplicate some social institutions of their homelands through webs of local communal and financial interactions; the latter denotes migrants (possibly not only of the first generation) who maintain a strong sense of belonging and play active political, financial and cultural roles in both their homelands and their new countries of choice (the term ‘long-distance nationals’ has been applied interchangeably in highlighting the political dimension of this phenomenon). The sub-typologies introduced in this article, no doubt, add a complication: they suggest that developments in the application of advanced media make it possible for someone to be a sojourner without belonging to an expatriate community, and for someone to be a transnational without playing or desiring any active role in the homeland’s affairs, choosing instead passive involvement attained through intensified media consumption. The idea, however, is not to argue that the natures of the sojourning and transnational experiences as outlined in existing literature are irreversibly and uniformly changing due to technological opportunities, as this is not case; rather, the article aims to highlight the greater variation that is being created within well-established typologies. The article is divided into two sections. The first discusses how advanced media technologies obliterated some of the impediments faced in the past by migrants who wished to consume their homelands’ media, and the second explores, through two test-cases, the emergence of the ‘lonely sojourner’ and the ‘passive transnational’.

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N EW I MAGINED C OMMUNITIES

Anderson understood modern nation-states to be the result of an affinity between territories and contents consumed simultaneously, primarily and on an ongoing basis by people residing in these territories – and only by them (1991: 62). They are inseparable from a benchmark of modernity: the development of mass media that, while massive, was nevertheless limited in its geographical scope. When satellite television and the internet first appeared as mass media of communication, the globalization of the media entailed, for some, the consolidation of worldwide unified imagery that challenges the nation-state; some believed that “a global sphere has already emerged, and subsequently that the national public sphere has either disappeared or that its borders have become permeable or fuzzy, open to influences from both local and global media” (Hjarvard 2001: 20); or that “there is an ever greater uniformity of lifestyles, cultural symbols and transnational modes of behavior” (Beck 1999: 42). Considering that ‘global’ imageries were predominantly American, it is not surprising that some believed the perceived globalization of the media to signify an intensification of ‘cultural imperialism’. Since the 1960s, this fluid concept was associated with the idea that media, as well as other non-violent means (‘soft power’) allow Western states to maintain their control over postcolonial territories (Schiller 1969: 109). Christine Ockrent, a senior correspondent for Radio Television France (RTF), expressed the sentiment that ‘global’ satellite channels are not global but in fact American: “CNN is a US channel with a global vocation, but which sees the world through an American prism [...] When CNN’s footage is not homemade in the US, it is homemade in some other country. That’s not being international” (Friedland 1992: 24). However, the development of satellite television channels from the early 1990s and of the internet in the mid-1990s challenged the conventional wisdom that the world is becoming a global village. The “globalizing strategy – offering the same menu to more and more people – soon turned out to be a failure”, and thus it was relinquished in favor of a strategy seeking to “regionalize programming, i.e., adjust it to ‘local interests and needs’” (Hjarvard 2001: 27). Audiences demonstrated a continuous desire to watch news, sports and entertainment distinctly recognized as the particular possession of their community imagined as a nation. Today, as twenty-five years ago, images and texts are still largely constructed, mediated and consumed along national lines, though this is increasingly done by means indifferent to national borders. In the satellite market, the more successful and influential among the networks with global reach have been those whose focus and orientation were openly defined as national.

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These are networks that broadcast national news and entertainment to a potentially global audience, yet direct their programming to a specific national or subnational community. Rupert Murdoch’s British Sky channels (established in 1989), the oldest and most successful example, can be received in and outside Britain via satellite dishes. While the technology of its mediation is in theory oblivious to the boundaries of the United Kingdom, their content is strictly British and the audience they target is largely British. Alternately, networks boasting a global brand but in fact adapted to different cultures caught on. MTV indeed shapes youth culture all over the world, but MTV in Germany and the American MTV are not the same. Moreover, warnings against cultural imperialism in the disguise of globalization came to be the core of globally oriented media initiatives that further challenged the creation of global imageries. These included, among others, the launching of the first Arab satellite channels in the early 1990s (Shavit 2009: 121-6), the establishment of channels like Venezuela’s Telesur, launched in July 2005 as a regional tool seeking to allow Latin Americans to see themselves “through their own eyes” (“Using Oil to Spread Revolution” 2005), and France24, launched in December 2006 on the initiative of President Jacques Chirac as a conduit for the world to see the French perspective of events (“CNN à la française” 2006: 30). In two decades, the proliferation of communication networks with a global reach became a matter of national rivalry rather than the cement of a globally formed, nationally blind, political and cultural imagined sphere. The development of the internet also challenged the understanding of globalization as a homogenizing process. National (or sub-national) newspapers offer much or all of their daily content on their websites; yet their global reach does not make them one bit less nationally oriented, and their consumption still is largely so, too. Online editions often reflect an understanding of the need to compete in rapidly evolving national internet markets rather than in an effort to attract an international audience. While internet users are able to receive their news or entertainment from thousands of sites, all accessible at the same speed, they generally prefer sites belonging to their native community (imagined as a nation), or sites waving a global banner but localized along national lines (Shavit 2009: 47). Why is it that in an age when people can consume images and texts of whatever imagined communities they wish, they still choose to be exposed primarily, simultaneously and on an ongoing basis to their national outlets rather than to those of other countries or the ‘global’ providers? One reason is that global media were introduced to people who, in terms of media use, were not tabula

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rasa, but rather to people already accustomed for many years to the media of their nation, its perspectives and priorities. This is not only a matter of language, although language is a serious barrier. The preference for the native national media over other media stems from being accustomed to particular contexts – this set of celebrities, this national team, along with the values and memories contextualized with them throughout the years. While some media operations gained global reach, others did not; the national product is still more abundant and more easily consumed. Moreover, in those spheres where the imagined does reflect an individual’s material condition, rather than simply entertaining them or infusing in them a sense of participation in events they could otherwise be ignorant of, the national media can afford not only the more customary, but also the more comprehensive reflections. A national election campaign, or a climate catastrophe, is more intensely covered by that nation’s media than by other national media where it is regarded as international news. The way the internet developed suggests that people want to imagine mostly those things which relate to their actual lives. One reason for Facebook’s immediate – and indeed global success – is that its designer and founder, a student of psychology, understood that people are more interested in confirming and enhancing social relations that exist in their physical world than in creating autonomous virtual spaces in which reality does not matter. Advanced communication technologies have not obliterated the attraction of unique national imageries. Rather, a different transformation has taken place. For the first time since the rise of nationalism, images and texts crucial to the imagination of communities as nations can be consumed primarily, simultaneously and on an ongoing basis regardless of territorial affinity. It is therefore not new technologies that have transcended nation-states, but the images and texts of nation-states that have transcend their old boundaries. This transformation challenges some limitations that in the past have defined immigrants’ efforts to recreate aspects of the imagined communities they left behind. Throughout modern history, outside an imagined community’s territory its imagery could not be imagined as it was in the homeland. If such imagery was to be consumed at all from a distance, a process of redefinition and of imitation, maintaining a national sentiment while simultaneously creating an ever expanding gap between the immigrant’s imagined world and that of the members of the imagined community left behind was bound to evolve. While immigrants were often successful in modern times in consuming texts and images originating from their original communities, and while the consumption of such images and texts allowed immigrants not to lose touch completely with their sending

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countries’ imagery, their patterns of consumption from afar denied the triple attributes of primary, simultaneous and ongoing exposure. Newspapers are the oldest example. Receiving a newspaper from the homeland fulfilled several voids in immigrants’ lives. It enabled them to pursue a habit – the holding of a printed replication to whose textual and graphical structure they were accustomed. It allowed them to stay in touch with the latest news from their homelands, whether such news was purely sentimental or entertaining or whether it bore possible implications for the well-being of their relatives. Also, in relation to immigrants’ language skills, homeland newspapers were possibly more easily read, or the only ones that could be read and understood. For all these reasons, any neighborhood where a large enough number of immigrants from a certain nation settled would soon host a specialized store, offering newspapers and magazines from the homeland. On the bookshelves of such stores, the distinct atmosphere of another world could be felt (Pan 1994: 313). Even if a community was not large enough to sustain an ethnic store, immigrants found other ways of receiving newspapers from their homeland. They could rely on casual trips home (theirs or of others) to supply them with the cherished reading material, or they could subscribe to the overseas (air mail) edition of a newspaper, or have family or friends send them packages. Unless the immigrant was extremely isolated, some newspapers from the homeland were guaranteed to come his or her way. However, imported newspapers were consumed in a way that was distinctly different from their consumption back home, which ensured their reading had a different effect on the reader. First, in the homeland their consumption was a daily ritual, like drinking morning coffee, a ritual calling for little consideration or effort. In the receiving country consumption of homeland newspapers required a special effort. Not surprisingly, many immigrants, eager for homeland news, could not afford the time or money needed to obtain homeland newspapers primarily and on a daily basis. Simultaneity was also lost. Delay in the consumption of imported newspapers was inevitable. Even if the time lag was minor, it was bound to significantly alter the reading experience. A newspaper read even a day after its publication was read in a different context. It delivered an echo of chronicles rather than the chronicles themselves. The ethnic press that served migrant communities was in part a means of compensating for the obstacles to obtaining homeland-based newspapers. While consumption of the immigrant press reflected the affiliation to a community, an insistence on maintaining one’s roots and a continued interest, or even a strong commitment, to the homeland (that is, a denial of complete assimilation), the immigrant press simultaneously reflected and helped to shape that community’s transformation into a new entity

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distinct from the one it originated from, not only in its geographical position but also in its shared images and texts. Exposure to radio and television broadcasts presented an even more definitive break from a departed imagined community. Radio broadcasts from the homeland had to be transmitted on shortwave frequencies. This necessitated a conscious policy and financial resources on the part of the sending country wishing to direct such broadcasts abroad, and the means to purchase an expensive shortwave device on the part of the immigrant. The break in consumption of television broadcasts was the most complete. Having left his or her homeland, an immigrant lost all possibility of watching its programming. The introduction of videocassette recorders (VCRs) was therefore eagerly welcomed by immigrants. Several studies have documented immigrants’ enthusiastic response to videotapes from the homeland and the proliferation of stores offering them (Lum 1998: 141; Siew-Peng 2001: 147). However, videos hardly bridged the gap. Rather, their consumption was governed by the same limitations typical of newspapers from the homeland. First, it involved a deliberate effort. Instead of simply switching on the television, one had to locate the ethnic store and do the footwork or, alternatively, rely on the goodwill of family or friends in the homeland. Consequently, obtaining homeland movies or television transformed into a statement of identity rather than a routine followed with little regard to its significance. Second, exposure to recordings of films and television from the homeland, even when watched with greatest devotion and intensity, could never match the round-the-clock, daily nature of exposure in the homeland. What the videocassette enthusiast abroad was exposed to was a fragmented collection of content, pieces of a puzzle. Third, the content consumed in video recordings competed with the more accessible filmed and televised content of the receiving country. Since the 1990s, transformations in the application of the internet and satellite television (rather than the mere introduction and mass usage of these technologies) allow migrants to live in a distant territory yet continue to be exposed primarily, simultaneously and on an ongoing basis to most images and texts mediated by the mass media in their homelands almost as if they still lived there. This new possibility opens up new prospects for migrants, as it lets them experience, or re-experience, an imagined community in a way that was once impossible. For immigrants, the reading of online editions offers a continuation of primary, simultaneous and ongoing exposure to their homeland newspapers. Because it is as easy to access a homeland-based edition as it is to access a newspaper of the receiving country, and because its accession is not dependent upon external

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conditions other than an internet connection, it can be consumed in a way similar to that of the original imagined community. The existence of an ethnic store, regular visits to the homeland, or overseas subscriptions, conditioned by one’s financial situation, cease to be a determining factor for consumption. Simultaneity with the homeland is achieved as well. Online newspapers are accessed outside the nation-state by the exact same means as they are accessed within its borders, and exactly at the same time. In a world where internet users are gradually becoming accustomed to reading their newspapers online, an immigrant need not associate reading habits with waiting time and the immigrant status. On the contrary, he or she is simply practicing their normal routines in a different place. Satellite television similarly obviates the affinity between national imagery and territory. The marginalization of self-proclaimed global satellite channels and the rise of nationally oriented yet globally transmitted channels since the early 1990s were of special relevance for immigrants. Television is the most powerful medium mediating national (or ethnic) imageries; but until satellite broadcasting took root television programming was the most difficult to access from afar. Today, however, immigrants can watch news, sports and entertainment from their homeland via satellite and the Internet. They may do so simultaneously with the people in the homeland, and if they choose to watch their national satellite channel exclusively, they may also do so. The conjunction between internet and television adds to the elimination of territorial affinity and to the ability of migrants to consume television broadcasts from their homelands as though they still lived there.

‘L ONELY S OJOURNERS ’ AND ‘P ASSIVE T RANSNATIONALS ’ An obvious consequence of primary, simultaneous and ongoing exposure to the contents of a sending national community would appear to be that political and social ties between migrants and their homelands would strengthen, and so will communal actions related to the homeland undertaken by migrants. However, my studies suggest that this is not necessarily the case, and instead, patterns of introversion and passivity may be encouraged. This observation is based on a one-year qualitative field-study I conducted among migrants from a variety of countries in Frankfurt am Main, Germany (Shavit 2009: 61-93). It is reasonable to assume that my conclusions would not have been different had the study been conducted in most other countries, as the two variants involved – access to

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advanced media technologies and the desire of individuals to consume the media of their homelands – are almost universal (and increasingly so). Breaking down the discussion to ‘ideal types’ of migrants, two potential implications of advanced media technologies are particularly worthy of attention. One concerns the ‘sojourner’. This type was introduced in 1951 by Paul C. P. Siu to describe individuals who travel to a foreign country in order to accumulate money fast but, because that objective is not achieved, end up spending their entire lives in their receiving country. Convinced that they are soon to return to the homeland, they lack motivation to integrate, are identified by their receiving society in line with their profession only, and become marginalized (Siu 1952: 3444). Sojourners often reside in enclaves and try to extend their homelands to afar – read the same newspapers, eat the same food and play the same sports as in their homeland. One aspect common to sojourners as depicted by Siu and other scholars was that their ability to recreate aspects of their sending societies was dependent on the existence of sojourners like themselves, and, in some fields, on maintaining intense contacts with the homeland. For a Chinatown or a Little Italy to emerge, a large enough number of migrants that justifies the establishment of a network of commercial operations (relying in part on imported products) and encourages interpersonal relations with other sojourners only, were essential. Siu’s article depicted Russians in New York who socialized only in Russian homes (Siu 1952: 35-37); for that to be possible, a Russian community, even if small, had to exist. Shokeid, who studied Israeli sojourners in New York, described the culinary businesses that were established to serve their longing for Israeli dishes and for socializing with fellow expatriates (Shokeid 1988: 71-72); a substantial number of Israelis residing in proximity and sharing the same tastes motivated this process, and some steady import of products from the homeland was necessary. Until the emergence of advanced media technologies, the dependency of sojourning patterns on social interactions within a migratory community or with the homeland applied also to media consumption. This is no longer the case. Advanced media have done more than to obliterate a number of the impediments sojourners faced when trying to extend to afar the media of their homelands. One curious aspect of the possibilities they create is that the virtual can be consumed without any affinity to a physical reality. In the past, the ethnic store, the expatriates’ social club, or to the very least the goodwill of relatives back home that sent packages, were an essential part of the effort to recreate a home away from home through media consumption. Now sojourners can do without these things; in reading the newspaper of the homeland or watching its television shows, they can be ‘lone sojourners’.

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The most radical example of this transformation that I have encountered in my field work was Zvi, an Israeli sojourner in Germany, whose mediaconsumption patterns I documented throughout 2007. Zvi was born in 1966 in Jerusalem. He married Gabriela, a German-Jew, in 1990. In 2001 they moved to Frankfurt am Main. He contended that when arriving in Germany, he saw himself as a businessman who would live in Germany for a limited time, visit Israel frequently, make a lot of money and then return to the homeland for good. His business, manufacturing glass frames, did not do well, and he and Gabriela never returned. In 2005 he purchased a Malaysian restaurant in Frankfurt, and added some authentic Israeli dishes to the menu. In his first years in Germany, Zvi showed an inclination to assimilate in his receiving country. He took three courses in the German language, and watched a lot of German television. In those first years, he maintained contact with Israel mainly through the internet. At least an hour a day, Zvi read Israeli news sites. Then, in 2004, something changed Zvi’s life: he discovered satellite television. First, he discovered Channel 33, the satellite channel of the Israel Broadcasting Authority (IBA). It is an unpopular, publicly funded channel. Channel 33 made little impression on him, except for its daily broadcast of the IBA’s evening news. However, a year later Zvi discovered the Israeli Network, a commercial channel (commonly known also as the Israeli Channel), established for Israeli immigrants worldwide. Zvi connected both his home and his restaurant to the Israeli Channel. After doing that, he started to dedicate about four hours a day to watching its broadcasts, occupying most of his free time. In this way his life began to revolve around the programming of his favorite shows. His knowledge of every little political item occurring in Israel and every cultural trend was impeccable. Meanwhile, his connection to the imagined community of Germany dwindled to the point of almost nonexistence. His language skills, he testified, “ceased to develop”. Speaking about his connection to Germany and Israel, Zvi said: I look from the sidelines at what is happening in Germany. My real feelings are toward what happens in Israel. If there is a terror attack, if there is war [in Israel], I live it by the minute. I follow it with my family and my friends as it happens.

Zvi developed the life of an ideal-type sojourner, but did so alone. Around 490 Israeli citizens lived in Frankfurt at the time. However, they did not form a community and had no cultural or commercial organizations. Zvi made no Israeli German-based friends. There was no ethnic – or other – store in Frankfurt that sold Israeli newspapers. Zvi cultivated a one-man Israeli bubble, an individual

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extension of the homeland in another country, without relying on any interactions with other Israeli sojourners or on the support of friends in the homeland. Zvi’s media consumption patterns demonstrate that intensified connectivity with the homeland does not necessarily result in an intensification of actual political involvement. While Zvi was very much informed about everything that was happening in his homeland, he did not actively engage in its affairs. Zvi was very conscious of the fact that he was an Israeli living in Frankfurt, and he believed this imposed restraints on his political participation. For him, this distinction was ideological. Zvi said he did not believe that being able to follow Israeli events by the second or being able to respond to them as if he still lived in Israel gave him the right to do so, because, he said, he would not suffer the consequences that people residing in Israel would (Shavit 2009: 62-67). Another typology of migrants challenged by advanced media technologies is the transnational. The term has been widely introduced to Migration Studies since the 1990s to reflect the realities of migrants with multiple identities who maintain a confident and possibly equal emotional attachment and sense of belonging to both their sending and receiving societies. Studies on this typology highlighted that transnationals combine daily activities, routines and institutions (in the social, political, financial or cultural spheres) located both in a sending and a receiving country (Levitt 2004: 1003; see for example Skrbiš 1999, Itzigsohn et al. 1999, Glick Schiller/Foroun 2001). The relations of transnationals with their homeland were described as existing not “only in the domains of imagination and sentiment”, but also in the domains of actions (Glick Schiller/Foroun 2001: 20). Historically, transnationalism was encouraged by a number of developments, including faster and cheaper transportation, the globalization of media, the breakdown of the Soviet Block and the liberalization of laws – and social expectations – regarding dual citizenships and electoral participation. Advanced media challenge this typology by allowing the emergence of a new kind of transnational: an individual with a multiple identity who feels a simultaneous attachment to a sending and a receiving society, but engages with the homeland only as a passive observer. Hanifa, a first-generation Turkish migrant in Germany, was the most radical example I encountered for a person who developed the mindset of a transnational, but participated in the affairs of the sending state through an imagined and passive way only. Born in 1946 in Ankara and married at the age of 13, she arrived in Germany in 1967, shortly after her husband. Like other guest-workers, she soon became an ideal-type sojourner – Germany became her permanent home, but in her mind she still believed she would return someday to Turkey and made hardly any effort to integrate. For example, in the 1970s, her television

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offered only German channels, but she refused to succumb; she would turn down the volume and played a cassette of Turkish songs, imagining the people on the small screen were singing in Turkish. With time, it became clear to Hanifa and her family (as was the case for a majority of guest-workers) that they are in Germany to stay. But exactly at the point of transforming from a sojourner to a member of a minority ethnic, hyphenated community of Turkish-Germans, something happened that transformed her life (and that of other Turks in Germany at large). In 1990, TRT-INT, the international subsidiary of TRT, a public Turkish channel, was received on Hanifa’s German cable system. TRT-INT was one of the first examples of a national channel extending itself outside the national boundaries to attract immigrants. Immediately, Hanifa’s media consumption habits radically changed. By then a pensioner, she began watching the channel six hours a day. Except for sports, she found interest in everything: series, talk shows, variety shows, movies, music and news. She watched the news from Turkey at least four times a day – at 06:00, 13:00, 17:00 and 20:00. If awake, she also watched the 24:00 edition. Other than news, her favorite programs were travel and folklore documentaries. She said the years that passed without Turkish television had caused her to lose touch with modern words, but she quickly caught up “through the context”. In 2006 Hanifa subscribed to the basic Turkish cable package. If she had had the financial means, she would have bought a satellite dish and signed up for the complete Turkish package, giving her a choice of 40 Turkish channels. Subscribing to the seven-channel package did not change the overall number of hours she devoted to watching Turkish television, even though her options became more varied. Her new favorite became Kanal 7, a religious-conservative channel, where she enjoys religious, cooking and travel shows. Why was it that Hanifa, having spent most of her adult life in Germany and being secure that she would stay in Germany, jumped so eagerly at the opportunity to connect extensively to homeland television? She offered two explanations. One, that she understands Turkish 100%, while she only partially understands German. The other relates to the self-definition of her identity: “Turkey is my home, Germany is my second home. I live here but my heart is always in Turkey. This is why Turkey is more interesting for me.” However, Hanifa’s extensive involvement in the Turkish imagined community did not mean increased participation in the physical Turkey that she left. She said she wished she could afford to travel to Turkey and vote for Erdoğan, her favorite politician. But it was not only a matter of finances that kept her in Germany. While she intensely took part in primary, simultaneous and ongoing exposure to the imagined Turkish nation, the reality of Turkey became less and

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less attractive for her. Her seven children and their families lived in Germany; she did not respond well to the weather in Turkey because of her illness. She felt that some aspects of Turkish culture alienate her. She declared: “Today I don’t feel so much like visiting Turkey. Not like I used to. My parents died and my sister is old. After one month in Turkey, I feel I long for Germany, and I already want to return here” (Shavit 2009: 75-79). Hanifa, who maintained a strong sense of belonging to both Germany and Turkey, divided her life between a physical Germany and an imagined Turkey. In a sense, she became an ideal-type transnational, that is, a person who draws upon and creates fluid and multiple identities grounded both in her society of origin and in the host society (Glick Schiller/Basch/Blanc-Szanton 1992: 11). Her identity developed in a way that manifests the changing nature of relations between migrants and their homelands, in which nation-states can no longer make exclusive citizenship a sine qua non, and the scope for multiple affiliations and associations that opens outside and beyond them allows allegiance with the homeland “to become both more open and more acceptable” (Cohen 1997: 174). Yet Hanifa’s transnationalism was of a passive nature. Starting her life in Germany as a sojourner and gradually developing a sense of unique Turkish-German ethnicity, she became secure knowing that her family’s future is in Germany. Her life divided between two countries. She favored Germany as a destination of choice, yet the major portion of her leisure time was spent imagining Turkey from afar. However, this imagination did not involve any direct, active participation in the Turkish homeland; in fact, it turned gradually into a substitute for such an involvement. Zvi and Hanifa demonstrate what may well prove a profound effect of advanced media technologies on the relations between nation-states and migrants. Imagination through satellites and the internet has the potential to distinguish between the sharing of political imagery and the sharing of political fate. The imagined community and the political community no longer necessarily overlap. Migrants can be almost full participants in the former without participating in the latter. Moreover, they can be fully immersed in imagining their community of origin from afar without the mediation of political or commercial organizations of a migratory community.

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R EFERENCES Anderson, Benedict (1991): Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Beck, Ulrich (2000, orig. 1999): What is Globalization?, trans. Patrick Camiller, Cambridge: Polity Press. “CNN à la Française” (2006): Welt Kompakt, 6 December, 30. Cohen, Robin (1997): Global Diasporas: An Introduction, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Friedland, Lewis A. (1992): Covering the World: International Television News Services, New York: A Twentieth Century Fund Paper. Glick Schiller, Nina/Basch Linda/Blanc-Szanton Christina (1992): “Transnationalism: A New Analytic Framework for Understanding Migration”, in: Nina Glick Schiller/Linda Basch/Christina Blanc-Szanton (eds), Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered, New York: The New York Academy of Science, 1–24. —/Fouron, Georges Eugene (2001): Georges Woke up Laughing: Long Distance Nationalism and the Search for Home, Durham: Duke University Press. Hjarvard, Stig (2001): “News Media and the Globalization of the Public Sphere”, in: Stig Hjarvard (ed.), News in a Globalized Society, Göteborg: Nordicom, 17–41. Itzigsohn, Jose/Cabral, Carlos Dore/Medina, Esther Hernández/Vázquez,Obed (1999): “Mapping Dominican Transnationalism: Narrow and Broad Transnational Practices”, in: Ethnic and Racial Studies 22.2, 316-339. Levitt, Peggy (2004): “Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society”, in: International Migration Review 30.3, 1002-1039. Lum, Man Kong Casey (1998): “Chinese Cable Television: Social Activism, Community Service and Nonprofit Media in New York’s Chinatown”, in: Gary Gumpert/Susan J. Drucker (eds), The Huddled Masses: Communication and Migration, Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 121-144. Pan, Lynn (1994): Sons of the Yellow Emperor: A History of the Chinese Diaspora, New York: Kodansha International. Safran, William (1991): “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return”, in: Diasporas 1.1, 83-84. Schiller, Herbert I. (1969): Mass Communication and the American Empire, New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers.

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Shavit, Uriya (2009): The New Imagined Community: Global Media and The Construction of National and Muslim Identity of Migrants, Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. Sheffer, Gabriel (1986): “A New Field of Study: Modern Diasporas in International Politics”, in: Gabriel Sheffer (ed.), Modern Diasporas in International Politics, London: Croom Helm, 1-15. Shokeid, Moshe (1988): Children of Circumstances: Israeli Emigrants in New York, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Siew-Peng, Lee (2001): “Satellite Television and Chinese Migrants in Britain”, in: Russell King/Nancy Wood (eds), Media and Migration: Constructions of Mobility and Difference, London: Routledge, 143–157. Siu, Paul C.P. (1952): “The Sojourner”, in: American Journal of Sociology 58.1, 34–44. Skrbiš, Zlato (1999): Long Distance Nationalism: Diasporas, Homelands and Identities, Aldershot: Ashgate. “Using Oil to Spread Revolution” (2005): The Economist, 28 July, ‹econo mist.com/world/americas/displaystory.cfm?story_id=4232330›, accessed on 16 November 2015.

Part II: Media Politics

Inter/National Media Politics Approaches to Postcolonial Studies B ARBARA T HOMASS

I NTRODUCTION Shome and Hegde asked how “institutionalized knowledge is […] subject to forces of colonialism, nation, geopolitics, and history” (2002: 251). How are media politics inspired by the claims of modernity? Where are the limits of concepts of mainstream media politics? What does the lack of civil society in some of the decolonialized countries mean? Do media politics reflect the elements of dominance and moreover of resistance to how they are developed? These are questions that result from a postcolonial approach to media politics, national or international. As a general remark, to begin with, it has to be admitted that due to the Eurocentrism dominating Media Politics Studies so far, we lack just and equitable knowledge about the countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America and do not know enough about the deep divisions and inequities of exchange. This chapter will clarify the notion of ‘Inter/national Media Politics’, discuss how this disciplinary field is interrelated with the approach of Postcolonial Studies, evaluate the potential of the postcolonial perspective for the field of Inter/national Media Politics, and look at what the field of Inter/national Media Politics can contribute to Postcolonial Studies. I do not claim to be fully familiar with all of the concepts, theories, studies and developments of postcolonial thinking. I took on the endeavor to understand as a novice what postcolonial thinking is like and what it could contribute to the field of International Media Politics, which I am familiar with (Kleinsteuber/Thomaß 2009; Thomaß 2013), as well what media politics can contribute to Postcolonial Studies. The relation to issues of postcoloniality in this respect is identified in the central question, if claims, views and values of other cultures and ethnicities than those of the

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mainstream or majoritarian societies have the possibility of access to and articulation within the media. Postcolonial Studies were developed on the two axes of a Marxist-materialist orientation which is mostly interested in active politics and a semioticpoststructuralist orientation which focusses more on theory (Struve 2012: 92). They can also be differentiated according to whether they follow the linguistic turn and regard economic and social power relations as based on text and discourse or whether they focus on social conditions of living and representations which can be analyzed as such. Given the fact that researchers of media politics are interested in these social conditions of the power play in media, the Marxistmaterialist perspective may speak more to them than an approach that considers culture not primarily as being formed by conditions of economy, politics and technology but as an independent text. In order to lay out the conceptual thinking of the presented approach, some clarifications and definitions are required. Media are regarded in this chapter as central agents for making communication in society possible. They are institutions embedded in social, political, economic and cultural contexts, and they are based on technologies of a given state. At present, media such as satellite broadcasting services and internet services bring the messages of global media companies right into the center of the lives of billions in a vast array of nations, cultures and ethnicities, not regarding their backgrounds, longings and belongings. Media politics in general try to influence the structures of media, their performance and their outputs, and predominantly it is the “West” which dominates the “Rest” (Rao 2010: 103) by producing and circulating flows of media products, journalistic styles, fiction narratives and aesthetics and media ethics. All this is shaped by the market and the efforts of media politics on the local, national, regional and international level to control the market and to give it an appropriate frame. International media politics reflect the fact that politics always happen in specific spaces, which are also communicative spaces (Kleinsteuber/Thomaß 2009). These spaces can be of very different nature and comprise five factors: 1. Technology: Spaces are defined in a physical manner via the range of media, i.e. the radius of a broadcast or the footprint of a satellite. Technically speaking – and only technically – the Internet defines the global communication space. 2. Politics: Spaces are defined by administrative units, i.e. nation-states. The political systems of nation-states are those which primarily generate media politics.

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3. Legislation: Closely related to administrative units is the application of laws or – for international media politics – international treaties, which relate to the political space of the state. 4. Economy: It defines spaces according to the logics of market economy. Media companies are active in a space where they can realize their profits; these markets are not necessarily congruent with political-legal spaces, e.g. film markets or transnational television. 5. Culture: This refers to the remaining spaces – or free spaces – which can be interpreted as a supplement or corrective to the aforementioned actors and spaces. Here global and local activities are possible which come from the center of society, e.g. civil society activities (Kleinsteuber/Rossmann 1994: 36). Culture, which is for Postcolonial Studies a central dimension to be analyzed, can be interpreted in this frame as the weakest factor shaping communication spaces and is often pushed back by primarily economic drivers and political power in their service. The protection of cultural spaces against the claims of economics is therefore central for Postcolonial Studies. Communication spaces are not secluded containers, but formations of spaces which can have very different dimensions and which are interlaced in many ways. These manifold spaces are not identical with political systems; they can exceed them by far (e.g. the footprint of a satellite) or be much smaller than them (e.g. a local online community). Hence, Postcolonial Studies can bring new views to the interpretation of communication spaces and point to those aspects that are not dealt with in media politics, which mostly focus on technology, politics, law and economy. The combination of political and legal spaces can be specified further by identifying levels on which media politics occur. Politics in general and media politics also take place in a multi-level system, which means that different levels of decision cooperate or compete with one another or do both. In a federal state, media politics are developed and implemented on the level of states and of the nation. In Europe the EU is the decisive level, and in international media politics the UNESCO or international treaties such as GATS, TRIPS or TTIP can be named. It is typical that media politics oscillate between these levels; political processes wander up and down these levels or move horizontally and transgress borders on one of these levels (Kleinsteuber/Thomaß 2009: 67). If we transfer this multi-level-concept to the global context, we can identify the following levels of politics:

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1. 2. 3. 4.

world, region (continent, a defined number of states), the nation-state and – beyond these – transnational or even transregional cooperations.

Which level is dominant or even decisive, which nation-states have the strongest influence in this complex system of media politics is subject to a power play which is based on factors of domination and subordination. These factors – and this is important in the context of this chapter – are part of a relation between the states that stems from colonial structures and their postcolonial heritage. On each of the levels, a postcolonial perspective of analysis can therefore take place, and it would be a promising endeavor to look for the outcomes of such an analysis. Media politics can occur in very different scenarios, be driven by different actors and take place in varying institutions as well as have ever-new content (Ahrweiler/Thomaß 2005). To structure the field, Political Studies’ classical triad of politics, policies and polities is helpful, which will inspire the following remarks (Kleinsteuber 2001). By polity (system) we refer to the political order in its totality, including the constitution, the norms and the given institutions. For media the fundamental legal provisions are particularly important, as well as the relevant institutions such as parliaments, governments and courts. However, visions and overall guiding principles by which the institutions are led are important as well. The notion of politics (process) is applied when the struggle of the political actors for power is in the focus and their strategies for the implementation of aims are described. They are all input-orientated, which means that they try to influence the political system. Typical actors here are media companies and their organizations, political parties, associations, trade unions, and NGOs. They direct specific political demands to the political system, for example for more participation or influence, active media policies or non-action of the state. The notion of policies (decisions) is used for content and forms by which media politics are shaped. The main focus with this concept is on the output resulting from the political process. Policies describe the fields of political action which influences media and communication such as, for example, licensing, press subsidies, quota etc. As political processes are cyclical, any output is the object of a following input: as soon as a media law has been passed, new discussions of the consequences start. These typologies serve for orientation only, as reality is much more complex, and in concrete political processes these factors may be blurred, in the sense that an institution (polity) might become an actor (politics), or a law (policy) is

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established as part of the order (polity). The following section will elaborate on the main trends within these fields of media polities, politics and policies and show which questions and approaches by Postcolonial Studies could be elaborated. This chapter assumes that Postcolonial Studies and Communication Studies in the field of International Media Politics can offer something to each other, and it is presupposed that various phenomena of media politics and postcoloniality are intertwined with each other. As Postcolonial Studies always takes an emancipatory political stance in the sense that it tries to theorize how colonial conditions and its consequences “can be undone and redone” (Shome/Hegde 2002: 250), an emancipatory perspective will dominate the remainder of this chapter.

M EDIA O RDERS – P OLITIES Comparing Media Systems A central instrument to understand media orders in the global scope is the comparison of media systems. This has a long-standing tradition. From the beginning of this approach, which is represented by the Four Theories of the Press (Siebert/Peterson/Schramm 1956), its starting point and focusing perspective were the Western media systems with their values of democracy, selfdetermination, state, individual and free thought, which were deeply rooted in the idea of the Enlightenment and completely betrayed in the period of colonialism. Not only did these values not apply to any of the autochthonous people in the colonized countries, many of these countries were also held accountable for the fact that they did not manage to build media systems which obeyed the demands of these values. Siebert et al. identified four types of media systems according to their appearance in history: the authoritarian model, dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the liberal model inspired by the philosophy of enlightenment, the (idealistic) social responsibility model, proposed by the Hutchin’s Commission on the Press in the USA in 1984, and – identified at the peak of the Cold War – the communist model. This form of classification had a strongly normative approach. By looking at the rationales and theories behind the press and describing these normative rationales, the description of the models had itself a normative bias as it is founded on an ethnocentrically grounded philosophy of freedom. It wanted to explain differences of media systems and press performance, and it ended up in measuring the performance of media systems in other countries against the background of the dominant Western philosophical

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mainstream of liberalism. Four Theories of the Press confined itself to a few countries, which were the USA, the UK and the Soviet Union. On the basis of the four theories no reference was made to the situation in colonized countries nor to the effects of the understanding of media freedom as expressed in the described models on the colonial populations. This schematic classification of media systems was continued in the concept of Ronneberger (1978), who contrasted North/South and East/West systems. His Western model, located in Europe and North America, follows the liberal model of Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm; his Eastern model follows their communist model. He adds two more models located in the South, in the developing countries: the first model comprises politically active media, which are endowed by the government with a guidance function, besides media which do not follow any political issues; the second model describes media which take on a developing function of their own will and autonomy, but still in accordance with the governmental sphere. Again the Western liberal model is the benchmark of classification in this concept, which also uses the binary code of free and non-free media (Massmann 2003: 31). It is to Ronneberger’s credit that he added a look at developing countries to the hitherto bipolar considerations; yet modernizing theories which take ‘the West’ as the ideal model lurk in the background of this concept. A few years later Martin and Chaudhary (1983) segmented the world into three ideological systems – the Western, the Communist and the Third World – and described important aspects of the media against this background: the nature and treatment of news, the role of mass media, their significance as vehicles of education, persuasion, opinion making and entertainment. They also looked at mass media economics and press freedom. Thus the scope of elements to be analyzed was enlarged, and a functionalist view came into consideration. But the approach did not look at all at postcolonial heritages and at the specifics of the cultures which were summarized under the label of the so-called Third World. Wiio’s contingency model of communication (1983) marked the effort to leave this normatively grounded approach behind as it tried to find categories by which media systems could be described empirically. He differentiated between the openness or closed character of the receiver system and the message system, between public and private ownership in combination with centralized and decentralized control of the media, and the right to receive and the right to send, which can be either with the individual or with the state – all categories which were built on the experiences in the West. Thus he introduced more categories and tried to avoid the established dichotomies of media classification. As he ended up in identifying two types of communication models, the Marxist

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models, being sender-centered, and the pluralist models, being receiver-centered, his approach did not allow the discovery of a specific approach to postcolonial countries nor the introduction of categories which would have been able to capture the ways of communication which shape the media, for example, in oral cultures. Another approach which immediately followed Wiio’s shows convergent elements of different media systems. Altschull (1984) looked at purposes of journalism, views of press freedom, articles of faith as they are described by the representatives of the different media systems themselves. Hence, he studied the discrepancy of self-description and reality in different countries and the underlying ideology. The common characteristic of the market model, the Marxist model and the advancing model in his concept is that, in all media systems, “news media are agents of those who exercise political or economic power” and that for that reason “the content of the news media reflects the interest of those who finance the press” (Altschull 1984: 298). Altschull’s contribution to comparative media system analysis from a postcolonial perspective is the idea that classification of media systems in Communication Studies had been hitherto reflecting the bloc ideology of the Cold War, that notions like objectivity, press freedom, presentation of truth and the assumption that media would serve the right of information of the public have to be interpreted in their respective geographic, political and historic environment and that advancing countries – as he called them – have their own approaches to media politics. Nevertheless, the majority of the models reflect European perspectives of the 1970s and 1980s as they try to find positions in the world order and do not consider how comparing media systems from a different geographical perspective would have led to different categories and models. Postcolonial thinking in this field would have brought about ideas on the characteristics that forces of colonialism, nation, geopolitics and history have brought to media polities. Yet geographical, geopolitical and historical specifics in the media polities are not analyzed in these models, and they fall short of providing tools of understanding the media systems of the cultures of ‘the South’. This is mainly because media polities – as described in comparisons of media systems – simplify or completely ignore the complexity of the rest of the world. They reproduce mostly the notion of the inferiority of the ‘East’ and the ‘South’. An important step in the comparison of media systems was the publication of Hallin and Mancini (2004), who developed better empirically grounded models. In their analysis, they include only countries of developed capitalist dem-

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ocracies, i.e. countries from Western Europe and North America and identify three models: •

•

•

the liberal model which is found in Britain, Ireland and North America and characterized “by a relative dominance of market mechanisms and of commercial media”; the democratic corporatist model which prevails across northern continental Europe and is characterized “by historical coexistence of commercial media and media tied to organized social and political groups”; and the polarized pluralist model prevailing in the Mediterranean countries of southern Europe, which is characterized by “integration of the media into party politics, weaker historical development of commercial media, and a strong role of the state” (Hallin/Mancini 2004: 11).

Hallin and Mancini’s approach may be disputed from a postcolonial perspective, but they were not responsible for their models being used as a blueprint to look at other media systems in the world. Voltmer discusses the limitation of the model of Hallin and Mancini with respect to the non-Western world and criticizes that the polarized pluralist model has become “something like a catch-all category for media systems outside the Western world of established democracies” (2012: 225). It is obvious that all the dynamics of democratization in countries with a colonial heritage cannot be grasped by models – let alone only one model – that were designed to explain a historically specific state of media systems. Hence the “De-Westernization” of comparative Media Studies (Curran/ Park 2002) is an important endeavour of international media politics as a research field. Despite the countless efforts of government programmes and NGO activities to ‘export’ Western standards of democratic institutions and media, the post-autocratic countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America show a huge diversity of ways that political institutions and media performance are shaped and also how the relation between both takes very many different forms. The notion of autocratic and post-autocratic countries refers to those decolonialized countries that struggle to overcome postcolonial structures. In their concluding remarks on the review of their model, Hallin and Mancini (2012) stipulate that the conceptualization of the four dimensions as a framework for comparing media systems – structure of media markets, professionalism of journalists, political parallelism and the role of the state – have to be reconsidered and refined. This is the anchor point where postcolonial thinking could enter in comparative media system analysis and the description of media polities in the world, in order to find new adequate categories which can question the

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Western-born notions of democracy, self-determination, civil society, state, equality, the state, the individual, free thought, and democratic justice, look at how they have been distorted in the period of colonialism and afterwards, and analyze what this means for the media orders of the colonized countries. Open vs. Monopolized markets Beyond the models discussed above, media orders can be analyzed according to market structures, and these have a huge impact on the possibilities to overcome postcolonial conditions. Whose voice is heard in the media and whose is not is dependent on market structures, ownership and access to the dominant media corporations. For a long time, print and audiovisual media with few exceptions were only active in a national context. In these confined national markets concentration processes started soon after the Second World War which were fueled by the media-specific economies of scale that privilege big media corporations over small ones. Thus, while small media outlets were dying away, highly concentrated media markets developed, and the surviving media houses engaged in transnational activities. Anti-monopolistic policies were not successful, neither on the national, the regional (EU-) nor the global level. Although, on the global level, the news market is still marked by a quite pluralist situation – CNN could not defend a monopolistic position but was challenged by channels like BBC World, Deutsche Welle, France 24, or Russia Today –, the online and the entertainment sector show a highly concentrated pattern again, as can be observed with Google and Facebook in the online sector and the ‘Big Six’ (20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures, Universal Studios, Columbia Pictures and Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group) in the entertainment business. These big ‘media players’ dominate the markets with a homogenized culturally unified product palette where alternative perspectives, cultural articulations or diverse individualities find little place. Postcolonial Studies find a rich source of material and a challenge here to deconstruct these patterns showing the hegemony of the West. The big media players shape consuming styles, proliferate ideologies of life styles, shape opinions on the relative values of different cultures and decide on the inclusion or exclusion of cultures from the worldwide cultural industries. The consequences of media concentration are studied mostly in the news sector, as well as the internet and entertainment businesses. They are problematized in Media Politics Studies both with respect to social values of a democratic society and to the possibilities of plurality and participation but have not yet been analyzed deeply with respect to the question of how they influence

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culture and societies in postcolonial countries and how they determine the chances of multiculturalism in the metropolitan regions. Thus, by analyzing the dominant cultural values in media production and exposing their inherent Western hegemony on the one hand and by demonstrating which cultural richness remains unrepresented in the media products of concentrated markets on the other, Postcolonial Studies can give an important insight into the consequences of the dominating media production for the absence of cultural diversity. Institutions and Structures of Regulation Despite a strong public service sector – mainly in many European countries –, the commercial media model largely dominates the mediascapes of the world. This does not mean that there is no state interference in the media sector. In most states, regulation of the broadcasting markets is in practice, which means that a state body gives out licenses for broadcasting and controlling if certain standards and guidelines are observed. While this principle was dominated for a long time by social, cultural and democratic orientations, a shift to an economic paradigm happened around twenty years ago (Hoffmann-Riem 1996) and is now the prevailing model (Trappel et al. 2015). In both models – the welfare-orientated media regulation and the market-orientated one – cultures that exist beyond the mainstream society had and have an extremely difficult standing. However, the welfare-orientated regulation model contains the chance that with the values of plurality and diversity, which are leading values in most pluralistic societies, minority cultures and their articulations have a possibility to find a protected niche in the mediascape. Market-driven regulation, in contrast, means that the above described homogenization of cultural content, which is pushed by media concentration, is not combated. This is especially true when it comes to the media and communication policies of the EU. The EU commission submits its media and communication policies to the claim of competition rules which are at the heart of the European integration (Puppis 2007). Furthermore, the special dislimitation of media supplies and their transnationalization implies that national media regulation is losing power and influence and supranational approaches gain momentum. The UNESCO declaration for cultural diversity (see below) demonstrates that the respective actors do not possess enough weight to be a proper counterpart to the globally acting media players. They are very much dependent on the possibility for action that they are granted by their national governments. The weaknesses of international agreements which could make a case for more cultural diversity, access and articulation of all cultures in in the world are especially seen in the

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autocratic countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, where government control over the media impedes an autonomous and participatory media model which would help to overcome neocolonial dominances in media production. The connections between media regulation, postcoloniality and diversity have not yet been studied and would provide a fruitful field of analysis for an interdisciplinary approach of Postcolonial Studies and International Media Politics. The same applies for any treaties as GATT, GATS, TRIPS and the upcoming TTIP. They all are part of structures that are called ‘global governance’, meaning that states and governments are no longer at the center of activities, but stakeholders and shareholders, and the results are obtained in more or less formalized negotiation processes. The question of democratic legitimation must be posed here, when only private companies are the decisive actors, and civil society and non-commercial interests are not taken into account (Hamm/Machill 2001). The impact of the mentioned treaties on cultural identities and independence is discussed widely, but could be deepened with respect to problems and challenges of postcoloniality. In this perspective, the analysis of the mentioned treaties, their negotiation and outcomes would bring across knowledge about how the involvement or non-involvement of diverse actors lead to the establishment of media structures that foster or hinder the expression of a wide variety of cultural voices.

I NPUT – P OLITICS Actors of National Media Politics A large number and different types of actors is typical of politics in the sector of media and communication. In the communication industries alone, seven types of actors can be distinguished: telecoms, producers of information and communication technology, mobilcoms, cable distributors, broadcasters, publishers and film producers, railways, energy producers and others which potentially provide communication networks (Grewlich 1994: 621). Among the actors on the national level we can identify public service broadcasters, media moguls (Tunstall/ Palmer 1991), financial investors, NGOs with media initiatives, and political parties and associations. Depending on the economic situation of a country in the communication sector, a multitude of possible alliances and consortia result which then are relevant for media politics. All those actors and alliances can be analyzed with respect to whether they have the claims of diverse cultures on their agenda, whether they open access of

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deprived groups to the media and whether they have a stake in restricting the activities of private companies in a commercialized media market which foster homogeneous media content. As representatives and NGOs from diverse cultures and ethnicities are quite weak in this concert of media political actors, concerns of socially and culturally deprived groups do not usually have a strong stake within national media politics. An important aspect of media politics on the national level is the question whether it is organized in a centralized or decentralized way. A strong decentrality as in Spain or Germany is opposed to the strongly centralized model of media politics as e.g. in France (see Moragas Spà/Garitaonandía/López 1999). The possibility of actors to influence media policies is bigger in the decentralized model, as the competing forces in this model do not have much individual power, whereas centralized institutions for media politics are more readily in the position to reject the claims of dissenting actors. Movements of autonomous media for diverse cultures are thus potentially more successful in the decentralized model. The attempt to link media politics closely to government action is prevailing in countries where a democratic mediascape is in its infancy as can be seen with the ministries for information that exist in many authoritarian or semiauthoritarian states. This is the case in most of the countries in Africa, Central Asia and the Arab world. Finding explanations from Postcolonial Studies for the political situation of these countries is thus also a key for an explanation of the media situation. Decentrality with a multitude of actors is the result of a long liberal market tradition, where the media sector developed with little interference by the state, and only some anti-cartel bodies are active, as e.g. the Office of Fair Trading in the UK or the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice in the USA or – looking at a supranational institution – the Directorate-General for Competition within the EU commission. Questions of media are questions of power – this relation is especially true when it comes to claims of access of deprived groups of the society, and the structures of media regulation can give important hints to answer the question of how access for them can be achieved and guaranteed. However, whether this concept of decentrality is a valuable one for all media related power conditions is still a pending question for analysis. Actors of International Media Politics The most important media actor on the international level is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) with 195 member states, which since its founding in 1945 has lived through a significant change in its media politics (see Breunig 1996). While in its beginnings it was orientated

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towards the promotion of cooperation in the field of communication, it soon became subject to the dominance of the Cold War and led the struggle around the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO). NWICO was demanded by non-industrial states, whereas the Western world defended the principle of free flow of information, the latter meaning that the economic and cultural dominance of media content from the West should be maintained. At present, the defense of plurality, the independence of the media, access to communication, the development of an information ethics (infoethics) and the protection of cultural diversity are the main topics of the UNESCO. The meaning that is inscribed in these topics can be questioned from postcolonial perspectives, as they all have a strong Western bias. However, there has been a development towards challenging the dominance of Western claims. One example might be the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity of 2001 which resulted in the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions in 20051. This convention created an authoritative foundation for the right of all states to an independent cultural policy. Today, the UNESCO tries to support media cultures in the poor regions in ‘the South’ and to coordinate education programs for journalists. It is due to the character and the structure of this organization that its initiatives and declarations strongly smack of compromise. But the possibilities to challenge Western values and views in dealing with media and communication have grown, and the voice of the UNESCO is important when it comes to reminding people of the cultural and societal functions of the media in the world. Another international institution, the Organization for Security and CoOperation in Europe (OSCE) has dealt with media issues occurring in the wake of the democratization of the former socialist countries. The OSCE’s appointment of a Representative on Freedom of the Media might be questioned from a postcolonial standpoint in the case that the Representative refers to media freedom only as a concept of liberal markets and not as the principle of all voices to be heard. Yet when it comes to intervening where journalists are threatened in authoritarian countries or when standards of online communication are developed, the possibilities of this institution for promoting conditions for more plurality and diversity in the media become relevant. Much more problematic are organizations like GATS (General Agreement on Trades and Services) and WTO (World Trade Organization) which have expanded their activities to the realm of media and thus transfer normative principles that are binding for the worldwide commercial exchange of goods to

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media services and culture. Especially with the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which is being negotiated at present, it becomes obvious that the obligation to the increasing liberalization of media services is in sharp conflict with the cultural exception that many countries claim with respect to media production. In view of the limitless communication facilitated by information and communication technologies, a growing section of national media politics will have to be transferred to supranational organizations as most of the upcoming problems can no longer be solved within a national framework. These circumstances were accommodated by the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) in 2003 (Geneva) and 2005 (Tunis). It hosted the attempt to come to a common understanding of the information society and to develop proposals for action in the field of media and communication. Since the WSIS, new actors of the civil society (NGOs) have entered the stage of international media politics. Even if they did not have a great influence on the final declarations, WSIS allowed some participation for them. For the first time with a UN summit, there was a far-ranging integration of NGOs. Nevertheless, it was a central point of contestation whether organizations of the civil society should be entitled to take part as actors with equal rights to representatives from states and from international and economic organizations. The extension of the circle of actors will be a main trend of future inter/national media politics: a window is opened so that postcolonial analyses and critiques might result in claims and activities that could help to overcome postcolonial deprivations and to strengthen and renew media policies in service to cultural diversity needs and complex heritage issues.

O UTPUT – P OLICIES Foundations In nearly all states, media politics is a rather young field of politics showing dynamic development due to the convergence of information technologies, telephone and broadcasting. It is a field of politics with rather soft contours and fluid general orientations. Its outputs are difficult to foresee because they are often related to the question whether it is possible at all to shape the mediascape by political means: how can politics proceed in a target-oriented way as the claim for media’s independence and distance to government is a central value in pluralistic societies? On the one hand, these values allow for democratic developments of the media, while on the other, they are also obstacles against strong actions being

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taken in favor of neglected cultures and groups. The fact that the general orientations in media politics are not clear cut, because of the variety of actors in the field, means that it is a contested field and that bringing in new claims which might overcome distortions in cultural representation is an option. Thus, the claim for press and media freedom, which is strongly upheld in WesternEuropean constitutions, often is not a social reality, and whether media freedom is interpreted as economic freedom or as cultural freedom is subject to further struggles of power. Aims of Media Politics Even if – as mentioned above – general common goals in media politics are vague in pluralistic societies, there are some political goals which are pursued by different actors according to their own interests. Maintaining and guaranteeing media freedom is one of them; the creation of a regulatory framework for the media to fulfill their public tasks is another. These aims and even more the means to achieve them have already undergone a paradigmatic change in Europe, as a consensual culture-orientated paradigm which puts cultural and social functions of media first was replaced by an economic paradigm that prioritizes the ability of media corporations for competition on the world market (or a regional market). Regarding these central principles of Western media politics, little theoretical work from non-Western perspectives has entered the discussion of so-called ‘universal’ principles for media. The detailed analysis of smaller mediascape units is therefore a promising endeavor. The increased analysis of media globalization requires a closer examination of the principles advocated by media theorists in the field of media politics. Here, Postcolonial Theory can be used to argue that advocates of a universally valid media order need to take into account the history of colonialism, differences of powers between nations and peoples, and the importance of indigenous theory. It can be assumed that in the non-Western world, underlying conditions of postcoloniality and indigenous values influence how media professionals and journalists make decisions on media regulations. These interpretations present an epistemic challenge to dominant political concepts based primarily on Western Enlightenment philosophies. This is obvious when it comes to media ethics, as has been shown e.g. in a discussion of two specific ethical theories, ubuntu from South Africa and ahimsa from India, which illustrate the importance of indigenous knowledge in the search for global media ethics (Rao/Wasserman 2008). Yet, as aims of media politics refer to the mentioned central concepts of freedom and independence, a

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postcolonially orientated questioning of these principles would lead to a better understanding of the possible range of media politics. The need for this challenge is even more urgent from the perspective of globalization, which has a far-reaching effect on media technologies worldwide. Together with the global spread of media forms, liberal views of the media’s role in a democracy have been exported to countries outside the West. However, reactions against Western, liberal democratic views of the media’s role in society in postcolonial African countries have indicated that the dominant liberal framework is not universally applicable. In South Africa for example, where media underwent a shift towards self-regulation after the era of oppressive state regulation, the debate focuses on the media’s roles and responsibilities in a new democratic society marked by continued social polarization and material inequalities. Wasserman (2006) argues that the dominant understanding of the role of media in society which is prevalent in the Western world is concentrated on liberal market values. According to these values, media have only the task of surveillance of the power, which is in the hands of the government. But looking at power structures in a postcolonial situation makes it necessary to take into consideration all forms of power, especially those which result from inequalities in economic and social terms. Under these circumstances, media politics need aims different from the ones imported from Western cultures. The fulfillment of the tasks for media cannot be trusted to self-regulation when aims such as equal access to the media or adequate representation of cultures and meanings are at stake. According to Wassermann (2006: 83) there are three areas in which a liberal market approach to media politics is not sufficient. This refers to strengthening the role of media • • •

“in surveillance of political and economic power”, “in the affirmation and renegotiation of cultural identity”, “in the transformation of society and the redress of inequalities inherited from apartheid”.

Such a revisionary project of defining new aims of media politics could draw on Postcolonial Theory in order to renegotiate the orthodox media politics frameworks inherited from Western societies and contextualize it within the current historical, (geo)political and cultural situation in South Africa. Experiences show that national, cultural, political or legal differences between states are huge when it comes to articulating the aims of media politics. This is even truer when new fields of media politics emerge. For example, politics in the field of Online Communication have been developed in different

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countries with big time lags. Countries like India, for example, which hoped to make a big leap forward in economic development, made huge efforts to implement adequate politics. There are also different answers to the question of who should be the driving force in implementing new media politics: education institutions, economic corporations, public service broadcasting? As the differences in formulating aims and implementing media politics are so big even between Western countries, there is no reason to assume that Western patterns in these terms can be guiding ones for the rest of the world. Fields of Media Politics The dynamic development of media technologies has opened up new fields of media politics without the older ones having lost their relevance. Especially the Internet with its limitless expansion and its endless possibilities for usage requires media political actions beyond the national frame in order to realize its emancipatory potential. The more negotiations and regulation – if they occur – take place, the more aspects of international power play come into focus for postcolonial perspectives. What is happening within the realm of Internet Governance – trying to develop and implement common principles, norms, regulation and procedures for decision making and programs – is heavily dominated by issues that reflect the concerns of Western industrialized countries: security of data transfer, criminality in the Internet, secured e-commerce, and the control over the Internet. The conflict between the USA and other states concerning a supranational control conceals the fact that many concerns rooted in the social realities of postcolonial countries are not at stake in these negotiations. This refers e.g. to the question of access for rural population, of visibility and survival of indigenous languages in the internet, of digital commons, of educational needs and other media policies that benefit deprived parts of societies. Concepts for media politics that aim at the societal performance of information and communication technologies are orientated towards and framed by the given political, cultural and economic situation of the countries which develop them – and export them. This was true for the US idea of the so-called information superhighway (Kleinsteuber 1996), the initiative “i2010 – A European Information Society for growth and employment”2 or for the negotiations of property rights on the Internet. However, a majority of states is still far from being able to secure access to

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the Internet for their populations. The problem of the digital divide has been debated on the WSIS without solutions. Many poor countries called for a ‘digital solidarity fund’, but the majority of the industrialized countries denied this claim, arguing that the digital infrastructure would develop on its own, provided there were true competition. As the online-world in the industrialized countries is showing increasingly monopolistic structures, with Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. dominating the different sectors of the market, this argument seems to be influenced purely by financial interests and extremely biased. Again, the willingness of supranational organizations and NGOs to work for the overcoming of the digital divide is inspired by a postcolonialist attitude. The problem that in many countries the majority of the population has no access to traditional media shows how much the discourse in international media politics is dominated by views and values of some particularly influential countries. The proliferation of new media has put another field of media politics into the focus of attention: the protection of public service broadcasting, which has come under pressure in those countries where it exists due to the dynamics of commercialization. As public service broadcasting is traditionally a national undertaking and is embedded in the sociocultural paradigm of media politics, it has become endangered in a twofold way. The seemingly limitless expansion of media technologies and digital platforms makes its audiences shrink, and governments are less willing to protect it due to the powerful trend of economic liberalization. On the other hand, its maintenance and the renewal of its remit (Thomass/Moe/d’Haenens 2015) might offer a chance to hold up a counterweight against the overall trend of the commercialization of the mediascapes and also to give space for more groups in society to be heard (Thomass/Radoslavov 2014). This approach can be of relevance for a postcolonial orientated scrutiny, as at least in a normative perspective public service broadcasting is considered as a forum where different claims of society can be expressed and negotiated. The fact that in most of the countries where it exists it is bound heavily to the interests of the mainstream culture should not cloud its possibilities for a more diverse debate and cultural representation. The fact that the media industry is always and simultaneously a cultural industry and therefore touches on values beyond the purely commercial – such as identity, participation, democratic public sphere etc. – leads to the consequence that it benefits in many states from special promotion. This can be seen especially within the film sector. Countries like France and Germany have an active public film funding policy. Although all the mentioned values supported by such policies can be questioned or even deconstructed from a postcolonial perspective, they are certainly directed against pure commercialism in the media

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markets and therefore increase the chance that more cultural diversity, ethnic groups, diverse content and perspectives find access to the media and constitute a counterpart to a mainstream media diet. Even if – in the context of film history rather newly developed – centers of film production like Bollywood, Nollywood or the worldwide travelling Telenovelas of Brazil have emerged, which break up the dominance of Western media production – the necessity for media production beyond profit-orientated strategies lies in the logics of a postcolonially motivated orientation for cultures. Possibilities of International Media Politics Many of the fields of media politics mentioned here – and only a selection of special interest could be addressed – have had transnational, supranational or global dimensions for a long time. Whether technical platforms of distribution, information flows, competition, cooperation, interest, or migrations: national borders play only a minor role in many aspects of media and communication. Limitless commercialization of media supply necessitates regulative interference more than ever, if certain normative aims of media politics which are bound to social communication are supposed to have a chance. This is – with the fullest respect to any critic of these aims, and the fact that they are Western-born, but not maintained in the West – the line behind which any postcolonial strife for emancipation cannot fall back. International cooperation of national actors and the strengthening of supranational actors like UNESCO or European Broadcasting Union are necessary in order to achieve these aims. At the same time, access and representation of the diversity of voices from postcolonial countries is necessary if this struggle is not to be dominated by purely Western ideas. Freedom of opinion, equal access to information and knowledge, equal access to all forms of articulation, protection of cultural diversity – these are principles that need further interpretation from many perspectives, and this can also create an interface for Postcolonial Studies and inter/national media politics.

C ONCLUSION Media are a heavily contested field of power where structures, regulations, actors and their policies create a space of negotiations. These negotiation processes decide as to who has media access and can hence distribute claims and worldviews, spread cultural values or even discriminate against other values. Looking at

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Inter/national Media Politics can thus give explanations to the findings of Postcolonial Studies when they describe misrepresentation, deprivation or discrimination of a multitude of cultures and ethnicities. As Postcolonial Studies also has a strong stake in questioning power and – in the long term – enabling the powerless to be heard, the analyses of media structures as they are shaped by Inter/national Media Politics can be an important interdisciplinary endeavor of Media and Postcolonial Studies. Both can meet in the political goal to strive for a national and international mediascape where a variety of cultural expressions is guaranteed by a multitude of actors and a maximum diversity of content.

R EFERENCES Ahrweiler, Petra/Thomaß, Barbara (eds) (2005): Internationale partizipatorische Kommunikationspolitik: Strukturen und Visionen, Münster: LIT. Altschull, J. Herbert (1984): Agents of Power: The Role of the News Media in Human Affairs, New York: Longman. Breunig, Christian (1996): “Internationale Kommunikationspolitik im Wandel: Alte und neue Initiativen der UNESCO”, in: Miriam Meckel/Markus Kriener (eds), Internationale Kommunikation: eine Einführung, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 67-84. Curran, James/Park, Myung-Jin (eds) (2002): De-Westernizing Media Studies, London: Routledge. Grewlich, Klaus W. (1994): “Multimedia und globale Kommunikation: Wettbewerb und Zusammenarbeit”, in: Europa-Archiv 21, 620-626. Hallin, Daniel C./Mancini, Paolo (2004): Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — (eds) (2012): Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hamm, Ingrid/Machill, Marcel (eds) (2001): Wer regiert das Internet? ICANN als Fallbeispiel für Global Internet Governance, Gütersloh: Verlag Bertelsmann Stiftung. Hoffmann-Riem, Wolfgang (1996): Regulating Media: The Licensing and Supervision of Broadcasters in Six Countries, New York: Guilford Press. Kleinsteuber, Hans J./Rossmann, Torsten (1994): Europa als Kommunikationsraum: Akteure, Strukturen und Konfliktpotentiale in der europäischen Medienpolitik, Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Kleinsteuber, Hans J. (ed.) (1996): Der ‘Information Superhighway’: Amerikanische Visionen und Erfahrungen, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.

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— (2001): “Die Bedeutung der Medienforschung für die Medienpolitik”, in: Uwe Hasebrink/Christiane Matzen (eds), Forschungsgegenstand Öffentliche Kommunikation: Funktionen, Aufgaben und Strukturen der Medienforschung, Baden-Baden: Nomos, 39-54. —/Thomaß, Barbara (2009): “Kommunikationspolitik international – ein Vergleich nationaler Entwicklungen”, in: Hans-Bredöw-Institut (ed.), Internationales Handbuch Medien, Baden-Baden: Nomos, 64-88. Massmann, Annette (2003): Kuba – Globalisierung, Medien, Macht: Eine Indikatorenanalyse zur Klassifkation von Mediensystemen im Zeitalter der Globalen Netzwerkgesellschaft, Frankfurt: IKO Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation. Martin, John L./Chaudhary, Anju Grover (eds) (1983): Comparative Mass Media Systems, New York: Longman. Moragas Spà, Miquel/Garitaonandía, Carmelo/López, Bernat (eds) (1999): Television on your Doorstep: Decentralization Experiences in the European Union, London: Luton Press. Puppis, Manuel (2007): “Von guten und bösen Ordnungshütern – der Einfluss von UNESCO und WTO auf die nationale Medienregulierung“, in: Otfried Jarren/Patrick Donges (eds), Ordnung durch Medienpolitik?, Konstanz: UVK, 131-145. Rao, Shakuntala (2010): “Postcolonial Theory and Global Media Ethics: A Theoretical Intervention”, in: Stephen J. A. Ward/Herman Wasserman (eds), Media Ethics beyond Borders: A Global Perspective, London: Routledge, 90-104. —/Wasserman, Herman (2008): “The Glocalisation of Journalism Ethics”, in: Journalism 9.2, 163-182. Ronneberger, Franz (1978): Kommunikationspolitik: Institutionen, Prozesse, Ziele, Mainz: von Hase & Köhler. Shome, Raka/Hegde, Radha S. (2002): “Postcolonial Approaches to Communication: Charting the Terrain, Engaging the Intersections”, in: Communication Theory 12.3, 249-270. Siebert, Fred S./Peterson, Theodore/Schramm, Wilbur (1956): Four Theories of the Press: The Authoritarian, Libertarian, Social Responsibility and Soviet Communist Concepts of What the Press Should Be and Do, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Struve, Karen (2012): “Postcolonial Studies”, in: Stefan Moebius (ed.), Kultur: Von den Cultural Studies bis zu den Visual Studies: Eine Einführung, Bielefeld: transcript, 88-107. Thomass, Barbara/Moe, Hallvard/d’Haenens, Leen (2015): “Renewing the Pub-

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lic Service Media Remit”, in: Josef Trappel/Jeanette Steemers/Barbara Thomass (eds), European Media in Crisis: Values, Risks and Policies, New York: Routledge, 182-199. —/Radoslavov, Stoyan (2014): “Discovering, Narrating and Representing Diversity in European Public Service Broadcasting: A Comparison of Human Resources Management and TV Programmes in Austria, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK”, ‹ripeat.org/wp-content/uploads/tdomf/ 3622/Thomass%20_%20Radoslavov%20RIPE%20paper%202014.pdf›, accessed on 18 November 2015. Thomaß, Barbara (ed.) (2013): Mediensysteme im internationalen Vergleich, 2nd edn, Konstanz: UVK. Trappel, Josef/Nieminen, Hannu/Meier, Werner A./Thomass, Barbara (2015): “What Media Crisis? Normative Starting Points”, in: Josef Trappel/Jeanette Steemers/Barbara Thomass (eds), European Media in Crisis: Values, Risks and Policies, New York: Routledge, 3-19. Tunstall, Jeremy/Palmer, Michael (1991): Media Moguls, London: Routledge. Voltmer, Katrin (2012): “How Far Can Media Systems Travel? Applying Hallin and Mancini’s Comparative Framework outside the Western World”, in: Daniel C. Hallin/Paolo Mancini (eds), Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 224-245. Wasserman, Herman (2006): “Globalized Values and Postcolonial Responses: South African Perspectives on Normative Media Ethics”, in: International Communication Gazette 68.1, 71-91. Wiio, Osmo (1983): “The Mass Media Role in the Western World”, in: Leslie John Martin/Anju Grover Chaudhary (eds), Comparative Mass Media Systems, New York: Longman, 85-94.

Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony in Postcolonial Media Theory and Culture R INELLA C ERE

I NTRODUCTION Hegemony and counter-hegemony have been mobilized as key theoretical approaches in the critical analysis of media texts and institutions right from the beginning of Media and Cultural Studies. Similarly, the postcolonial theorists discussed in this chapter have applied the Gramscian concept of hegemony to unravel the dynamics of colonized societies and the aftermath of empires especially in relation to culture. This chapter discusses the importance, meaning and trajectory of this concept for both fields of study. The concept of hegemony utilized by Media and Cultural Studies derives initially from the work of Antonio Gramsci, one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, mainly from the Prison Notebooks, written while he was imprisoned by the Italian Fascist regime. Gramsci understood hegemony as the “intellectual and moral leadership” by one class over another, normally exercised through civil society’s institutions. He distinguished this from the state’s more direct dominance exercised through coercion rather than consent and negotiation.1 But Gramsci also argued that even the Fascist regime that imprisoned him and which was the ‘model’ he had in mind when thinking about the coercive

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For a history of the concept of hegemony prior to Gramsci’s formulations, see Anderson 2006 and also Boothman 2008; for me the best book about Gramsci’s hegemony in the English language is still Femia’s Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Revolutionary Process (1987).

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state exercised its power through a “balance” of coercion and consent, a consent which could be levered through workers’ grass-root organizations. This concept has become of fundamental importance in the analysis of media institutions and the way their cultural output normally serves the interests of the dominant bourgeois class, and codifies these interests as part of normative common values. Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall were the first to introduce Gramsci’s concept of hegemony in British Media and Cultural Studies; in his well-known essay “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms”, Hall has this to say about Gramsci’s work: “[…] in my view, the line in Cultural Studies which has attempted to think forwards from the best elements in the structuralist and culturalist enterprises, by way of some of the concepts elaborated in Gramsci’s work, comes closest to meeting the requirement of the field of study” (Hall 1981: 36; emphasis in original). This requirement dictated that we need to read media and cultural messages in the light of the workings of hegemony and at the same time remind ourselves that it cannot absorb all the contradictions of an unequal society: resistance may occur (counter-hegemony), thus disrupting the dominant hegemonic project of any given society. This was explained by Gramsci as also giving rise to the figure of the ‘organic intellectual’, a concept that Gramsci introduced along with hegemony to explain the role of individuals in guiding the “intellectual and moral leadership” of any given class. Gramsci’s ‘organic intellectual’ embraced working class allegiance, and this he distinguished from the ‘traditional intellectual’, who served the interests of the status quo.2 In addition, the concepts of hegemony, counter-hegemony and organic/traditional intellectual cannot be seen in isolation from another Gramscian concept: the subaltern, which has also been one of the concepts reworked by postcolonial theorists to read hegemonic power relations in former colonial empires. Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and counter-hegemony has been the most helpful formulation to date in the analysis of power relations among civil institutions like the mass media and their operations in developed and developing societies, from texts to audience to political economy. Firstly, it has helped to account for the ways in which hegemonic power works down to capillary level in society and culture, thus producing a pervasive, quasi-spontaneous adherence to

2

According to Timothy Brennan, the term ‘organic intellectual’ sprang from NowellSmith and Hoare’s interpretation of the Selections from the Prison Notebooks, one of the first Gramsci translations into the English language to circulate widely, rather than from the Italian original text, which he argues spoke only of “intellectuals who organize” (Brennan 2002: 174; emphasis in original).

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the prevailing ideology from individual citizens.3 Secondly, just as hegemony is maintained through consent, it is not a tight shut process, and no amount of consent (or coercion) will produce a homogeneous view in line with the interests of the dominant groups, i.e. the figure of the ‘subaltern’ can never really entirely consent although it may be entirely coerced as under a fascist regime or a situation of colonial domination. Hegemony and conversely counter-hegemony as processes of negotiation, consent and resistance are also at the heart of postcolonial theories. Below, I will trace the complexities these concepts have allowed to unravel in the work undertaken on the relationship between colonizer and colonized by Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon; on Orientalism by Edward Said; on hybridity and mimicry by Homi Bhabha and finally on subalternity by Gayatri Spivak. In relation to some of these key critical concepts, I will analyze and refer to illustrative examples from the media, most notably selected films by director Claire Denis, as well as documentaries and news coverage produced in contemporary European postcolonial societies.

H EGEMONY , THE C OLONIZER -C OLONIZED R ELATIONSHIP AND R ACISM What better expression of the hegemonic model of coercion/consent could be found than in the relationship between colonizer and colonized? Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon were the first to describe this relationship in detail and read it as the dominant colonial class exercising power towards colonized people. The categories that both Memmi and Fanon introduced in their writing on the French empire to outline the intricacies of a hegemonic colonial political system are still important in interpreting today’s media culture. Albert Memmi’s book The Colonizer and the Colonized (first published in French in 1957 and translated into English in 1965), was a detailed consideration of the hegemonic relationship developed in colonial empires between colonizer and colonized. In the description of this relationship, he concentrated on the consequences brought about at psychological level for both the colonizer and the

3

It is a matter of much debate as to the reasons why working people are consenting (principally through elections and consumer culture) to a capitalist system which reinforces and continues their oppression. This has been much in evidence of late due to the economic crisis and the excesses of financial capitalism.

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colonized and the possible outcomes of this protracted unequal relationship, which he understood to be revolution and the removal of colonial power. Memmi made a number of distinctions in order to explain the complex workings of a hegemonic colonial system. The first set of these distinctions addressed the figure of the colonizer and the way it incorporated in its hierarchy the figure of the ‘colonial’ and the ‘colonialist’. The first of his distinctions is the ‘colonial’, the white worker “whose living conditions are not higher than those of a colonized person of equivalent economic and social status” (Memmi 2003: 54). Yet in a colonial context, even the white worker is in a more privileged position than the colonized because “the colonial so defined does not exist, for all Europeans in the colonies are privileged” (ibid.: 54). The second distinction is the ‘colonialist’, the governor, the industrialist and the landowner, as the real ideological and hegemonic driver behind the colonial system, but whose “cultural and moral mission, even in the beginning, is no longer tenable” (Memmi 2003: 47) as it is based on profit, privilege and usurpation. Filmmaker Claire Denis has drawn on both categories in two of her bestknown films. Chocolat (1988), her first feature film, and White Material (2009), although produced almost twenty years apart, both share an evocation of colonial life structured around exploitation; in Chocolat in an earlier time towards the end of French colonial rule in Cameroon and in White Material in an unspecified postcolonial African colony on the verge of civil war. In Chocolat (1988) Denis explores via the eyes of the child of a ‘colonialist’, returning as an adult to the country she grew up in, the complex relationship between colonizer and colonized and the duplicitous traits of the former. In White Material, too, the main protagonist is a white woman, a ‘colonialist’ intent on saving the family’s coffee farm from the destruction going on all around her, in an unnamed African country. Both films illustrate the subtle distinction between the colonized and the ‘colonial’, by conveying the antagonism of black exploited characters against white characters who are privileged even when they are not part of the colonial military or economic apparatus. Both films also showcase ‘colonialists’ using and perpetuating or, in the case of White Material, trying to hang on to the colonial structures of exploitation. According to Memmi, in the wider category of the colonizer with its own white hierarchy based on class, we can also detect counter-hegemonic forces, which are made up of all the different groups which oppose the colonial system of oppression who Memmi terms “the colonizer who refuses”, thus producing elements of dissent within the hegemonic leadership of the colonizer. However, in Chocolat (1988) even the character of Luc, who claims to be against the

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colonial system, reveals itself to be no different from the other characters which are represented as openly racist (Mayne 2005). The “Portrait of the colonized” in The Colonizer and the Colonized delves in depth into three important features linked to colonized people. Memmi identifies these as: “Mythical portrait of the colonized”, “Situations of the colonized” and “The two answers of the colonized”. If the first, “Mythical portrait of the colonized”, is largely about the persistent negative mythologies that are circulated by colonizers,4 in the second feature, the “Situations of the colonized”, this is translated into a far more concrete outcome of colonization, the entire dispossession of a people from their culture, history and language, in short the total hegemonic cultural imposition of empire rule and discourse. The third feature is about resistance and counter-hegemonic processes from colonized people; these of course have meant a range of strategies from armed anti-colonial struggles (Algeria) to more moderate acceptance of assimilation (Martinique). In “The two answers of the colonized”, Memmi considers the two options left to the colonized: assimilation or revolt. In a prescient piece on assimilation and its impossibility, he anticipates debates which have been at the heart of metropolitan postcolonial societies ever since: assimilation vs. multiculturalism. At the time of Memmi’s writing, revolutions and national liberation struggles were certainly being pursued worldwide and equally forcibly repressed. Nonetheless, Memmi argued, in the same vein as Fanon, that the only way out was revolt, and in the idealist and revolutionary times of decolonization (prior to neocolonialist failures), belief was widespread that with the “liquidation of colonization […] complete liberation and self-recovery” would come about (Memmi 2003: 195). The best cultural media symbol of this latter sentiment at the time was Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers (1966), which is considered a masterpiece of anti-colonial as well as postcolonial cinema. In the representation of the conflict between France and Algeria, the consequences of the brutality of empire are given full unforgettable exposure, undoubtedly due not only to verifiable historical events but to the way it “deploy[s] the identificatory mechanisms of the cinema on behalf of the colonized, presenting the Algerian struggle as an inspirational exemplum for other colonized peoples” (Stam 2003: 25). However, in the

4

Memmi gives a telling example of Arab hospitality and how a people’s trait which can hardly be considered in a negative light is turned on its head as “the colonized’s irresponsibility and extravagance, since he has no notion of foresight or economy” (Memmi 2003: 128).

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process of examining the consequences of colonialism, Memmi introduced an analysis which still stands up just as well to contemporary postcolonial multicultural societies and its representations. In fact, Memmi’s work on the bankruptcy of the “cultural and moral leadership” of colonialism feels very relevant to the works of many contemporary French filmmakers, defined as the ‘Féminin colonial’, the likes of Marie-France Pisier, Brigitte Rouän and Claire Denis, who has already been mentioned (Strauss qtd in Beugnet 2004: 51). In Chocolat, for example, there is a strong sense of the colonizer’s degenerate status. The film received strong criticism for being a film about white people in Africa, yet I think it consciously reveals what Mayne called the “function of whiteness […] in which whiteness and its attendant privileges impose vision and stories on the rest of the world” (2005: 40). Even more intense degeneration permeates the subsequent film White Material, right up to the final destruction of the coffee farm. In the film’s representation of a postcolonial context of corruption and decay (even the quality of the coffee beans is compromised) which makes direct references to the colonial past, nothing is left untouched and every character is implicated, from the figures of the French colonials (Maria Vial, her son Manuel, the fatherin-law who owns the plantation and her former husband, André Vial) to the new government and anti-government forces (Chérif, the local government representative, the Army and the rebels) which are contesting its legitimacy. Perhaps only the child soldiers are ‘rescued’ in the film, not as being outside the process of degeneration but as ‘directed’ figures in the spiralling violence (Bojesen 2011). Critiques of the hegemony of colonialism and racism in all their manifestations are central to Postcolonial Theory, and Frantz Fanon was one of the first to introduce a fundamental critique about the effects of racism and the way it is embedded in the hegemonic power of colonial culture as well as in its military and economic oppressive system. In Black Skins, White Masks (1952), Fanon attempted to delve into the unconscious expression of racism, partly due to his training as a psychiatrist; he read in the intricate psychological relationship between colonizer and colonized the “workings of racism”, which he addressed by looking at language, ‘interracial’ relations as well as colonization. The language of the colonizer (Fanon himself was educated in French) and the ‘desire to be white’ are interpreted as forms of internalized oppression which enters black people’s consciousness and ultimately ascribes to white people a superior status, a kind of interiorized hegemony. It is through this equation that Fanon introduces the concept of the white mask: “by slipping on a white mask the black man can see himself as part of the humanity he is denied as a black man, and hence on equal terms with the white man” (Cere 2011: 5-6).

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In the same vein, his influential essay on “Racism and Culture” in Toward the African Revolution (1964) states that racism is never a mere “super-added element discovered by chance” (Fanon 1970: 46) but an inseparable aspect of dominant white culture: “Racism stares one in the face, for it so happens that it belongs in a characteristic whole: that of the shameless exploitation of one group of men by another which has reached a higher stage of technical development” (Fanon 1970: 47). Other writings by Fanon reach a harsher and more direct critique toward European colonial powers; in The Wretched of the Earth (1962), he captures the urgency to tackle the superiority of the whites and end the somnambulist superior vision colonialists have of themselves. This wake-up call is, once again, encapsulated well in Denis’ film White Material with its relentless spiralling into the postcolonial inferno left behind by the French. This ultimately engulfs black people as well as the few white colonialists left and stands as a reminder of two of the outcomes of colonial oppression – violence and racism – which are in turn carried into the myriad of contradictions arising out of the ‘postcolonial condition’. But the postcolonial condition is also about the ultimate ‘irrelevance’ of the colonizer, a counter-hegemonic process which is evocatively illustrated in Denis’ earlier film Beau Travail (2000), a film about the French Legion stationed in Djibouti. Claire Denis makes direct reference to this in an interview with Didier Castanet (2004): There is one particular moment that I am thinking of, when Galoup [the main character] is about to leave Djibouti. He is sitting on the terrace of a café with his cap, and we hear the noises of the city. I think that it is a quite a political shot, because there he is in the centre of Djibouti, a French soldier in uniform in a city that is no longer the least bit French. And the people around him pay him no attention at all. (Castanet 2004)

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Said’s book Orientalism is an account, mainly through nineteenth-century literary examples, of the various ways the Orient was constructed by the Western colonial powers. This text (along with Covering Islam, which relates more directly to Media Studies) has become very important for two reasons: one, it was the first systematic critical reading of ideological and hegemonic discourses of the Orient, as engendered by colonial power to justify its own superiority, and two, this reading ‘in language’ produced critical knowledge about the process of ‘othering’, a process whereby the inadequacies of the east were ‘distilled’ into essentialist psychological traits of all oriental people:

132 | R INELLA C ERE Now one of the important developments in nineteenth-century Orientalism was the distillation of essential ideas about the Orient – its sensuality, its tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its habits of inaccuracy, its backwardness – into a separate and unchallenged coherence [...]. (Said 1991: 205)

It is worth emphasising that, for Said, nineteenth-century Orientalism went hand in hand with the hegemonic project of colonialism and imperialism, in that precise measure of coercion and consent required and crucial to the West’s colonial mission and its political rationale: “Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orient’s difference with its weakness” (Said 1991: 204). Of particular value to the analysis of media texts is his insistence on the multi-faceted and complex nature of Orientalism. For example, he argued that one of the reasons the Orientalist worldview became dominant was that its characterisation was not only formulated in contrast to the superior Occident but also relied on a dual condition, which Said explained as forms of latent and manifest Orientalism. This explanation is especially important as it provides another layer to hegemony (and Postcolonial Theory) in the process of collusion and consent. Said understood latent Orientalism as an “almost” unconscious process which “fixed” the Orient as a negative entity to which was denied any possible transformation: “Whatever change occurs in knowledge of the Orient is found almost exclusively in manifest Orientalism; the unanimity, stability, and durability of latent Orientalism are more or less constant” (Said 1991: 206). Manifest Orientalism, on the other hand, presented the public face of Orientalism, explained as the “various stated views about Oriental society, languages, literature, history, sociology, and so forth” (ibid.: 206). This binary process served to reinforce the “hegemony of Orientalism” and finds confirmation in today’s enduring Orientalist stereotypes in the media, even when the counter-hegemonic ‘manifest’ discourse is trying to move away from them. Important examples in recent years have been the contradictions evident between text and image, with text explicitly arguing that we can no longer see the east as one unified geopolitical and cultural system, given its regional extension, diversity and its many different cultures, while the accompanying visual images still hark back to that very much unified oriental worldview. This has been visible in the many stereotyped versions of oriental females (veil/exotic body), still widespread in contemporary Western media texts, from computer games to television programs to feature films to advertisements. An example which is pervasive is in the advertising and tourist industries: airlines adverts to far-east Asia and the Middle East are still universally produced with

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‘exotic’ sexual connotations. Likewise, the male Oriental (Arab or Muslim, the two terms and representations often conflated in meaning) is repeatedly visualized in proximity, or within, a mosque and/or with a muezzin call to prayer, when he is not directly visualized as a ‘bearded Islamist terrorist’. Macdonald has argued that this is in direct reference to “the mosque as threatening space”: “When the media construct the mosque as a uniquely masculine and ethnically bounded space, they disregard the manifold differences of belief and ideology within Islam.” (Macdonald 2011: 133; emphasis in original) Furthermore, this pattern has been visible across Europe, where the media has uncritically presented Islam and the “mosque/minaret/Sharia Law” triad as a threat to the public sphere and democratic practices. Increasingly, research has shown that in Europe as elsewhere much news coverage has centered on “fears and racist anxiety about Sharia Law”, “fears of mosques”, on “Islamic invasions” and “threat to civilization” (Brunt 2011; Cere 2002, 2010; Macdonald 2003, 2006; Morey/ Yaqin 2011). With remarkable foresight and long before 9/11, Said’s book Covering Islam described how Muslim people were often associated “deterministically […] with terrorism, violence and ‘fundamentalism’” (Said 1997: xxi). Some important studies have been produced since about the media coverage of Islam which can be directly perceived as having been influenced by Said’s postcolonial work. In Reporting Islam, Elizabeth Poole finds “that the discourse of Orientalism has a continuing actuality, which finds different forms of expression according to its location” (Poole 2002: 32). Her ground-breaking study showed that new and different forms of Orientalism were to be found in Islamic-related media discourses in the British press, thus demonstrating empirically how contemporary representation of Muslims was not so dissimilar to Said’s findings about nineteenthcentury Orientalism: “Persistent ideas have found their expression in coverage of British Islam: that Islam is static and that Muslims are resistant to progress, engage in antiquated and repressive practices that abuse human rights, and often use their religion to manipulative ends” (Poole 2002: 250). This homogenising blanket coverage is a reminder of the other crucial element for Media Studies discussed earlier in relation to the hegemony of Orientalism: its racist foundation. Said himself has described how latent Orientalism was in fact the “willing partner” of racism: “Oriental backwardness, degeneracy and inequality with the West most easily associated themselves early with nineteenth-century ideas about the biological bases of racial inequality” (Said 1991: 206). Like Memmi and Fanon before him, the conclusions he draws are that colonialism exercised its hegemonic power through a racist lens. Said’s insistence on hegemonic discourses of Orientalism having a continuation into the present

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has been of extreme value to Media and Cultural Studies as it revealed the basis of present ideological workings in race relations and representations, recent coverage of Islam and especially about the figure of the ‘Islamist terrorist’ in contemporary news coverage.

H YBRIDITY AND M IMICRY : C OUNTER -H EGEMONIC S TRATEGIES ? The concept of hybridity has provoked much debate, and many authors have discussed its validity or irrelevance in Media and Cultural Theory. Postcolonial Theory has incorporated both critics of hybridity as well as intellectuals who have proposed new meanings attached to it; Hutnyk, in his comprehensive article about hybridity, describes their different positions in these terms: “Hall approves hybridity as forcing an ‘unwelcome message’ (Hall 1995: 18) upon Britain, transforming nationalist complacencies for the better. Bhabha calls this a ‘third space’. Gilroy is ambivalent, Spivak scathing” (Hutnyk 2005: 98-99). There is no room in this short chapter to discuss all the different positions; for Postcolonial Theory, Bhabha’s use of the term was perhaps the most influential; his reliance on this term was innovative as he used it to introduce the concept of a ‘third space’ and was not at the time overly concerned either with the historical original meaning of the term (as outlined in Young 1995) or with the racist use put to it in nineteenth-century biological theories of race, which may be better termed racist science. Bhabha’s work is not about racial confusion or “terminological fetish” (Hutnyk 2005: 81); rather it interrogates the process initiated by Fanon and Memmi about the hegemonic relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, and it attempts to show a form of counter-hegemony in the ‘insecurity’ of the colonizer whose proximity and need of the colonized has thrown a new light on the relationship. In Bhabha’s case, embedded in the ‘interstices’ of British colonialism rather than the French: “It [hybridity] unsettles the mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial power but reimplicates its identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power” (Bhabha 1994: 112). Both terms, hybridity and mimicry, “work as a team” to unsettle and undermine colonial hegemonic power.The first acts as a way of undermining the binary produced by empire and creates new terms of critical debate, not least ones that can be used in contemporary postcolonial societies and diaspora. “Hybridity is the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to emerge. This third space displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority,

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new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received political wisdom” (Bhabha qtd in Rutherford 1998: 211). Alongside hybridity, mimicry, or rather the ‘menace of mimicry’ undermines and disrupts the authority of colonial discourse: What I have called mimicry is not the familiar exercise of dependent colonial relations through narcissistic identification so that, as Fanon has observed, the black man stops being an actional person for only the white man can represent his self-esteem. Mimicry conceals no presence or identity behind its mask. […] The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority (Bhabha 1994: 88).

In reiterating the role of the unconscious in the colonizer-colonized relationship (first discussed by Fanon), Homi Bhabha suggests not only a reconfiguration of that relationship but also a way of countering the imperial hegemony. Hybridity and mimicry may not be the same as revolution, but they do involve resistance and opposition. Bhabha has undoubtedly enabled new readings of multicultural societies and cultural and media diasporic cultures but has simultaneously received sustained criticism about his insistence on precisely the main constituents of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, which relies on contradictions and collusion with the colonizer leadership. Moore-Gilbert (2000) has suggested that Bhabha’s hybridity and mimicry has ascribed power and agency to the colonized which has not been in evidence empirically. Yet perhaps the question we really need to ask today is why and how colonial power’s instability has protracted into the present and whether postcolonial societies suffer from that same instability. Judging by the constant renewed efforts to put the empire’s case and the concomitant proliferation of revisionist programs on the British Empire which have filled British television screens in the last ten years, we can probably conclude that the questions posed by historical processes of colonial domination and its effects are not entirely settled in postcolonial society and the representations that are circulated in culture and the media are still symptomatic of the ‘hegemony of empire’ and its unresolved contradictions. For example, in the British Channel 4 production Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (six parts, broadcast 2002-2003), presenter and writer historian Niall Ferguson promotes the idea of ‘goodness of empire’ and specifically suggests that a world without the British Empire is unimaginable: “Without the British Empire, there would be no Calcutta; no Bombay; no Madras. Indians may rename them as many times as they like, but they remain cities founded and

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built by the British” (Ferguson 2003: xxi). His view of empire has received much criticism along with other work he produced,5 and we do not need to search far to counteract an argument to such blatant defence of empire; we only need to look at Memmi’s eloquent testament: How do we know? Why must we suppose that the colonized would have remained frozen in the state in which the colonizer found him? We could just as well put forward the opposite view. If colonization had not taken place, there may have been more schools and more hospitals. (Memmi 2003: 156-157)

The most recent production documenting empire on television, the BBC’s 2012 series Empire,6 written and presented by Jeremy Paxman, is less apologetic of empire but nonetheless asserts some parallels with previous revisionist versions. These sets of documentaries and their interpretation of empire are examples of the continuing “hegemonic project to rewrite history from the Western viewpoint” (Cere 2011: 11).

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Finally, the last consideration is about hegemony and its relation to Gramsci’s conceptualization of the subaltern, a key concept embraced by postcolonial theorists which owes most to Gramsci’s work. One of the main proponents is Gayatri Spivak, especially in her engagement with the history group ‘Subaltern Studies’, which started in India, a country very much at the center of the postcolonial study project.7 Her influential essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988)

5

Pankaj Mishra’s 2011 extended critical essay “Watch this man”, a precise and erudite critique of Ferguson’s publications, provoked hostile response, where Ferguson demanded an apology for what he felt were accusations of racism.

6

A five-part series broadcast between 27 February and 26 March 2012. (Part 1. A taste for power — Part 2. Making ourselves at home — Part 3. Playing the game — Part 4. Making a fortune — Part 5. Doing good).

7

Many of the key figures in Postcolonial Studies have come from India; this is no coincidence as India was one of the largest colonial dominions of the British Empire. To this day much of that history is still to be told from postcolonial perspectives, although the group Subaltern Studies have been active for at least three decades towards that project. Chakrabarty described the Subaltern Studies Group as “a ‘postcolonial’ project of writing history” (Chakrabarty 2005: 468); see also Chaturvedi 2000.

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addressed precisely the position of the subaltern in a system of colonial exploitation and domination. In Gramsci the ‘subaltern’ was defined as those groups which belonged to the subordinate classes. As a Marxist, the identification of those groups was of the utmost importance, in order to reveal and change their material living conditions as well as introduce a class consciousness which would make transformation possible. Similarly, Spivak appropriated the term in order to give voice to the constituency of the colonized and at the same time introduced the gendered dimension to the study of postcolonialism absent from all other studies. Spivak’s subaltern is the Indian woman and her material condition, in particular the absence of the ‘women’s voice consciousness’. In the example of the sacrifice of the widow in Hindu society who is burned alongside her husband (a Hindu ritual known as Sati, meaning the ‘good wife’), Spivak builds a compelling argument about the literal silencing of the subaltern, caught between what she calls “White men saving brown women from brown men”8 and the “Indian nativist argument, a parody of lost origins: ‘The women actually wanted to die’” (Spivak 1988: 296, 297). Spivak also describes how “[w]hite women – from the nineteenth-century British Missionary Registers to Mary Daly9 have not produced an alternative understanding” (1988: 297). Western white women’s complicity in the patriarchal values of colonialism and their failure to ‘decolonize’ themselves is starkly represented in the female characters of Claire Denis’ film Chocolat mentioned above. Upon her return to Cameroon as an adult, France, the protagonist of Chocolat, relives her childhood memories through a series of flashbacks which slowly reveal the hierarchical order of colonial life and the tensions which surface as a result of the subordinate status of the male black servant colliding headon with the subordinate status of the white colonial wife, albeit as representative of the colonial order. There seems to be an intellectual parallel between Spivak’s formulation of the question ‘can the subaltern speak?’10 and what she calls the “silent, silenced center” (1988: 283) and Denis’ silenced black characters in Chocolat. The main black character Protée in Chocolat, the servant of the colonizer’s house, is the symbol of the subaltern that cannot speak in spite of the

8

The British Empire abolished the ritual in the whole of India in 1861 under Queen Victoria’s reign.

9

Mary Daly is an American radical feminist philosopher who passed away in 2010.

10 Spivak’s question is formulated against Foucault and Deleuze’s argument that the oppressed “can speak and know their conditions” (Spivak 1988: 283; emphasis in original).

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film as a whole being infused with “anti-colonial consciousness” (Strauss qtd in Beugnet 2004: 51); Protée’s subaltern status stands as a defining feature of his oppression and one that cannot be remodelled by the “nostalgic retrospective trend” (Beugnet 2004: 46). Similarly in Denis’ subsequent films, including those that address the experiences of ethnic minorities in today’s metropolitan France: the Paris-based films such as S’en fout la mort (No Fear, No Die, 1990) and J’ai pas sommeil (I can’t Sleep, 1993), characters share the subaltern status of the “colonised body”. Susan Hayward has argued that Jocelyn’s death, one of the characters in S’en fout la mort, can be read in two ways, one that “the dislocated post-colonial body can find no sources to restore the erasure of memory (which is the effect of colonialist repression)” and two, that “Western capitalism as an ideal is sold to the excolonies; the economies of desire (the search for money) – which brought Jocelyn to Paris in the first place – lead to his exploitation, then fatigue with life as an always already colonised body and mentality, and finally to his death” (Hayward 2001: 160). Spivak’s reading of the predicament of the marginalized (black female) as subaltern is an important critical tool for postcolonial feminist critique and resonates in contemporary media representations of the postcolonial condition about women and men from the ‘South’ of the world. Her text, with its Gramscian reading of hegemony, counter-hegemony and the subaltern has been crucial in foregrounding gender and postcolonial issues in Media, Feminism and Cultural Studies generally.

C ONCLUSION In 2012 the edited collection The Postcolonial Gramsci (Srivastava/Bhattacharya 2012) was published. In this book many of the chapters draw on Gramsci’s key concepts which have been claimed by Postcolonial Theory: hegemony, the southern question (connected to subalternity), and the organic intellectual coupled with an epilogue based on an interview with Gayatri Spivak. This publication caused a stir amongst Gramscian and postcolonial scholars and was subsequently followed by over forty pages of comments in the review forum of the journal Postcolonial Studies (2013) where some of the articles have put into doubt the whole exercise of the book and, in particular, have questioned the uses, or rather the over-uses of Gramsci’s concepts in relation to Postcolonial Studies. The critique comes especially from a Gramscian scholar, Timothy Brennan, who argues in his polemically titled “Joining the Party” (2013) that the editors of

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Postcolonial Gramsci appear to have a memory loss as to his own previous undertakings; indeed the first time I had come across the term ‘postcolonial Gramsci’ was in an extensive article by Brennan entitled “Antonio Gramsci and Postcolonial Theory: ‘Southernism’” (2002). His was a first direct account of Gramsci’s postcolonial reception, and in the article he pointed towards some of the contradictions which are inherent in Postcolonial Theory and which were first visible in Gramsci’s writings on the Italian Southern Question and the role of the intellectual: “As we have seen in the case of Gramsci’s reception, postcolonial critics stake their claims on anti-Eurocentric principles even as they reinforce both the language and the policies of Euro-American global culture” (Brennan 2002: 178). The reason for mentioning this critical discussion, as a way of conclusion, about Gramsci’s work and concepts in relation to postcolonial theories, is to also point towards some of the problematics attached to the way they have ‘adopted/adapted’ terms like hegemony and counter-hegemony. Nonetheless, constant media revisions of empires, the North-South divide and the pernicious effects of globalization make it all the more important to have a critical vocabulary at hand to enable us to read and interpret media representations of postcolonial societies and people, whether these are understood as contemporary multicultural societies or former colonized countries and its people. Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and the different ways in which postcolonial theories on the relationship of colonizer and colonized, on hybridity, Orientalism and subalternity have ‘embedded’ the concept have allowed Media Studies to delve in more depth into the representations of colonized people; into questions of race, power and ideology; into issues pertaining to multi-cultural societies, immigration, diaspora and globalization. The aim of this chapter is modest in the sense that it is an introductory attempt to give future students of Media Studies and postcolonialism a grounding of the possible links which can be made between key Gramscian and postcolonial concepts and how the latter owe a considerable debt to Gramsci’s body of work.

R EFERENCES Anderson, Perry (2006): “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci”, in: New Left Review 100, 5-78, ‹newleftreview.org/›, accessed on 10 January 2016. BEAU TRAVAIL (2000) (F, D: Claire Denis). Beugnet, Martine (2004): Claire Denis: French Film Directors, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Bhabha, Homi (1994): The Location of Culture, New York: Routledge. Bojesen, Emile (2011): “Nancean Faith and Dis-enclosure in Claire Denis’ White Material”, in: Kenneth R. Morefield/Nicholas S. Olson (eds), Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 168-176. Boothman, Derek (2008): “The Sources for Gramsci’s Concept of Hegemony”, in: Rethinking Marxism 20.2, 201-215. Brennan, Timothy (2002): “Antonio Gramsci and Post-Colonial Theory: ‘Southernism’”, in: Diaspora 10.2, 143-188. — (2013): “Joining the Party”, in: Postcolonial Studies 16.1, 68-78. Brunt, Rosalind (2011): “What a Burkha! Reflections on the UK Media Coverage of the Sharia Law Controversy”, in: Rosalind Brunt/Rinella Cere (eds), Postcolonial Media Culture in Britain, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 8298. Castanet, Didier (2004): “Interview with Claire Denis, 2000”, in: Journal of European Studies 34.1-2, 143-160. Cere, Rinella (2002): “‘Islamophobia’ and the Media in Italy”, in: Feminist Media Studies 2.1, 133-136. — (2010): “Globalization vs. Localization: Anti-immigrant and Hate Discourses in Italy”, in: Michela Ardizzoni/Chiara Ferrari (eds), Beyond Monopoly: Contemporary Italian Media and Globalization, Lanham: Lexington Books, 225-244. — (2011): “Postcolonial and Media Studies: A Cognitive Map”, in: Rosalind Brunt/Rinella Cere (eds), Postcolonial Media Culture in Britain, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 1-13. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2005): “A Small History of Subaltern Studies”, in: Henry Schwarz/Sangeeta Ray (eds), A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, Malden: Blackwell, 467-485. Chaturvedi, Vinayak (ed.) (2000): Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, London: Verso. CHOCOLAT (1988) (F/BRD/CM, D: Claire Denis). Fanon, Frantz (1968, orig. 1952): Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann, London: McGibbon and Kee. — (1970, orig. 1964): Toward the African Revolution, trans. Haakon Chevalier, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. — (2001, orig. 1962): The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, London: Penguin Books. Femia, Joseph (1987): Gramsci Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Revolutionary Process, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Ferguson, Niall (2003): Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, London: Allen Lane. Gramsci Antonio (1966): La questione meridionale, Rome: Editori Riuniti. — (1973): Scritti Politici, 2 vols, Rome: Editori Riuniti. — (1975): Quaderni del carcere, 4 vols, Torino: Einaudi. Hall, Stuart (1981): “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms”, in: Tony Bennett/ Graham Martin/Colin Mercer/Janet Woollacott (eds), Culture, Ideology and Social Process: A Reader, London: Open University Press, 9-37. Hayward, Susan (2001): “Claire Denis’ Films and the Post-colonial Body – with Special Reference to Beau Travail (1999)”, in: Studies in French Cinema 1.3, 159-165. Hutnyk, John (2005): “Hybridity”, in: Ethnic and Racial Studies 28.1, 79-102. J’AI PAS SOMMEIL (I CAN’T SLEEP) (1993) (F/D/CH, D: Claire Denis). Macdonald, Myra (2003): Exploring Media Discourse, London: Arnold. — (2006): “Muslim Women and the Veil: Problems of Image and Voice in Media Representations”, in: Feminist Media Studies 6.1, 7-23. — (2011): “Discourses of Separation: News and Documentary”, in: Rosalind Brunt/Rinella Cere (eds), Postcolonial Media Culture in Britain, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 127-141. Mayne, Judith (2005): Claire Denis, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Memmi, Albert (2003): The Colonizer and the Colonized, London: Earthscan Publications. — (2006): Decolonization and the Decolonized, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mishra, Pankaj (2011): “Watch this man”, in: London Review of Books 33.21, 10-12. Moore-Gilbert, Bart (2000): “Spivak and Bhabha”, in: Henry Schwarz/Sangeeta Ray (eds), A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, Malden: Blackwell, 451466. Morey, Peter/Yaqin, Amina (2011): Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation after 9/11, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Poole, Elizabeth (2002): Reporting Islam: Media Representations of British Muslims, London: I.B.Tauris. Rutherford, Jonathan (1998): Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Said, Edward W. (1991): Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. — (1997): Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the World, London: Vintage.

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S’EN FOUT LA MORT (NO FEAR, NO DIE) (1990) (F/BRD, D: Claire Denis). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988): “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in: Cary Nelson/Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 271-313. Srivastava, Neelam/Bhattacharya, Baidik (eds) (2012): The Postcolonial Gramsci, London: Routledge. Stam, Robert (2003): “Fanon, Algeria and the Cinema: The Politics of Identification” in: Ella Shohat/Robert Stam (eds), Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 18-43. WHITE MATERIAL (2009) (F/CM, D: Claire Denis). Young, Robert (1995): Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, London: Routledge.

Performing Regulation The Politics of Postcolonial Film Exhibition and DVD Distribution M ONIKA M EHTA

I NTRODUCTION Dominant discourses on globalization often use terms such as ‘flow’, ‘movement’, and ‘crossing’ to describe present-day travel of immigrants and film. By examining postcolonial censorship, I seek to historicize globalization and to show how post/colonial encounters generate traffic in rules of governance as much as in goods and people. I bring together theories of nation-state, Film and Media Studies, and postcolonial critique in order to analyze how state regulation and nationalism shape the lives of immigrants, minorities, and films. Scholars in Film and Media Studies have researched questions related to colonialism, migration, nationalism, and national identity; however, the state has been undertheorized. Andrew Higson’s widely read The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema (2000) asserts the importance of using a transnational framework to study practices of film distribution, exhibition, and production. However, he also re-affirms the relevance of the national framework: “[…] if the concept of national cinema is considered troublesome at the level of theoretical debate, it is still a considerable force at the level of state-policy” (Higson 2000: 69). According to Higson, states institute both cultural and economic policies to protect local cinemas and citizenry; through these policies, the state exerts power over the nation. In this argument, the state and the institutions which constitute it are not only understood as restricting, but are themselves bounded and rooted. A study of colonialism shows that the bricks which would constitute the state edifice, including censorship as well as the division of the nation-state into a majority and

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minorities, travelled from the metropolis to the colonies (Breckenridge/Veer 1993; Hansen/Stepputat 2001; Jaikumar 2006; Mufti 2012; Sen 2002). These rules were restructured to meet the demand of the colonial state which ruled by force rather than hegemony. Film censorship was characterized as a reasonable restriction of freedom of expression; according to the paternal colonial and later postcolonial states, this restriction was instituted for the benefit of the natives and citizens respectively. As fledgling new nations, postcolonial states sought to meet the normative demands of the international order. To do so, they needed to possess certain institutions; censorship was among them. While colonialism as territorial occupation ended in most parts of the world, the discourse of development, a crucial part of its arsenal, did not. While in the metropolis non-governmental bodies or the film industry itself administered censorship, in many postcolonial states censorship came under the ambit of the state. This arrangement benefited the postcolonial state; however, it also enabled it to be characterized as ‘developing’ and ‘not quite liberal’, since state censorship is perceived as heavy-handed compared to the non-governmental regulation in ‘liberal’ and ‘developed’ states. Both in common parlance and scholarly work, censorship is often used to designate the authoritative exercise of state power while regulation is characterized as benign implementation of rules. The normative deployment of these terms reproduces the discourse of development and obscures their overlaps in the exercise of power. By turning to law and regulation, I explore the uneven relations amongst states, nations, and film industries as they jostle to define citizens, nationals, and audiences. My point of entry into this analysis is Karan Johar’s My Name Is Khan (MNIK; 2010), which sought to appeal to a worldwide audience by addressing global issues, namely, 9/11 and racial discrimination. It was not only through its narrative that this ‘Bollywood’ film sought to secure its domestic market and capture the global market, but also through its alliance with Fox Searchlight Pictures, which acquired the rights to distribute MNIK in India and worldwide. In the film, Muslims are doubly marginalized. First, within the ambit of the postcolonial Indian state, they are designated as ‘minority’ and thus, must be subservient to the Hindu ‘majority’. Second, in the global arena, they are characterized as potential ‘terrorists’, and therefore, as immigrants are subject to the panoptic surveillance of states. If regulation is crucial to the film’s narrative, it is also central to the film’s distribution. As it crossed state boundaries, the film (both in its theatrical and DVD versions) needed to be certified according to specific state or non-governmental guidelines before it could be screened. Through the application of censorship or rating guidelines as well as exhibition norms,

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MNIK was tailored to meet ‘national’ tastes. This tailoring invites us to reflect on the adaptations — the cutting and the stitching — made by minorities and immigrants to fit in so that they can be viewed as nationals and citizens. I propose to examine the film’s complicated position with respect to immigration and nationalism in tandem with how these issues play out in the film’s trans/national theatrical exhibition as well as DVD production and distribution.

R E - FRAMING F ILM C ENSORSHIP In my book, Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema (2011), I develop an analytical framework for examining film censorship (Mehta).1 In India, the concept of film censorship was first introduced by colonial administrators. After India’s independence in 1947, the postcolonial state, while against censorship in art and literature, viewed the medium of film in a different light and felt it necessary to retain censorship in order to regulate film’s effects on its citizenry. While contemporary state-censorship in India clearly is shaped by its colonial legacy, even new rules and policies (e.g. the recent effort to transform certification practices in India by introducing ‘12+’ and ‘15+’ certificates similar to the ones used in the UK) show the influence of global forces. Presently, the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), a branch of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, certifies films for exhibition. The work of viewing and certifying films is carried out by advisory panels composed of government bureaucrats as well as members of the public. My fieldwork at the CBFC allowed me to observe advisory panels at work, giving me a front-row seat to micro-practices of the Indian state. Such micro-practices engender decisions which are supported as well as challenged both within and beyond the ambit of the state, revealing that the state is not a monolithic, fixed or all-powerful entity. In Discipline and Punish (1991), Michel Foucault illustrates the importance of investigating micro-practices. Through painstaking attention to architectural details and movements of the body, he shows how disciplinary power permeates prisons, armies and schools. It is by tracking this banal exercise of power at seemingly incongruous sites that Foucault is able to dismantle the fiction of the free, sovereign individual. His analysis invites us to direct our scholarly lenses to

1

Earlier versions of this argument appear in my book Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema (2011) and my article “Reframing Censorship” (2009). I am grateful to the publishers of both works for permission to reprint some of the earlier material.

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such practices in order to generate material histories of institutions as well as industries and to place them in conversation with one another. In structuring my analysis in Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema (2011), I drew upon Foucault’s astute observations in “Subject and Power” (Foucault 1983) in which he explains the difference between asking a question which begins with “how” as opposed to “why” or “who.” While the first method enables descriptions of practice(s), the second method leads one on a hunt for causes and subjects, respectively. Descriptions produce more complex versions of subjectivities as they make visible overdetermined practices. For example, the practice of cutting is generally attributed to the state, i.e. the censors are the ones who cut films. By questioning this practice in the mode of how rather than who, we learn that cutting is not a practice limited to or caused by the state; cutting is done by directors and editors who ‘cut’ films, by audiences who decide to patronize some films and not others, and by scholars who seek to narrow their scope. New media modes of exhibition generate new forms of cutting such as “Deleted Scenes” in bonus features of DVDs and Blu-rays; on YouTube, fans regularly clip and upload their favorite scenes, dialogues and song-sequences. A productive effect of this insight is an analytical rupture between subject and practice, i.e. the censors are the ones who cut films. This rupture enables us to see that the practice of cutting sediments the identities of the censors, directors, editors, audiences and scholars; this practice, in turn, is attributed varied meanings such as state authority, creative effort, cinephilia, fandom, entertainment and scholarly work. What emerges is a field of relations between subjects and practices in which identities and meanings are blurred, leaking into one another rather than remaining fixed or rigid. Following Foucault, it is with an eye to the mobile practices of cutting, classifying and certifying that I craft the tale of censorship. I not only examine how these techniques are deployed at the site of state-censorship, where I initially discover them, but also track their application in the arenas of film production, exhibition, and reception. Aruna Vasudev’s Liberty and Licence in Indian Cinema (1978) provided me with initial information; however it reproduced the state-prohibition model for understanding censorship. By turning to Michel Foucault’s insights on power and Annette Kuhn’s study of censorship in early British cinema, I was able to critique Vasudev’s work and offer a theoretical model which focused on the productive rather than the prohibitive aspects of censorship. Vasudev’s account focuses on the state and its apparatus, assuming that censorship is specifically the duty of the censors, and generally, the domain of the state. In characterizing censorship as an act of cutting or banning, she is only able to describe the power of the state in terms of repression and prohibition, thereby ignoring its

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productive effects. Vasudev also neglects to examine less spectacular regulatory and generative practices of the CBFC, namely, classification and certification. Films are certified according to the following categories: ‘U’ (Unrestricted Exhibition), ‘UA’ (Exhibition restricted to those above 12), ‘A’ (Exhibition restricted to Adults) and ‘S’ (Exhibition restricted to specialists). The ‘U’ certificate is the most desirable one because it marks the film as suitable for family viewing and consequently, assures producers that the film would attract such audiences. This letter rating appears in advertisements for the films, signaling to viewers the content of the film as well as the state-designated audience. Thus, the process of certification not only defines and regulates film audiences but also assists in marketing the film. In addition to certifying films, the CBFC also classifies them according to the following categories: short film (Newsreel, Educational, Documentary, Children’s Film, Scientific, Trailer, Advertisement and Feature) and long film (Feature, Children’s Feature, Documentary). Feature films are further divided into thematic categories: Social, Historical, Biographical, Mythological, Devotional, Legendary, Horror, Fantasy, Action/Thriller, Crime, Satire, Comedy, Spoof and Adventure.2 Such classification produces an archive which is important for tracing the histories of genres. It also shapes the CBFC’s readings of films and subsequent decisions to cut and certify films. For example, while considering Pati Parmeshwar/My Husband, My God (1989) for certification, the CBFC expressed considerable concern about divine or miraculous elements in a – “social-”, a genre which they felt should follow a “scientific and rational approach”, this approach being dear to the Nehruvian state (Film Certification Appellate Tribunal Order). Vasudev constructs the Indian state as the central and all-powerful actor in the theater of censorship. In doing so, she overlooks other sites at which power operates, namely, film production and film reception – and assumes that power is a privilege of the state. Film cutting is not only performed by the censors. Cutting, in fact, is central to the process of filmmaking. Filmmakers are well aware of censorship guidelines and practices, which inform film production. My conversations with members of the film industry and officials at the CBFC reveal that directors often push the boundaries of these guidelines by inserting more sex scenes (hoping that some will be passed), bribing the censor board members – and by finding alternative ways to represent sexuality: the drenched heroine, the almost-kiss, and the cabaret dance. The calls for cutting or banning are initiated not only by the state but also by the citizenry. When Raj Kapoor’s Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram/Truth, God,

2

These categories have changed over time.

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Beauty (1978) was exhibited in theatres, there were public protests that the censors neglected to do their duty in not cutting ‘vulgar’ scenes from the film. These protests compelled the CBFC to conduct an informal survey by handing out postcards at theatres in Bombay, Madras and Calcutta where the film was being screened to assess the CBFC’s performance. One litigant even appealed to the judiciary to ban the film. The case went as far as the Supreme Court which ruled in favor of Raj Kapoor, taking into consideration the CBFC’s certification of the film. This case both demonstrated and codified that certification can provide legal protection to the industry from litigation. Perhaps this fact explains why only a few members of the film industry have ever demanded the eradication of the CBFC. Thus, in situating censorship in a wider field, we see that the kinds of relations forged in the exercise of power cannot be captured in the dichotomy between the dominators and the dominated. In decentering the state, we see that multiple players engage in this uneven play of power, contributing to discourses on cinema and censorship. As controversial texts with the aid of technology circulate in the global marketplace, they produce subjects, discussion, and profits. For example, Bandit Queen (1994) and Fire (1997) generated debates on caste, gender and sexuality, both within and beyond the Indian nation-state. These films also became marketable due to their status as forbidden objects arising from the known act of censorship. ‘Banned’ and ‘censored’ became advertising gimmicks to entice global and local audiences. Thus, censorship often fuels desire, resulting in an increase in revenue for the film industries. These advertising gimmicks also shape how nation-states are perceived; those permitting exhibition take on a democratic sheen while those prohibiting screenings are deemed repressive. Thus, a multipronged approach demonstrates that censorship is not simply about the act of regulating representation but has an impact on broader areas, producing discourses about gender, sexuality, nation (to name a few), which in turn shape the postcolonial state.

T RACKING M Y N AME I S K HAN In late January 2010, mere weeks away from its much anticipated release, My Name Is Khan (MNIK) was subject to Shiv Sena’s ire who threatened to ban its exhibition. The Shiv Sena, a formidable Hindu-right group located in Mumbai, has played a major role in policing cinema since the 1990s. It instigated the protests against Mani Ratnam’s Bombay (1995), objecting to its representation of the Hindu-Muslim riots in Mumbai. Its members violently blocked the

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screenings of Deepa Mehta’s Fire (1997), decrying its explicit portrayal of lesbianism as well as its use of Indian mythological names for its protagonists. Shiv Sainiks, members of Shiv Sena, targeted the film posters of Kurbaan (2009), which displayed the nude back of its heroine, Kareena Kapoor, alleging that it was obscene; in fact, to make their point, some Sainiks covered up Kapoor’s back with a sari on a poster located in Juhu, Mumbai. Given this history, one might analyze the events surrounding the release of MNIK by focusing solely on Shiv Sena’s coercive tactics which were given ample time and space in the media and incited much debate. This analysis would limit the discussion to Shiv Sena and those who resisted them. It would confirm the exercise of censorship as a supreme act of power synonymous with prohibition. In contrast, my theoretical model, which draws upon Foucault’s work, offers an understanding of power as diffuse by tracking MNIK through the filmic narrative, film production, reception and distribution (theatrical release, VCD, DVD). This framework produces a new object of study by generating a dialogue amongst these sites which are generally analyzed in isolation as they are bracketed under textual analysis, censorship, or the institutional operations of the film industry. My analysis of MNIK places law and its regulatory operations in conversation with film circulation. How do rules of governance as well as their practices shift as they travel from local, regional, national, and global terrains? How are they imagined, implemented, challenged, and accepted at political, economic, social, and cultural sites? Following Foucault, my study of law is both an investigation and a performance – a performance that is attentive to language’s role in conjuring, sedimenting, mediating, and naturalizing relations of power. In Foucault’s work, descriptions are not mere backdrop, but the ground on which relations of power are mapped. In Discipline and Punish (1991), the thick descriptions of the army, school, and prison show the similarities amongst these institutions and their practices. Similarly, my inquiry relies on thick description, and I strategically use language to (e.g. cut, edit, stitch, screen, rupture, truncate) to draw attention to the workings of power at varied sites. As I track MNIK through the filmic narrative, film production, reception and distribution (theatrical release, VCD, DVD), law emerges as filmic and social conventions, political rules, bureaucratic regulations as well as exhibition and distribution norms. My analysis highlights the differential and interconnected operations of laws, and I seek to underscore both the formal and informal instances of law and its operations. My approach thus stresses the overlaps between state-generated laws, industrial practices, and social mores.

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The much-publicized MNIK was going to reunite the blockbuster team of Karan Johar, Kajol, and Shah Rukh Khan after eight years.3 Karan Johar and Shah Rukh Khan, who came on board as a producer, signed a first-time contract with Fox Searchlight Pictures who acquired the rights to distribute MNIK in India and worldwide. Johar underscored the import of this tie-up by noting that Fox would open new territories for Hindi films, taking them beyond the usual domestic and diasporic South Asian markets. The film’s publicity actively advertised its “Islam-friendly narrative” as well as its Muslim star cast and playback singers in order to reach Muslims in India’s hinterland and globally. Television shows such as National Bingo Night (2010-) and Music Ka Maha Muqabala/Super Music Challenge (2009-2010) attended by Johar and Khan during this period quite deliberately either increased Muslim members in the audience or were edited to highlight the presence of such viewers. Drawing upon Foucault, we can see that the marketing strategies addressed and produced ‘Muslims’ as consumers and as ‘ordinary, citizen-subjects’ who, much like MNIK’s protagonist, were not ‘terrorists’. This strategy sought to intervene in and profit from the dearth of ‘positive’ representations of Muslims in global and Indian media where they have been largely cast as terrorists, suspects, fanatic, and suicide bombers. MNIK recounts the story of Rizvan Khan who suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism. Khan grows up in a lower-middle class neighborhood in Mumbai under the shelter of a doting mother. We briefly see the 1993 Mumbai riots which reignited communal fires; an effect of these riots was demonization and increase in discrimination against Muslims in India. The work of narrative development and editing stitches Khan’s status as member of a minority in India and later in the US, where he moves after his mother’s death. During his stint as a salesman of beauty products in San Francisco, he meets and falls in love with Mandira, a divorced Hindu single mother. The social conventions found in India travel with Khan to the US. Habituated Hindi film viewers would recognize the transgressive nature of this romance: he is Muslim; she is Hindu; he is single; she is divorced and a mother (i.e. not a virgin); he is autistic; she is ‘normal’. Here, I want to underscore that the law and its violations are neither universally legible nor is their magnitude uniformly experienced. In the narrative, the protest against this transgressive romance is articulated by Rizvan’s brother who refuses to attend his brother’s wedding. The deleted scenes on the

3

The film publicity sought to promote friendly relations between India and Pakistan, by noting that well-known Pakistani playback singers, Shafqat Amanat Ali and Rahat Fateh Ali Khan, were included on the soundtrack and its cast boasted Sonya Jehan, the grand-daughter of the framed yester-year playback singer and film star Noor Jehan.

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DVD bonus features, which I will discuss later in more detail, reveal that Mandira’s parents also object to the wedding. The wedding is a threat because it would legalize and potentially reproduce transgression. In the filmic narrative, Rizvan’s sister-in-law, however, decides to attend the wedding, gently bypassing social prohibitions. After their marriage, Mandira, Rizvan and their son Sameer settle into their comfortable suburban family home. Then 9/11 arrives and irrevocably disrupts their lives – their business dwindles and their neighbors treat them as pariahs. Moreover, their son Sameer, called Sam by his friends (the truncated name presumably enables him to blend easily into American life and easily rolls off American tongues), is mercilessly teased at school and, eventually, killed by his classmates. His death ruptures Mandira and Rizvan’s inter-religious marriage as she attributes her son’s death to his newly adopted surname: Khan. To repair his marriage, Rizvan travels across the country to meet the US president and tell him, “My name is Khan and I am not a terrorist.” Foucault’s work on governmentality enables us to see the links between the social and political. Clearly, Mandira and Rizvan’s marriage violates not only social, but political laws. At this juncture in the narrative, the racist violence against South Asians painfully reminds us of the ways in which social and political norms are intertwined. The unequal division of the nation-state into majority and minority places the burden of proof on minorities. Throughout his journey, Khan encounters American state institutions which subject him to invasive security checks, sentence him to prison without any substantial proof, and torture him in order to obtain information about Al Qaeda. If the American state is largely presented as violent (or, in the case of finding Sameer’s killers or assisting with the Wilhelmina flood disaster simply ineffectual), the media which track Rizvan’s moves becomes his ally. In fact, it is the media that record how Rizvan, with the assistance of his family and supporters, helps the African-American victims of the Wilhelmina disaster (the gesture here is to Katrina) thereby drawing the attention of the incumbent US president. Compelled by Rizvan’s sincerity and love, her friend Sara’s urging and a closure to Sameer’s death (she finds his killers), Mandira appears at the Wilhelmina disaster site. Before Rizvan and Mandira can unite, Rizvan is knifed by a Muslim fanatic who blames him for the arrest of an important leader. The cut on screen is matched by the cut in editing. This cutting produces Rizvan as both messiah and hero. Later, Rizvan is able to both reunite with his wife and meet the president. While My Name Is Khan (2010) provides a happy ending, it is triumphant neither in tone nor color; the melancholic blue palette is still visible in the end. And, it cannot be triumphant: Sameer is dead and his best friend, Reese,

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is complicit in his murder. Sara, Reese’s mother, brings him to Mandira so that he can confess his role in Sameer’s demise and Mandira, for Sara’s sake, requests a more lenient sentence for Reese. Nevertheless, Reese’s involvement in Sameer’s killing damages Sara and Mandira’s friendship. Rizvan’s poignant placard “Repair Almost Anything” reminds us that some things cannot be repaired. Uncannily, the themes of race, discrimination and religion central to the film shadowed its production and exhibition. The film faced a temporary setback during late December 2008 when actor Aamir Bashir was denied a visa to the United States (Maniar 2008). He was eventually replaced by Jimmy Shergill as Khan’s younger brother. Despite pleading with authorities in Los Angeles that his film would not promote “anti-social values”, Johar was not permitted to shoot a scene at a mosque in Los Angeles and eventually a set was erected at a club in Mumbai to shoot the sequence (Jha 2009). On August 14, 2009, Khan came to the US to participate in promotional events and much like his character Rizvan, was pulled aside and interrogated by immigration officers at Newark Airport. Approximately two weeks prior to the film’s release on February 12, 2010, the film plunged into controversy after Khan who is an owner of the cricket team Kolkata Knight Riders stated that Pakistani players should have been allowed to participate in the Indian Premier League cricket tournament. Shiv Sena, a rightwing Hindu party, based in Mumbai, immediately called upon Khan to apologize for this anti-nationalist statement, threatening to ban his upcoming film if he did not comply. A national Hindu organization, Vishwa Hindu Parishad also questioned Khan’s patriotism, alleging that as a Muslim, Khan was sympathetic to Pakistan. In an unprecedented move, Khan categorically refused to apologize for his statement. However, as the release date of his film approached closer, he made conciliatory gestures, short of an outright apology. Shiv Sena appeared to change its mind and declared that it would not block the film’s exhibition. However, when theaters in Mumbai opened for advance opening a few days prior to the film’s release, Shiv Sainiks attacked and vandalized at least nine theaters, impelling at least sixty out of seventy theaters to close the film’s advance booking. Amidst this raging controversy, the film was quietly examined by the Central Board of Certification which classified it as a “Social” and gave it a “UA” certificate similar to the US rating ‘PG-13’, with deletions in sound (CBFC).4 To

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See the Central Board of Film Certification website, ‹cbfcindia.gov.in/html/ uniquepage.aspx?va=my%20name%20is%20khan&Type=search›. On the CBFC

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circulate in other national contexts, MNIK also required ‘certification’. Foucault’s work invites us to attend to such quotidian forms of power. An analysis of certification in a transnational context compels us to question distinctions between state-censorship and non-government regulation. MNIK was rated ‘12A’ in the UK; ‘M’ in Australia; ‘PG’ in Canada; ‘PG-13’ in the US In these countries, film regulation is administered by non-governmental entities. In Singapore, the film was classified as ‘PG’; in Ireland as ’12 A’; and in India as ‘UA’. In these countries, films are vetted by the state. In different national contexts, these ratings regulated who could view the film and framed viewers’ entry into the film. A cursory look at the website of the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) categorization of MNIK demonstrates the import of certification. The BBFC generated fourteen classifications for the film (theatrical and video versions) as well as its promotional and other supplemental materials, displaying an astonishing bureaucratic exactitude in its bid to manage the film, ancillary materials, and its audiences. A focus on certification points to the exercise of power in each case, and reveals overlaps between state-censorship and nongovernment regulation.5 Upon its release on February 12, 2010, MNIK received largely positive reviews in India and abroad.6 Many reviews lauded Shah Rukh Khan’s restrained performance while criticizing Johar’s over-the-top Wilhelmina flood sequence. In a bid to oppose Shiv Sena’s chauvinistic rhetoric, the majority of the Indian media outlets formed a united front, showcasing ‘houseful’ signs as well as appreciative viewers who were not cowed by Shiv Sena’s threats. While the media

website, the following deletion is listed for the theatrical version: “Deleted the work ‘Kohl ke’ (Replaced with approved word ‘Saala’: Sound Only)”. The deletions were voluntary and submitted by the producer after the film was examined. When I wrote an earlier version of the article, only this information about the film appeared on the website. Subsequently, twenty-one more items have been added related to the films promotional material and the ‘video’. All of the materials are given ‘U’ certificates. For transforming the ‘UA’ film into a ‘U’ film which can be screened on television, a number of cuts have been implemented. The content of the cuts include, expletives, a sexual invitation, and a reference to God. 5

Julian Petley points to the alliances and interactions between the BBFC and the state, revealing the problems of viewing government and non-government regulation as entirely different entities, (see Petley 2013: 149-166).

6

Many of the positives reviews were collected on the My Name Is Khan (2010) website, forming a part of its publicity. See ‹www.mynameiskhanthefilm.com›. The website is currently (24 November 2015) not operational.

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suggested that despite the dangers, Indians generally and Mumbaikers particularly were going to the theaters in droves to see the film, the availability of tickets on the Internet especially for shows in Mumbai suggested otherwise. While the controversy might have galvanized audiences in other parts of India, it depleted the collections from the Mumbai territory, a major distribution territory. Given that the majority of a film’s business today rests on its first week’s revenue, this represented a major setback.7 While in India, the film did not meet its recordbreaking expectation, overseas its performance was noteworthy. Studies of censorship largely focus on theatrical releases. By turning to new media, I seek to explore new modes of cutting, regulating, and packaging film. On April 21, 2010, Reliance Big Home Video released a VCD version as well as collector’s edition of My Name Is Khan (2010), containing two DVDs. Like the film’s theatrical version, both the VCD and DVD versions were subject to statecensorship, receiving ‘UA’ certificates. While the VCD version only included the film, the DVD version boasted bonus features including the theatrical trailer, the making of MNIK, and forty-five minutes of “Unseen footage with Karan Johar”. At the outset of his commentary for the “Unseen footage”, Johar informs his viewers that he has included “all” of the deleted scenes from the film on the DVD. Adopting a friendly, pedagogical style, Johar explains the reasons for removing the scenes. This commentary both provides insight into the production process and offers a critical vocabulary for understanding the narrative and filmmaking.8 At the outset, he tells us that Rizvan’s childhood sequences needed to be reduced so that the film could arrive more quickly to the story of the adult Rizvan and showcase the talents of the superstar Shah Rukh Khan. In explaining the decision to trim scenes of Mandira and Rizvan’s romance, Johar divides the film into two halves, namely, a love story and political drama. While a formal intermission – a staple of narrative construction and exhibition practices in India – is not present in the DVD, it structures Johar’s thoughts on the film. He stresses that Mandira and Rizvan’s love story in the first half of the film provides the emotional syntax for the political drama in the second part. According to Johar, the love story needed to be truncated to pave the way for Rizvan’s heroic journey. Johar tells us that the political drama in the second portion would have

7

Often piracy, audience comments on the internet, print and television as well as film reviews reduce the film’s shelf life. Johar stated, since the film’s topic was serious, it did not have repeat value. The lack of repeat viewers decreased its box-office earnings.

8

John Caldwell offers a useful taxonomy for understanding bonus features on DVDs. (See Caldwell 2008: 362-367).

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either followed Mandira’s quest for justice or Rizvan’s epic trek across the country. Johar chose the latter because to narrate both tales would have been “too much”. His decision demonstrates that male stars and male-driven narratives are still viewed by members of the industry as pivotal to a film’s success. Due to Johar’s decisions, Kajol’s role is significantly decreased in the film. I suspect that this reduction beyond upsetting Kajol – who it is clear from viewing the making of My Name Is Khan (2010) expected to be a part of a film about Mandira and Rizvan as opposed to a film about Rizvan’s solitary journey – had an impact on the film’s reception. Viewers, who were savoring the prospect of watching the SRK-Kajol jodi (pair), would have surely been disappointed. The unseen footage concludes with an eight minute sequence which was cut from the much abused Wilhelmina track. Johar prefaces this sequence by noting (as he did in interviews) that it troubled him and his crew during production, post-production as well as post-film release. However, he felt that the narrative required a larger-than-life event which would compel the President of the US to recognize and meet Rizvan. Through the DVD commentary, Johar is both able to address criticism pertaining to this portion of the film while making his viewers aware of the cost and effort of shooting this sequence. The commentary constructs Johar as a committed and transparent producer-director who is able to instruct us without screening either the film’s or his flaws. Post the release of the DVD and VCD in India, Fox, following an unusual distribution strategy, released an “international director’s cut” of MNIK in select theaters in New York and Los Angeles on May 7, 2010 (“My Name Is Khan’s new avatar to open in US big time”). This re-edited version was not crafted by Johar. Rather, it was initiated by Fox who hired Allan Edward Bell, a wellknown Hollywood editor, to work with Deepa Bhatia, Johar’s editor, to produce a version of MNIK suited for non-traditional markets. Fox stated that they would distribute MNIK in its new avatar in the US more widely if it proved to be successful at the limited venues. 9 The original film which clocked at 161 minutes was reduced by 34 minutes to generate the 127 minutes “international director’s cut”. Through the editing Fox intended to transform the commercial film into an ‘art-house’ version, trimming Indian excesses and tailoring to international tastes and normative US exhibition times.10 It is also worth noting that there was no

9

This version was not successful and within a couple of weeks was removed from theaters.

10 “My Name Is Khan’s new avatar to open in U.S. big time.” In his interviews, Johar suggested that Fox would be producing an ‘art-house’ version of My Name Is Khan (2010).

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intermission when the original version, which would attract audiences of cinephiles as well as members of South Asian diasporas, was screened in US theatres. This mode of exhibition also mimicked habitual US screening practices. Foucault has taught us that power comes in many hues: changing a film via editing or through exhibition practices is an exercise of power, especially in a global media context where Hollywood dominates. In this new form, MNIK becomes an “art-house” production instead of a big-budget commercial film which offered audiences what Hollywood did not, a story about 9/11 with a liberal Muslim as its hero. While the film’s ‘original’ and ‘re-edited’ theatrical versions were being screened in theaters worldwide, it was available for viewing in other venues and formats including pirated prints on the Internet and stores, the official DVD and VCD editions, and satellite television. In late May and early June 2010, the film was shown on direct to home television premiere. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment released a Region 2 DVD on June 28, 2010; the DVD could only be viewed in the Europe. It was classified as ‘12’ (suitable for 12 years or older) by the BBFC. In August 2010, Fox released a Region 1 DVD which could be played in US and Canada; this DVD was rated ‘PG-13’. In addition to the ratings, the DVDs varied slightly in the bonus features provided. The multiple versions of MNIK which are currently circulating highlight varying screening and viewing practices. Viewers have access to different texts and contexts for watching and making sense of the film.

C ODA By linking the insights of Postcolonial Studies with Foucault’s work, I have sought to historicize both discourses of globalization and the nation-state in order to illustrate how they mutually constitute one another. Discussions which cast globalization and the nation-state as dichotomous and/or separate entities produce scalar divisions such as global, regional, local, and national as geographical fact. Scalar analyses often adopt these categories without interrogating the practices and histories through which such divisions are generated. In doing so, they miss the overlaps, alliances, and fissures among these categories. Post9/11, the Indian state, like many other nation-states, instituted and reinforced discriminatory domestic policies against minorities; it also rationalized its antagonistic relation with its neighbor Pakistan, a Muslim majority nation. It did so by claiming that communal riots in India (allegedly fueled by Pakistan) were its ‘9/11’ and therefore required tactics similar to the US government’s in dealing

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with Al Qaeda. These acts re-generated and consolidated a global discourse on Muslims as “terrorists.” In MNIK, scenes of ‘local’ 1993 Mumbai riots are hooked to the ‘global’ 9/11 narrative; this stitching enables a ‘Bollywood’ film to circulate in wider exhibition markets, which are dominated by Hollywood. By examining MNIK at the sites of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception, I argue for a scholarly approach that resists scalar modes of thinking and understands media as a set of legislative, industrial and quotidian practices.

R EFERENCES BANDIT QUEEN (1994) (IN, D: Shekhar Kapur). Breckenridge, Carol Appadurai/Veer, Peter van der (eds) (1993): Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. BOMBAY (1995) (IN, D: Mani Ratnam). Caldwell, John (2008): Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television, Durham: Duke University Press. Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC): My Name Is Khan, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, ‹cbfcindia.gov.in/html/uniquepage.aspx?va=my %20name%20is%20khan&Type=search›, accessed on 23 November 2015. —/Film Certification Appellate Tribunal (1987): The Film Certification Appellate Tribunal Order on Pati Parmeshwar. Unpublished Record from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, New Delhi. FIRE (1997) (IN, D: Deepa Mehta). Foucault, Michel (1978, orig. 1976): The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1, New York: Pantheon. — (1991, orig. 1975): Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. — (2010, orig. 1982-1983): The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982-1983, trans. Graham Burchell, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. — (1983): “Afterword: Subject and Power”, in: Hubert L. Dreyfus/Paul Rabinow (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 208-226. — (1991): “Governmentality”, in: Graham Burchell/Colin Gordon/Peter Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 87-104. Hansen, Thomas Blom/Stepputat, Finn (eds) (2001): States of Imagination:

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Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State, Durham: Duke University Press. Higson, Andrew (2000): “The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema”, in: Mette Hjort/Scott Mackenzie (eds), Cinema and Nation, New York: Routledge, 63-74. Jaikumar, Priya (2006): Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India, Durham: Duke University Press. Jha, Subhash (2009): “KJo Denied Permission to Shoot in LA Mosque”, in: MidDay, 25 April, ‹archive.mid-day.com/news/2009/apr/250409-Mumbai-NewsKaran-Johar-LA-mosque-Denied-Permission-Shahrukh-Khan-Kajol-MyName-is-Khan.htm›, accessed 23 November 2015. Kuhn, Annette (1988): Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality: 1909-1925, London: Routledge. KURBAAN (2009) (IN, D: Renzil D’Silva). Maniar, Parag (2008): “Aamir Bashir Denied Visa”, in: Mumbai Mirror, 23 December, ‹mumbaimirror.com/entertainment/bollywood/Aamir-Bashir-deniedUS-visa/articleshow/15880167.cms›, accessed on 23 November 2015. Mehta, Monika (2009): “Re-framing Film Censorship”, in: Velvet Light Trap 63, 66-69. — (2011): Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema, Austin: University of Texas. Mufti, Aamir R. (2012): “No Place Like Home”. Unpublished Lecture for the Lines of Control Symposium – Green Cardamon Project at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca. MUSIC KA MAHA MUQABALA (2009-2010) (IN, P: Nitin Gaikwad). MY NAME IS KHAN (2010) (IN, D: Karan Johar). “My Name Is Khan’s New Avatar to Open in US Big Time” (2010): Rediff Movies, 5 May, ‹rediff.com/movies/report/fox-opens-my-name-is-khan-tomainstream-america/20100505.htm›, accessed on 24 November 2015. NATIONAL BINGO NIGHT (2010) (IN, H: Abhishek Bachchan). Petley, Julian (2013): “The Censor and the State in Britain”, in: Daniël Biltereyst/Roel Vande Winkel (eds), Silencing Cinema: Film Censorship around the World, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 149-166. PATI PARMESHWAR/MY HUSBAND, MY GOD (1989) (IN, D: Madan Joshi). SATYAM, SHIVAM, SUNDARAM (1978) (IN, D: Raj Kapoor). Sen, Sudipta (2002): Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India, New York: Routledge. Vasudev, Aruna (1978): Liberty and Licence in the Indian Cinema, New Delhi: Vikas.

Part III: Media Industries

Postcolonial Piracy L ARS E CKSTEIN

1. W HAT

IS

P OSTCOLONIAL P IRACY ?

Media piracy is a contested term in the academic as much as the public debate. It is used by the corporate industries as a synonym for the theft of protected media content with disastrous economic consequences. It is celebrated by technophile elites as an expression of freedom that ensures creativity as much as free market competition. Marxist critics and activists promote piracy as a subversive practice that undermines the capitalist world system and its structural injustices. Artists and entrepreneurs across the globe curse it as a threat to their existence, while many use pirate infrastructures and networks fundamentally for the production and dissemination of their art. For large sections of the population across the global South, piracy is simply the only means of accessing the medial flows of a progressively globalising planet. Piracy is a loaded term indeed, and it ties in with a range of related concepts, always depending on who is asked. Some will associate it with criminal behaviour and plain stealing, others with notions of sharing and informal exchange; those with a background in theory will find in piracy resonances of de Certeau’s poaching, of bricolage à la Levi-Strauss and Derrida, or of poststructuralist debates on simulacra and authorship after the various critical assassinations of the author; still others prefer to speak in more neutral terms about different “cultures of the copy” (Sundaram 2007) facilitated by the medial changes of the analogue and digital revolutions. Unsurprisingly, the academic productivity of the term has been intricately questioned given the “impossible heterogeneity” (Lobato 2014: 124) not only of the innumerable practices, but also of the many discourses piracy is supposed to encompass. Still, to date no alternative term has hit the scene which could replace it as a critical

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concept. And while the term demands self-reflexive positioning, it has opened a vital field of postcolonial critique. Let us begin by defining the larger cultural scenario in which postcolonial piracy is situated. The starting point for this discussion is the basic observation that, roughly over the past fifty years, converging media technologies have facilitated complex new forms of cultural production, distribution and reception which typically fail to access the global flows of technology, media, goods and ideas according to the dominant logic of property set as ‘modern’ standard. This standard, of course, is not in and of itself universal. It has a distinct local history that is grounded in British utilitarian legal models and German idealist notions of personal authorship. And it is a standard, too, which has itself evolved from a complex history of mass media piracy which in the Anglophone world reaches back at least as far as to the introduction of the printing press in England in the 1470s and which very gradually reformulated cultural scripts of authorship and cultural authority. As Adrian Johns (1998; 2010) showed, print piracy has been pervasive across Western modernity not only in the class-based, but especially also the geographical margins of markets; Scottish and Irish pirate publishers, for instance, thoroughly unsettled the authority of English printed matter in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while throughout the nineteenth century, the newly founded United States systematically failed to recognize British copyright. Piracy thus “fuelled the development of a deliberative public sphere […] and the transfer of knowledge between more and less privileged social groups and regions” (Balázs 2011: 399). But at the same time, it drove the global centres of governance and economic production to more firmly assert and justify copyright control, from the 1557 Royal Charter of Incorporation of the Stationers’ Company to the 1709 Statute of Anne, via the 1774 Copyright Case to the international forays of the 1886 Berne Convention. And most recently with the 1994 TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) Agreement – an agreement which sets minimal standards of copyright governance for all WTO member states – the property regime originally founded on the local histories of Western European print culture became enshrined as a powerful global doctrine. As I will argue in the further course of this chapter, this doctrine invites careful assessment from a postcolonial perspective for its entanglement with various imperial imaginaries, not only in view of an underlying idea of what it actually means to hold property (intellectual or otherwise), but also of what it means to be a person within the capitalist world system. My reading of piracy in this sense builds on Ravi Sundaram’s important insight that postcolonial piracy “fundamentally disrupts the categories of debate of property, capitalism, personhood”

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(Sundaram 2009: 111). My argument will be that a postcolonial perspective on piracy enables us to question the purportedly universal reach of postEnlightenment definitions of the relationship between self and world in the widest sense, as it allows us to investigate, without denying the power and validity of such definitions, how their scope is complicated and exceeded by different subaltern epistemologies. I will accordingly propose that we may best understand postcolonial piracy as a range of practices mediated through older and new technologies which negotiate “provisional compromises” between global designs of property, capitalism, personhood, and diverse local “ways of being human” (Chakrabarty 2000: 44). While this conception of piracy invites a perspective across the longue durée of modernity and globalisation as I will briefly discuss in the concluding section of this chapter, my main focus will be on cultures of the copy that have emerged in the postcolonial world over the past few decades. These are in many ways a function of the technological interventions of the analogue and digital revolutions which have also thoroughly transformed the global North. They have, however, brought nothing less than a sea change for the South by offering “people ordinarily left out of the imagination of modernity, technology and the global economy ways of inserting themselves into these networks” (Liang 2005: 12). These new avenues of access range from the spread of the four-track tape machine across Asia, Africa and the Americas in the 1970s to the introduction of video formats in the 80s and 90s; they encompass the global distribution of often recycled computer hardware all the way to the mass dissemination of the internet and mobile phones in the new millennium. What all these technologies have in common is that they have allowed users not only to consume, but crucially also to produce, share and reproduce media in an infrastructure that is more often than not informal and volatile, but which has facilitated a velocity of media content which increasingly renders difficult, if not obsolete, attempts to confine it and prevent it from travelling. Ravi Sundaram defines postcolonial piracy on these grounds as a “postliberal (if not post-Marxist) cultural effect” which “destabilizes contemporary media property, both enabling and disabling creativity, and evading issues of the classic commons, while simultaneously radicalizing media access for subaltern groups” (2009: 111-112). Let us begin by exploring some of the conceptual complexities behind this working definition and taking a look at the major discourses on piracy in the South as they are articulated mainly from the global North.

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2. E UROCENTRIC C RITIQUES OF P OSTCOLONIAL P IRACY The following account of the most vocal discourses about postcolonial piracy in Western debates draws heavily on a previous systematization by Ramon Lobato, of whose “Six Faces of Piracy” (2008) I will foreground three, with due awareness that this taxonomic reduction rather crudely simplifies a contingent field that is full of nuances and ambivalences. Rather than an encompassing review, what I offer is a flagging of the most prominent cornerstones, which I will again read selectively for their entanglement in specific Eurocentric imaginaries. The undoubtedly most prominent and common interpretation of piracy in this vein is, of course, its conceptualization as theft, following the dominant logic of copyright within the capitalist world system, according to which piracy is essentially imagined as a “parasitic act of social and economic deviance” (Lobato 2008: 20). This view is supported by mainstream legal and political discourses across the Western world (cf. Choate 2005 and Paradise 1999), and continues to be lobbied vocally by a whole range of industry associations and alliances which have, to this date, also funded most of the research into pirate practices. The viability of such research has been critiqued in an encompassing and nuanced way by Joe Karaganis in the timely collaborative and policy-oriented publication Media Piracy in Emerging Economies (2011). Karaganis outlines how industry research has, without making their methodology transparent, typically foregrounded dramatic financial losses incurred by media piracy, driven enforcement campaigns across the globe, and advocated pedagogical measures in the interest of copyright. Without wishing to deny the validity of this perspective in its entirety, postcolonial interventions into Western anti-piracy campaigns have revealed a starkly orientalising imaginary, and especially so in view of the portrayal of ‘Asian’ markets. Kavita Philip (2005) traced a clearly discernible shift in Western media coverage in the early 2000s, observing how a premillennial, largely patronizing perspective on Southern piracy “as annoying and inconvenient for western business, but one that will inevitably be cleaned up with the coming of full-fledged modernity to backward nations” (201) has given way to a much more fundamental anxiety that global piracy – like global terror – endangers nothing less than the Western way of life. Among others, Nitin Govil (2004) acutely analysed how after the events of September 11, the ‘war’ on global piracy became thoroughly enmeshed with the ‘war on terror’ in media coverage, fuelled, partly, by reports on the funding practices of Al Qaeda. But much more foundational to this anxiety is the increasing realisation that nations like India or China have achieved resilient economic success despite the fact that they have deliberately side-tracked

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the generously paved-out Western road to modernity, not least by negotiating their way around strong copyright enforcement. More recent representations in the mainstream media have thus ever increasingly invoked postcolonial piracy as a haunting orientalised spectre, in a rhetoric of crisis lamenting that “[t]he very technologies that appear to embody post-Enlightenment modernity and progress seem to facilitate the destruction of western civilization by those who ‘hate our values and freedoms’” (Philip 2005: 201). The second major discourse on piracy I wish to flag is one interpreting piracy within the framework of free speech. The defence of free speech has gained particular momentum and a new geopolitical twist more recently with the upheavals caused by, among other events, the WikiLeaks affair and Edward Snowden’s revelations about digital surveillance practices across the Western world. Yet it also underpins a range of liberal critiques of strong copyright enforcement which reach back as far as to the inception of copyright itself (as in the 1774 Copyright Case), and which similarly gained a new quality and urgency with the digital revolution. The prevalent libertarian argument here is that copyright restriction imposed by states and monopolists blocks the free flow of ideas and the creative powers of late modern network societies (cf. McLeod 2007, Strangelove 2005 and Vaidhyanathan 2003). The proponents of this discourse argue that by criminalizing vital techniques of the digital age such as cut-and-paste, remixing, ripping or sampling, an older generation of policy-makers is stifling the creative potential of the coming generation. Accordingly, they variously advocate an extension of fair-use regimes, thin protection, or alternative copyright systems such as the Creative Commons. There is much to be said for this critique – and not least also in relation to media cultures such as the one in which this very text is circulated; a text, after all, whose (intellectual) production is basically disentangled from its (probably very meagre) revenues in the marketplace, but ultimately funded by tax payers who afford tenured academics to produce knowledge for a public good. It is with a sense of ambiguity, therefore, that I exemplarily single out Lawrence Lessig, the man behind Creative Commons and doyen of the free culture movement, for a postcolonial critique of the libertarian anti-copyright movement. Yet Lessig’s model of free culture as underscored in his influential eponymous 2004 publication is indeed troubling for its underpinning Eurocentric imaginary, developed in response to initial criticism, both indignant and enthusiastic, which interpreted free culture as basically unsettling the law and the market. As Kavita Philip (2005) and Lawrence Liang (2011) outline, Lessig’s work after his interventions in The Future of Ideas (2001) is marked by a strategic distinction between piracy that is desirable, and piracy that “is rampant and just plain wrong” (Lessig 2004:

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66). ‘Good’ piracy is strictly defined by the “transformative uses of creative work” (ibid.: 156), whereas ‘bad’ piracy does “nothing but take other people’s copyrighted content, copy it, and sell it” (ibid.: 63). And strikingly, Lessig’s rhetoric and examples overwhelmingly locate ‘bad’ piracy outside of the West, and particularly in Asia: Asian piracy tacitly figures, again, like in the discourses advocating global copyright enforcement, as an orientalised Other which potentially jeopardizes the libertarian pillars of free culture – the bourgeois subject, its right to property, and the free market; or as Philip concludes: “Asian pirates serve as his [Lessig’s] limit case: the limit point of difference from bourgeois law [...] – abandon those lifelines and we fall into the pit of Asian sameness. We lose the difference [...] that makes us creative, successful, and technologically productive.” (Philip 2005: 212) This should bring us closer to understanding what Ravi Sundaram refers to when he defines postcolonial piracy as a “post-liberal (if not post-Marxist) cultural effect” which “disrupts the categories of debate of property, capitalism, personhood” (2009: 111-112) – except for the caveat about Marxist critique. Let me therefore, as a third and final signpost in a much more complex and heterogeneous field, briefly attend to (neo-)Marxist readings of piracy. By framing piracy as resistance, the interventions from this corner “insist on the importance of class” within a globalised media system marked by “control and exploitation that operates in the service of capitalism” (Lobato 2008: 28). Vital examples of this approach are, for instance, Ronald Bettig’s authoritative Copyrighting Culture (1996), or the Global Hollywood volumes by Toby Miller et al. (2002; 2008). Bettig undertakes a compelling history of the political economy of intellectual property which analyses in depth how especially the US government, in conjunction with various industry associations, has aggressively enforced a global copyright regime in its own economic interests. The authors of Global Hollywood, in turn, offer a profound materialist critique of the exploitative transnational labour and hegemonic distribution regimes of major film studios. Both approaches tend to value piracy as a viable mode of subversion and resistance within and against a hegemonic neoliberal and neocolonial world system. These critiques are revealing and powerful. Yet building on such analyses a larger Marxist critique of piracy as resistance, again, creates a range of problems. More generally, such a reading runs the risk of conflating in a “totalizing rhetoric” (Lobato 2008: 29) a myriad of highly heterogeneous cultural practices, contexts and, not least, agencies and motivations. Piracy may vary from distinctly local ventures to complex transnational circuits of production and distribution with very different cultural and economic imaginaries. Moreover, pirate networks of any size are hardly detached from the formal circuits of capital, but

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“there is a great deal of traffic between the formal and the informal over time and space […]. Formal economies can become informal and vice versa.” (Lobato 2012: 41) The many realities of postcolonial piracy, in other words, do not quite add up with the classical historical narrative of Marxism. How, then, may we nevertheless conceive of a materially grounded critique of piracy that accounts for historical and regional difference, a critique which productively exceeds the Eurocentric imaginaries of theft, freedom, and resistance? One way of getting there is to follow Dipesh Chakrabarty in his own dissident critique of Marx in Provincializing Europe. Chakrabarty particularly grapples, here, with the “stagism” of Marxism’s world historical model which has dramatic consequences for “formations of self and belonging” outside of Europe. Classical Marxist models, Chakrabarty worries, conflate a plurality of subaltern epistemologies into an indistinct prehistory, “posited by capital itself as its precondition”; or in other words, they sweepingly consign Europe’s Others to the “waiting room” of modernity (Chakrabarty 2000: 63). Against this strand of critique, Chakrabarty foregrounds how Marx himself undercuts the singularity of his historical model by positing that there are elements of cultural production which may exist alongside and within the dominant narrative of a capitalist world system (which Chakrabarty refers to as “History 1”), yet still “do not lend themselves to the reproduction of the logic of capital” (ibid.: 64). With and against Marx, who does not develop this further, Chakrabarty advocates that we attend to precisely such pasts and narratives (Chakrabarty calls these “History 2”) which productively interrupt the “totalizing thrusts” of the “universal themes of the European Enlightenment” (ibid.: 66); themes among which ‘property’ and ‘personhood’ feature prominently. Such readings, he argues, allow us “to make room, in Marx’s own analysis of capital, for the politics of human belonging and diversity” and “giv[e] us a ground on which to situate our thoughts about multiple ways of being human” (ibid.: 67). In this spirit we may arrive at a critically materialist, yet, in Walter Mignolo’s terms, inherently “pluritopic” (2000: 11) critique of piracy, a critique which acknowledges the ways in which its heterogeneous practices are necessarily tied to the logic of global capitalism, yet which insists that such practices are always refracted by local histories and epistemologies in “provisional compromise” (Chakrabarty 2000: 70). In order to make better sense of this, however, let us step back from theoretical abstractions for a minute and consider two classical examples of postcolonial piracy.

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3. C ASSETTE C ULTURES : I NDIA

AND

N IGERIA

My first example focusses predominantly on audio cultures in India in the 1980s and is seminally informed by the research of Peter Manuel into Indian Cassette Culture (1993) and its reading by Lawrence Liang (2005). My interest, here, is predominantly in the social, political, and, partly, ethical resonances of piracy in the postcolony. My second example will then change scenes to Northern Nigeria and look at video cultures in the 1990s that are crucially informed by a pirate infrastructure. This section draws mainly on research by Brian Larkin (2008), and will allow me to expand perspectives also to the epistemological and aesthetic. In the age of the mobile phone and peer-to-peer file sharing, both examples have an increasingly historical value, but they still allow concrete insights into the workings of piracy in specific postcolonial contexts. Peter Manuel’s story about the cassette revolution in India goes roughly as follows: back in the colonial days, the British-owned Gramophone Company of India (GCI) set up a factory in Calcutta in 1908 to dominate the Indian circuit for recorded music for a very long time to come. It negotiated exclusive distribution deals and strove to create a singular, nation-wide music market by way of establishing an all-Indian aesthetic. It did so by promoting almost exclusively Hindi film music, at the expense of other regional languages and musical genres. The dominant cultural impact of the GCI and HMV, GC’s retail business, remained largely unbroken in this fashion far beyond the time of Indian independence, and was only challenged by converging technological and economic developments from the late 1970s onwards. In this period, India shifted from Nehruvian statecentred and protectionist development policies toward a liberalisation of its markets; and crucially, this change coincided with the arrival of Japanese two-in-one tape players, which were initially brought back from the Gulf countries by migrant workers. Such machines were a desired status symbol of the affluent, yet they soon became increasingly affordable to the middle classes, partly through the lowering of import taxes under the new economic regime, but mainly through the establishing of informal markets for both hardware components and, especially, pirate cassettes of film music. By the mid-80s, the GCI went into rapid decline, just as the LP was almost completely replaced by the cassette as the dominant medium. This decline went hand in hand with a thorough transformation of the production and distribution schemes for recorded music in India. Tape coating became a viable new industry, and by the end of the decade, India ranked as the second-largest manufacturer of cassettes in the world. A few major and hundreds of small music companies set up business, and crucially, they distributed their music no longer through

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official retailers, but overwhelmingly through local corner shops, bazaars and street vendors. The result was a radical pluralisation and diversification not only of the market for recorded music, but concomitantly also of the distributed content. The pirate networks of localised production and distribution facilitated the establishment of entirely new musical scenes and a proliferation of new genres and styles from devotional to secular, catering to very different regional and linguistic groups. What all this attests to is that piracy is indeed more than just the consequence of a “global pricing problem” in a world of “[h]igh prices for media goods, low incomes, and cheap digital technologies” (Karaganis 2011: i). Piracy, as the case of Indian cassette culture shows, has been an indispensable way for populations in the South to negotiate local ways of being modern through new technologies; a way to insert themselves into the dominant narratives of globalization, albeit by refracting them through “diverse ways of being human” (Chakrabarty 2000: 44) outside of, or only partly within, the global designs of “property, capitalism, personhood” (Sundaram 2009: 11) – ways expressed, for example, through the preference of familiar corner shop and bazaar exchanges, and the pleasures of accessing communal and ritual as much as transregional and global flows of music. Surely, a reading of postcolonial piracy along such lines must beware of romanticising piracy or enlisting it for an easy narrative of postcolonial emancipation. The pirate domain is complicated by a myriad of practices ranging from the almost ethical to the clearly illegal, as Lawrence Liang demonstrates in an exemplary reading of the enterprises of the brothers Gulshan and Gopal Aurora, who quit work in their father’s fruit and juice shop in Delhi to found a company called T-Series. T-Series started out in the late 1970s as a small factory for magnetic tape which offered copying services, emerged as market leader for cassettes by the late 80s, and turned into a multi-media conglomerate in the 90s. Its success was built on various more or less shady practices from semi-legal version recording of GCI film songs all the way to inserting inferior tape into established cassette brands to discredit them. What is more, T-Series struck clandestine distribution deals with HMV, and unsurprisingly, they turned into the most aggressive enforcer of the copyright of their own products as soon as they had fully conquered the formal market (cf. Liang 2005: 10-11 and Manuel 1993: 6769). As the example of T-Series shows, the borderlines between the formal and informal are highly ‘porous’ within the pirate domain in the fields of both production and consumption, and the cassette cultures of India elude any clear cut analysis within the Western frameworks of theft, freedom or resistance as

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outlined above. The ensuing ambiguity persistently speaks through Peter Manuel’s own discomfort with the ‘illegality’ of Indian cultures of the copy. Lawrence Liang responds to this discomfort by insisting that such ambiguity needs to be read in the larger context of what he refers to as the “porous legalities” (2005) of postcolonial states such as India. What is at stake, here, are fundamental questions about the relationship between the state, the law, and different ways of being human in a context in which large sections of the population fail to reach, in Partha Chatterjee’s words, “the ethical significance of citizenship” (2011: 14). For Liang, the challenge to thinking piracy in a postcolonial framework accordingly ties in with the more fundamental question of “how one begins to understand what happens to the people who fall off official maps, official plans and official histories” (Liang 2005: 14) in the postcolonial world. This particularly pertains to the rapidly expanding urban and semi-urban settings in the South where public and private planning account for only a relatively small percentage, not only of media use, but much more fundamentally, of the access to housing, electricity, water and infrastructure in general. Any viable study of postcolonial piracy therefore needs to interrogate intimately the volatile local frameworks of being in all its aspects from the social and political to the epistemic and aesthetic which refract the global imaginaries of “property, capitalism, personhood” in what Ravi Sundaram calls “pirate modernity” (2009). Let me briefly expand on this idea by shifting scenes from India to Nigeria, and from audio to video cultures. The larger story of the Nigerian video circuit is not dissimilar from the Indian case, yet in and of itself specific. After independence from the British in 1960, Nigeria also attempted to secure control over the new nation’s infrastructure by widely centralising economic and cultural production, in a project that also led to the nationalisation of cinemas in the early 1970s to promote the indigenous arts. Simultaneously, the oil boom during the 1970s boosted consumption and the relatively wide dissemination of analogue cassettebased technologies. When the oil boom came to an abrupt end in 1979, these reproductive media technologies paved the ground for Nigeria to develop what is probably the largest and most diverse pirate media infrastructure on the African continent (cf. Haynes 2000). There are various reasons for this development: in 1981, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) stopped the distribution of Hollywood productions in Nigeria in response to Nigeria’s seizure of MPAA assets as part of their nationalisation campaign. Economic collapse and the neoliberal privatisation of almost all areas of life starting in 1986 with the International Monetary Fund-driven structural adjustment programmes led to a crippling of public cultural scenes, and not least to the displacement of classical Nigerian cinema culture. Due to the relatively wide distribution of cassette

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technologies, informal production and distribution circuits for pirated media products were quickly ready to replace the formal market for films. And finally, as in the case of the northern Nigerian capital of Kano, which is at the centre of Larkin’s research, the new networks for pirated media could draw on centuriesold trading networks within the traditional Hausa regions and beyond: to the Christian coast and the Atlantic circuit but especially towards the Islamic East across sub-Saharan Africa all the way to the Gulf countries, Pakistan and India (cf. Larkin 2008: 222). Apart from the distribution of Islamic religious material and, importantly, genuinely local Hausa television drama, the emerging video cultures of the Kano circuit mainly centred on the pirate dissemination of Indian cinema and Hollywood productions. In his research, Larkin documents how in the 1990s the access to both film cultures in Kano was channelled through the Persian Gulf; and intriguingly, the routes of the pirated media products left visible traces on the material itself. Indian video cassettes commonly featured advertisement scrolling across the bottom of the screen referring to shops in the Gulf countries; Hollywood films were typically illegally copied in the US and then shipped to the hubs of Beirut or Dubai before they reached Nigeria, sometimes taking additional detours. Larkin recalls watching films in Nigeria in which US anti-piracy messages scrolling on the bottom were obliterated by Arabic subtitles, while in other cases Chinese subtitles were superimposed over Arabic ones (ibid.: 224). The importance of Larkin’s contribution to Piracy Studies in this context is his insistence that postcolonial piracy is more than merely a legal, political, or economic issue, but that it is also generative of a materially grounded, provisional aesthetics. This aesthetics is not only inherent in the pirated media object itself, as a result of the multiple traces of its copying routes which in the age of analogue reproduction characteristically also eroded the quality of sound and images; it is also manifestly informed by the particular local frameworks of medial performance. Such frameworks are more often than not marked by “the ubiquity of technological breakdown and repair” in postcolonial contexts of frequent power cuts and volatile recycled hardware set up in often provisional public as much as private scenarios of consumption. The rhythms of breakdown and repair additionally qualify “a particular sensorial experience” that is enhanced by “poor transmission, interference, and noise” (Larkin 2008: 218-219, 233). Larkin’s reflections on the generative aesthetics of the postcolonial pirate domain productively trouble Lessig’s neat distinction between (Western) “transformative” copying that is good and (Oriental) “plain” copying that is bad. They encourage us to disentangle fundamentally the category of the ‘transformative’ from its seemingly natural association with the bourgeois subject as the only

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legitimate creative agent in the global marketplace. Postcolonial piracy encourages us, again, to think beyond the regimes of “property, capitalism, personhood”, and to acknowledge “multiple ways of being human” and their intricate technologically mediated productivity. It invites us to explore, in the words of Sarah Nuttall and Archille Mbembe, how urban life in the South is just as much “a place of manifold rhythms, a world of sounds, private freedom, pleasures and sensations” as it is a “theatre for capitalist accumulation and exploitation” (2004: 360, 356). Postcolonial piracy calls for a pluralising reading which “provincializes Europe” (Chakrabarty 2000) by developing what Walter Mignolo has called a “pluritopic hermeneutics” within the larger world system of “modernity/coloniality” (Mignolo 2011: 11), a system where “coloniality” (Quijano 2000) is always already tied to modernity as its darker side. Let me by way of conclusion draw out some of the larger trajectories of this idea.

4. T OWARD A P OSTCOLONIAL C RITIQUE OF M ODERN P IRACY Some of the wider critical horizons behind the study of postcolonial piracy open up when we use piracy not only as a critical tool to interrogate concrete practices of the past few decades, but also if we expand on it as a conceptual tool for a more encompassing critique of modernity in the Western philosophical and sociological imagination. The critical thrust of such a project is to challenge a widely shared consensus that identifies Europe, and Europe alone, as the origin and the emphatically endogenous laboratory of the modern (cf. Bhambra 2007). Against this consensus, postcolonial critique has insistently claimed that Europe did not establish its self-ascribed relation to modernity before, but precisely through imperialism and colonization. Modernity, to echo Paul Gilroy (1993), is hardly ‘rooted’ in the imperial centres; rather it is the product of innumerable ‘routes’ across a progressively colonized planet, and most adequately symbolized by the innumerable ships which not only transported tangible goods and humans in various degrees of bondage, but also complex cosmogonies, ideologies and ideas. But if we allow ourselves to think of the imperial slave ship as the site where the battle for modernity has been fought out, as profoundly argued, for instance, by Ian Baucom in Specters of the Atlantic (2005), need we not also locate the pirate vessel at the heart of modernity/coloniality, as a foundational if ambivalent trope which both shaped and refracted global negotiations of the modern? After all, the Atlantic debates about (maritime) piracy historically functioned to stabilize the identitarian discourses of Western modernity, as outlined by Nicole

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Waller who explores how the “captivity crises” induced by privateering off the North African coast crucially triggered “cultural scripts that move beyond the scope of local histories to establish a mapping of the world into economic, religious, and racial spheres” (Waller 2011: 2). Conversely, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker (2000) foreground how the codes of early Atlantic buccaneering institutionalized some of the first distinctive counter-cultures of modernity, counter-cultures which destabilised the modern identity politics of nation, class, capital, religion or race by creating limited social spaces which, if only temporarily, “established an alternative ethic and an alternate mode of being” (Liang 2011: 371). A view from the coloniality of power along such lines allows us to frame piracy as a constitutive “boundary object” (Philip 2014) of the global age, as a core trope which precisely occupies the ambiguous position of the slash between “modernity/coloniality”. My suggestion, following the work of Kavita Philip, is that such a reading of piracy facilitates a genealogical perspective on piracy across medial differences, a perspective which ultimately allows us productively to bridge the distinct but related frames of speaking about maritime and media piracy. It encourages us, for instance, to foreground the imperial imaginary of John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689) which formed the philosophical template for the inception of copyright legislation by the 1709 Statute of Anne (cf. Davies 2002). A contrapuntal, in Edward Said’s terms, reading of Locke forbids us to isolate the rise of copyright, which logically tied the ‘work’ of art to the personhood of clearly demarcated civil subjects by right of their invested labour, from related logics at work in the violent dispossessions of settler colonialism in the Americas, Southern Africa or Australia and New Zealand. It allows us to interrogate how the foundational writ of habeas corpus underscored notions of intellectual as much as of human property in the discourses legitimizing (and striving to abolish) chattel slavery. It asks us critically to interrogate the cosmopolitan debates of the Enlightenment over the global circulation of both human and property rights for their underpinning ideologies and typologies of gender, class and, particularly, race. And finally, a contrapuntal reading from the perspective of coloniality asks us to acknowledge, without denying the local validity and productivity of copyright, alternative local histories and epistemologies which frame notions of the self and its relation to the world. Such reflections recall Michael Taussig’s Benjaminian meditations on different “cultures of the copy” in Mimesis and Alterity (1993), which propose that Western capitalism facilitated a culture of “disenchantment” that is “home to a self-enclosed and somewhat paranoid, possessive, individualized sense of self […] within a system wherein that self ideally incorporates into itself wealth,

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property, citizenship” (97). Taussig ventures to juxtapose this disenchantment with the “sympathetic magic” of cultures he conceives of as essentially “mimetic”, informed by the notion of a “protean self with multiple images (read ‘souls’) of itself set in a natural environment whose animals, plants, and elements are spiritualized to the point that nature ‘speaks back’ to humans” (ibid.: 97). He advocates exploring precisely such alternative cultures of the copy and their potential for “post-capitalist utopias organized around the playful exchange of difference, weak chiefs, sharing, and what we may dare designate as a ‘human’, and perhaps ‘yielding’ relation to nature” (ibid.: 98). In Marcus Boon’s terms, such a reading challenges us to rethink piracy beyond the dominant postcolonial rhetoric of subaltern “appropriation” and perhaps to reframe the force of piracy as one of “depropriation” (2010: 236), as an ethical force that productively transcends the boundaries of property and self. Yet we may also linger with the category of ‘citizenship’, which Taussig posits as a crucial component of Western being next to ‘wealth’ and ‘property’ (as quoted above), and interrogate its heuristic validity in postcolonial contexts. This takes us back to Partha Chatterjee whom I briefly referred to in the context of Indian cassette culture: Chatterjee maintains that in most postcolonial nationstates, the field of politics became “effectively split” between what he refers to as “civil society”, a more often than not very narrow domain “where citizens relat[e] to the state through the mutual recognition of legally enforceable rights”, and a much wider domain of “political society”. In political society, he insists, “governmental agencies dea[l] not with citizens but with populations” (Chatterjee 2011: 13-14). The multiple informal exchanges and volatile infrastructures of such populations tend to be tolerated if they are in the interest of the postcolonial state. The pervasive ‘illegality’ of cultural practices is then typically explained as an exception to the order of ‘property and the rights of proper citizens’ in order not to unsettle the rule of law fundamentally. Conversely the populations of political society respond to this logic not by appealing to the law either, but by striving to form “moral communities” which pressure governments to tolerate popular exceptions (ibid.; cf. Liang 2011). A critique of how postcolonial piracy “fundamentally disrupts the categories of debate of property, capitalism, personhood” (Sundaram 2009: 111) needs to engage fundamentally with what it actually means to be a person, a citizen, a pirate, in specific contexts. What is needed, then, for an encompassing perspective on postcolonial piracy is a kaleidoscope of both locally and historically grounded perspectives from across the planet, a kaleidoscope of perspectives which acknowledge the validity and force of the familiar Eurocentric critiques of piracy, yet which equally acknowledge how their universalising narratives are

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refracted and exceeded in provisional compromise by multiple ways of being human. Developing such a planetary perspective on the multiple pasts and presents of media cultures and their relation to various regimes of property and being is essential in order to get a solid idea of where the futures of media culture might take us. In a global age where the viral technologies of the digital media increasingly converge with or displace older technologies, piracy and its many cultures of the copy ever more urgently destabilise and reformulate conceptions of originality and authenticity, of creative collectives and individuals, of authorship and ownership, of the global and the local. Some of the planet’s medial futures surely continue to be negotiated and mediated in Berlin or Los Angeles. But equally surely it is no longer here that we can intimate a rough sense of direction. The future is happening in Kinshasa, Sao Paulo and Palau, Cochabamba and Cochin, Detroit and Delhi, Cairo and Kano.

R EFERENCES Balázs, Bodó (2011): “Coda: A Short History of Book Piracy”, in: Joe Karaganis (ed.), Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, New York: Social Science Research Council, 399-413. Baucom, Ian (2005): Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery and the Philosophy of History, Durham: Duke University Press. Bettig, Ronald V. (1996): Copyrighting Culture: The Political Economy of Intellectual Property, Boulder: Westview Press. Bhambra, Gurminder K. (2007): Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Boon, Marcus (2010): In Praise of Copying, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000): Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Chatterjee, Partha (2011): Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy, New York: Columbia University Press. Choate, Pat (2005): Hot Property: The Stealing of Ideas in an Age of Globalization, New York: Knopf. Davies, Gillian (2002): Copyright and the Public Interest, London: Sweet and Maxwell. Gilroy, Paul (1993): The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso. Govil, Nitin (2004): “War in the Age of Pirate Reproduction”, in: Monica

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Narula/Shuddhabrata Sengupta/Ravi Sundaram/Ravi S. Vasudevan/Awadhanedra Sharan/Jeebesh Bagchi/Geert Lovink (eds), Crisis/Media, vol. 4, Delhi: Sarai, 379-383, ‹sarai.net/category/publications/sarai-reader/›, accessed on 21 September 2015. Haynes, Jonathan (ed.) (2000): Nigerian Video Films, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Johns, Adrian (1998): The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. — (2010): Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Karaganis, Joe (ed.) (2011): Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, New York: Social Science Research Council. Larkin, Brian (2008): Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria, Durham: Duke University Press. Lessig, Lawrence (2001): The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, New York: Random House. — (2004): Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, New York: Penguin Press. Liang, Lawrence (2005): “Porous Legalities and Avenues of Participation”, in: Monica Narula/Shuddhabrata Sengupta/Jeebesh Bagchi/Geert Lovink/ Lawrence Liang (eds), Bare Acts, vol. 5, Delhi: Sarai, 6-17, ‹sarai.net/ category/publications/sarai-reader/›, accessed on 21 September 2015. — (2011), “Beyond Representation: The Figure of the Pirate”, in: Mario Biagioli/Peter Jaszi/Martha Woodmansee (eds), Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property: Creative Production in Legal and Cultural Perspective, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 167-180. Linebaugh, Peter/Rediker, Marcus (2000): The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Boston: Beacon Press. Lobato, Ramon (2012): Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. — (2008): “The Six Faces of Piracy: Global Media Distribution from Below”, in: Robert C. Sickels (ed.), The Business of Entertainment: Movies, Westport: Praeger Publishers, 15-36. — (2014): “The Paradoxes of Piracy”, in: Lars Eckstein/Anja Schwarz (eds), Postcolonial Piracy: Media Distribution and Cultural Production in the Global South, London: Bloomsbury, 121-134. Manuel, Peter (1993): Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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McLeod, Kembrew (2007): Freedom of Expression®: Resistance and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mignolo, Walter D. (2000): Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking, Princeton: Princeton University Press. — (2011): The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options, Durham: Duke University Press. Miller, Toby/Govil, Nitin/McMurria, Richard/Maxwell, Richard (2002): Global Hollywood, London: The British Film Institute. —/Wang, Ting (2008): Global Hollywood: No. 2, London: British Film Institute. Nuttall, Sarah/Mbembe, Achille (2004): “Writing the World from an African Metropolis”, in: Public Culture 16.3, 347-372, ‹publicculture.org/›, accessed on 21 September 2015. Paradise, Paul R. (1999): Trademark Counterfeiting, Product Piracy, and the Billion Dollar Threat to the US Economy, Westport: Quorum. Philip, Kavita (2005): “What Is a Technological Author? The Pirate Function and Intellectual Property”, in: Postcolonial Studies 8.2, 199-218. — (2014): “Keep On Copyin’ In the Free World? Genealogies of the Postcolonial Pirate Figure”, in: Lars Eckstein/Anja Schwarz (eds), Postcolonial Piracy: Media Distribution and Cultural Production in the Global South, London: Bloomsbury, 149-178. Quijano, Anibal (2000): “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America”, in: Nepantla: Views From the South 1.3, 533-580. Strangelove, Michael (2005): The Empire of Mind: Digital Piracy and the AntiCapitalist Movement, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sundaram, Ravi (2009): Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism, London: Routledge. — (2007): “Other Networks: Media Urbanism and the Culture of the Copy in South Asia”, in: Joe Karaganis (ed.), Structures of Participation in Digital Culture, New York: Social Science Research Council, 48-73. Taussig, Michael T. (1993): Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, New York: Routledge. Vaidhyanathan, Siva (2003): Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity, New York: New York University Press. Waller, Nicole (2011): American Encounters with Islam in the Atlantic World, Heidelberg: Winter.

Sound Cultures C ARLA J. M AIER

How can sound be analysed as an expressive form which plays a crucial role in the transformation of culture? What are the ramifications for the ways in which scholars think about culture as a concept, if this sonic perspective is taken into account? This essay aims at demonstrating that sound is not a natural given, but part of complex cultural, social, and mediatised practices. Everyday soundscapes of the city, the varied sounds that are designed for mobile phones and other devices, the cut, looped and layered sounds of contemporary popular and club music – these sounds constantly re-constitute the world in which we live and how we perceive it and make sense of it. Therefore, studying sound cultures means exploring the specific social and cultural functions of sound in a particular time and space, across different media formats, production environments and listening habits. The first part of the essay gives an overview of some of the recent approaches in the emerging field of Sound Studies and highlights the close interaction of sound, Media Studies, and importantly, Postcolonial Studies. Subsequently, two examples will be given which demonstrate how sound cultures can be studied as an amalgamation of sonic, medial and postcolonial practices and thinking.

C ULTURAL P OLITICS OF S OUND & I NTERDISCIPLINARY S COPE OF S OUND S TUDIES Sound is ubiquitous in all aspects of everyday life, from music, radio, film, and television to sound branding and the functional sounds of mobile phones and electronic household devices.

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However, the study of these sounds and their entanglement in complex sound cultures is relatively new. The reason for this discrepancy might lie in the fact that modern Western thought was highly dominated by a visual perspective of the world, of human beings, cultural artefacts, and thinking itself. Roughly in the last decade, discussions dealing with the ‘hierarchy of the senses’ have emphasised how the prioritisation of the visual over the senses of listening, touch, taste and smell has influenced epistemologies and concepts of culture (Jenks 1995; Bull/Back 2004; Cox/Warner 2006; Schulze 2008). On the grounds of this dominance of the visual, a binary opposition was constructed between the visual and the auditory which is highly problematic: superimposing in an a priori way an audio-visual binary upon cultural practices, artefacts and technologies only allows for a very limited and limiting view on the complex workings of culture. The contributions to the multi-faceted research areas which Sound Studies comprises consequently refrained from this “audio-visual litany” which Jonathan Sterne already criticised in his book The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (2003). Sterne problematises a cultural theory of the senses that continuously emphasises differences between hearing and seeing and thus often “idealizes hearing (and, by extension, speech) as manifesting a kind of pure interiority” (Sterne 2003: 15). What is particularly relevant when studying postcolonial sound cultures is critically considering the audio-visual litany also in relation to cultural binarisms: “The othering of the auditory as ‘primitive’” has been prevalent in colonialist thinking, whereas, on the contrary, the Western has been depicted as purely visual, and thus rational and progressive (Schmidt qtd in Sterne 2012b: 10). In this article I will present two examples from postcolonial music culture to demonstrate how this binarism persists in contemporary discourses of popular culture and how artists sonically oppose, challenge, and transform stereotypical and racist notions of culture through different practices and strategies of sonic mediatisation and reappropriation. But how do we act, create and think sonically? A critical consideration of the concept of the “auditory turn” indicates that some of the aspects that have been emphasised by scholars in the emerging field of Sound Studies and auditory culture are very useful in generating a greater awareness of the sonic particularities of contemporary culture. In her edited volume Acoustic Turn (2008), Petra Maria Meyer uses the concept of the “turn” to emphasise a gap between the ubiquity of everyday sonic phenomena and the lack of concrete scholarship that attends to these phenomena. With regard to the received visualist framework outlined above, Michael Bull and Les Back highlight in The Auditory Culture Reader how “[t]he reduction of knowledge to the visual has placed serious limitations on

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our ability to grasp the meanings attached to much social behaviour, be it contemporary, historical or comparative” (Bull/Back 2004: 2). With regard to sound and music, Jim Drobnick suggests that the sonic incorporates particular dynamics which cannot be grasped visually; the study of sound and music, he claims, thus requires a sonic turn, which conceives of sound and music as specific forms of cultural articulation, taking into account their distinctive qualities (Drobnick 2004: 9–15). What many of these authors share, notwithstanding the difference concerning the objects and practices they study, is the recognition that, as with previous turns such as the linguistic turn or the iconic turn, the aim should not be, as Drobnick formulates, to simply “exchang[e] one trope, one sense modality, for another [...] [H]owever apparent sound’s unique qualities may be, it is important to guard against essentializing sound as an autonomous realm” (ibid.: 10). Therefore, as these and other studies have shown, the auditory is always linked with the other senses, and journals such as Senses and Society or David Howes’ edited volume Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (2005) show that Sensory Studies has also become an associated field. Moreover, Sound Studies have also explicitly dealt with historical accounts of listening and sound production, as Karin Bijsterveld did in Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (2008) and Veit Erlmann in his study on the close entanglement of the history of reason and resonance with notions of modern aurality in Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (2010). Thus, sound cultures cannot be grasped only from a visual or textual perspective, nor can it be analysed with the theoretical and methodological repertoire of a single discipline. The emerging field of scholars and thinkers inside and outside of academia has been studying aspects of sound from various disciplinary angles, including Cultural Studies, Anthropology, Musicology, Science and Technology Studies, Architecture, Sound Art and Sound Design. Consequently, there is not a coherent set of methods, but there are a number of reference works such as Bull and Back’s Auditory Culture Reader (2004), Pinch and Bijsterveld’s Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (2012), Sterne’s aforementioned Sound Studies Reader (2012b), as well as journals (Sonic Studies, SoundEffects, Sound Studies), associations (The European Sound Studies Association) and networks (e.g. the network Sound in Media Culture funded by the German Research Council), etc. In the context of the present volume, it is relevant to note that Sound Studies approaches have also been established within Media Studies. Notable in this regard are Sterne’s The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (2003) and his MP3: The Meaning of a Format (2012a), and Axel Volmar and

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Jens Schröter’s edited volume Auditive Medienkulturen: Techniken des Hörens und Praktiken der Klanggestaltung (2013). Moreover, Rolf Großmann’s conceptualisation of the ‘dispositive’ can serve as a model to analyse music as part of a complex configuration of medial, technological, sonic and social components (Großmann 2008). Especially regarding postcolonial media cultures, it is relevant to consider the intertwined histories of postcolonialism and their effect on contemporary cultural representations and practices. As Rosalind Brunt and Rinella Cere (2011) have pointed out, there is a “missing link between postcolonial and media studies”: The development of postcolonial studies so far has […] concentrated on the circulation of narratives and representations of “other” colonized cultures and paid relatively little attention to popular culture and contemporary media practices. Conversely […], [Media Studies’] emphasis has been primarily on the new and the now and it has paid little attention to the historical and to the intersection of the metropolitan with the colonial and postcolonial. (ibid.: 3)

Therefore, investigating the cultural politics of sound, then, means thinking about how sound is related to and intervenes in discourses of race, class and gender and how specific sound practices (Altman 1992; Maier [MüllerSchulzke] 2012) generate and transform these discourses (and thus become discursive practices in their own right). How such an analysis of the production, reception and dissemination of specific sound practices can be exemplified will be demonstrated in the case study section below. Dichotomies such as high culture versus popular culture, Western culture versus non-Western culture, and British chart music versus ethnic world music are often based on essentialist ascriptions which have more to do with power relations than with aesthetic or cultural differences. In relation to the transnational flows of goods, ideas, and people, as well as globalised music production, binarisms such as those mentioned above are increasingly questionable because they often rely on notions of homogeneous, territorially defined cultural spheres. In actuality, these musics reveal complex and highly dynamic temporal and spatial interrelations which transgress either purely British or, say, purely Indian musical traditions.1

1

‘Pure musical traditions’ refers to discourses which define music as representative of national or ethnic culture: Britpop, Afrobeat, or Indian folk music are musical categories which often hide their entanglement in diverse cultural contexts and movements.

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As the following examples, dealing with different aspects of contemporary music culture, will show, the transgressive potential of sampling and remixing, as well as of subversive radio practices lie in the manipulation and reappropriation of dominant Western music, or in the intervention in the working and ordering of dominant broadcasting media. As the first case study, dealing with a specific musical track by British-Asian musician Apache Indian, will show, music has always also been about the cultural politics of sound and listening, and especially with regard to the history of British colonial rule, there is a long tradition in prioritising Western music over the music of the colonised nations, and this inequality has continuously influenced postcolonial discourses and thinking. Illustrated in the second example, dealing with pirate radio practices in London, music can become a vehicle of subverting the power structures of mainstream music broadcasting. Postmigrant youths of the second and third generations who grew up in London still face everyday racism and a lack of opportunities to be represented and participate in Britain’s media industry.2 Therefore, as will be demonstrated, pirate radio has become a way to for them to create alternative channels to oppose, critique, and transform the dominant mechanisms of mainstream radio.

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This article discusses two examples in particular in order to demonstrate how postcolonial sonic cultures can be studied. The example that is presented in the following is Apache Indian’s track “Arranged Marriage” (1994), which will be analysed in order to indicate how the particular ‘sound practices’ (Altman 2009; Maier [Müller-Schulzke] 2012) of cutting, looping and layering generate complex sonic constellations in which received cultural, social and gendered inscriptions are constantly contested and renegotiated.3 The concept of ‘sound practices’ which builds the theoretical backbone of my analysis of music is used to

2

I use the term ‘postmigrant’ as defined by Kira Kosnick, “to refer to an increasing number of people who were born in the country of residence in the second, third etc. generation, but for whom diasporic or transnational affiliations created through family histories of migration still play a significant role in their lives. Neither the term migrant nor the concept of an ethnic minority can adequately describe these circumstances” (Kosnick 2010: 38).

3

This case study is based on my PhD thesis on Transcultural Sound Practices: South Asian Sounds and Urban Dance Music in the UK (2012).

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explore concrete musical techniques, as well as to investigate sound as part of a wider framework of cultural technologies and practices. Thus, the concept of ‘sound practices’ denotes a particular sonic constellation and specific practice in a musical track. Another crucial concept of my methodological tool kit is ‘key sound’. The term derives from the term ‘keynote sound’, which was coined by R. Murray Schafer and Barry Truax as part of their “World Soundscape Project” and is revised and adapted here in the context of musical analysis. The use of the term key sound also marks a shift away from the original meaning of keynote sound that refers to “the anchor or fundamental tone” (Schafer 1994: 9), that is, for instance, a characteristic sound of a specific place. Rather than understanding key sound merely as the characteristic sound of a musical piece that refers to a certain musical style, ‘key sound’ describes the particular sonic functionalities which are part of the complex sonic constellations in a musical track (Maier [Müller-Schulzke] 2012). Thus, in reference to this essay’s title, sound cultures emerge as an area of cultural production and reception that constantly reinvents itself as well as reshapes the cultural forms it creates: the techniques of cutting and pasting, looping, layering and reproducing sounds bear the potential of criticising and reshaping ideas of culture. This is particularly relevant when listening into the multi-faceted music that is part of the South Asian diaspora in Britain as well as other forms of transcultural diasporic music, as these musics are constitutive of revised versions of postcolonial thinking and critique. A significant example for this is British-Asian musician Apache Indian’s 1993 album No Reservations, and specifically the track “Arranged Marriage”.4 This track combines bhangra5 and ragga dancehall6 music with lyrics that are sung in Jamaican patois interspersed with Punjabi words – a unique mixture which was termed Bhangramuffin (see Sharma/Hutnyk/Sharma 1996). Two specific sound practices can be highlighted with regard to “Arranged Marriage” which challenge musical categories and enhance traditional notions of cultures as fixed entities. The first sound practice unfolds in the intro of the track, which features a particular interaction between a bhangra sample and ragga vocals. While bhangra is a folk music style from the Punjab, ragga refers to Jamaican

4

A more detailed analysis of this track can be found in my PhD thesis (Maier [MüllerSchulze] 2012).

5

Bhangra is a folk music style that derived from the Punjab and has become a popular

6

Ragga dancehall (or Raggamuffin) refers to a variety of Jamaican reggae music which

genre in Britain. is mostly electronically produced and features a kind of “spoken word” vocal style.

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reggae music culture. The combination of these musical styles is in itself a transcultural constellation as it draws from two musical traditions deriving from former British colonies that have become an inherent part of diasporic music culture in the UK. In “Arranged Marriage”, a bhangra sample is looped and runs through the intro of the track, while Apache Indian’s ragga vocals provide a rhythmic and melodic contrast. This sound practice in which bhangra and ragga sounds collide generates a new sonically constituted take on postcolonial sound culture. More specifically, the bhangra sample constructs a reference to bhangra music, characterised here by a dhol drum beat and a wooden flute melody. However, this bhangra sound is not a stable signifier, since the way in which the sample is looped results in a new repetitive rhythm and cut-up melody line that is decontextualised from its musical source. Therefore, although the basic traits of the sampled loop may remind the listener of Punjabi folk music, the actual sound is reshaped in the context of the intro of Apache Indian’s track. In its recontextualised form, the sampled and looped bhangra sound becomes a key sound by working as a hookline and repetitive beat pattern in the track’s intro. As soon as Apache Indian’s ragga vocals come in, which he ‘toasts’7 on top of the looped sample, it becomes clear that the bhangra sample was manipulated so as to work as a rhythmic base for the ragga vocals. Listening to “Arranged Marriage” as a whole, the basic beats and bass lines indicate that this is a characteristic 1990s reggae track in which the bhangra sample, and later also Hindi film music samples, work as supplementary contrasting elements that make the track’s sound unique. Therefore, in this sound practice, the bhangra sound is transformed from a Punjabi folk music reference into a transcultural sonic constellation that comprises different musical sources and particular production techniques. This music must be situated within the realm of postcolonial sound cultures which are not confined to just one cultural heritage. My example shows that South Asian sounds (or other diasporic sounds as well) are decontextualised and manipulated and that these transcultural sound practices transform the ways in which culture is perceived: not as a homogenous entity, but a transcultural sonic constellation. Another sound practice that is significant in “Arranged Marriage” concerns the female Hindi film music vocals that feature almost randomly throughout the track. Sections of Hindi film music vocals were sampled and accompany some of the instrumental and vocal parts without actually interacting with the other sounds. Rather, this sample somehow floats above the sonic ragga base in a detached and static way. The film music vocals become key sounds in generating a

7

Toasting depicts the rhythmic spoken singing style in reggae music.

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static form of difference that is perceived as detached from the dominant reggae dancehall sounds of the track. Therefore, in contrast to the transformative function of the bhangra key sound in the track’s intro, the Hindi film music vocals function as a kind of sonic ornament. The ‘Indianness’ of the Hindi film music vocals are primarily perceived as a cultural artefact and thus functions as an orientalist marker rather than being part of a complex cultural practice. To recapitulate, a key sound can have different functions within a musical track. It can have a transformative function which results in a complication of the sonic narrative of the track. It can also function as a sonic ornament in creating a static idea of an ‘Indian’ sound and thus Indian culture. It is important to emphasise that a key sound is not identified by a sound’s internal characteristics. Instead, the relevant point of the analytic category of key sound is how it plays a part in a specific interaction of sounds, i.e. a specific sound practice. To sum up, and to highlight the productive potential of juxtaposing Sound Studies and postcolonial approaches in analysing postcolonial sound cultures: an analysis of sound practices goes beyond the question of how Apache Indian’s alleged Indian cultural identity is reflected in his music, and instead asks how a specific production culture creates the basis for Apache Indian’s musical engagement with Asian sounds. The question of cultural identity is thus no longer confined to the notion of a fixed ethnic identity. Apache Indian’s sound practices are embedded in his affiliation with reggae music culture. His sound practices create a stronger bond with dancehall production culture than with an alleged Indian heritage. Therefore, sound practices have the capacity to forge new transcultural sonic relationships which defy any simple fixation on ethnic identity. In relation to the question raised above about how cultural binarisms persist in discourses of popular music, it must be stated that the ‘other’ element in music such as Apache Indian’s is usually emphasised and that it is primarily categorised as non-Western world music or Indian traditional heritage music, respectively. Apache Indian’s music, however, resists this narrow and potentially neocolonial definition. Firstly, this music is inherently transnational, combining musical influences from Hindi film music, Punjabi lyrics, Jamaican reggae and dancehall. Secondly, this music stems from/is related to Apache Indian’s home town Birmingham, and his music is thus produced and performed in the UK. As a result, the musical sources, production techniques and specific sonic and vocal narration constitute new ways of how we think about culture, not as an either-ordualism, but as part of a transcultural and diverse sound culture.

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P OSTCOLONIAL

Pirate radio might not be an obvious artistic field (or media practice) when thinking about postcolonial sound cultures. However, as the following section will demonstrate, pirate radio practices re-examine relations of centre versus periphery, or high versus low culture, produced in colonial and postcolonial discourses, movements and struggles.8 The specific sounds of pirate radio stations that emerged in London in the 1990s and early 2000s arise from the imaginative power of marginalised postmigrant youths who were able to turn these stations into a pivot of sonic, technological and political artistry. Pirate radio is a meaningful example of postcolonial art and aesthetics that challenges the dominant structures of the former colonial metropolis. Pirate radio practices allude to the fact that [t]he city as agglomeration of heterogeneous parts contains a myriad of magic doors improbably secreted switching-systems opening up to other dimensions [...] Such hypertaxis is virtual, that is, for its actualization it demands power to the imagination (Fuller 2005: 14)

As the above quote by Matthew Fuller suggests, the city is a multi-dimensional and convoluted structure which cannot be grasped merely in geographic terms. Venturing into the other dimensions of urban space which are not manifest in the concrete guiding systems (subway channels, traffic lights) and the regulated behavioural patterns (accessibility to buildings, order of quietness) that manage the everyday flow of people through the city also means challenging the power structures upon which the city is built. This case study deals with how pirate radio became a platform to create imaginary versions of the urban space for

8

The question of space has long been a central issue in Postcolonial Studies. To give a brief and highly selective overview, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) is as much proofe of that as Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin’s The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (1994) and Homi Bhaba’s The Location of Culture (1994). Questions of transnational spatialities have also become a focus in Globalization Studies (Ong 1999). How postcolonial spatial discourses are generated in contemporary Anglophone literature is negotiated in Andrew Teverson and Sara Upstone’s Postcolonial Spaces: The Politics of Place in Contemporary Culture (2011). An account of how diasporic music challenges and transforms postcolonial spatialities is given, for example, in Gilroy 1993, Lipsitz 1994, and Ismaiel-Wendt 2011.

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post-migrant music producers, DJs and MCs in London, especially in the context of urban club music culture from the 1980s onwards. The aim is to investigate how pirate radio practitioners decode and unlock this multi-dimensional switching system by creating acoustic channels through which they reclaim an alternative cityscape. In the context of pirate radio, the “hypertaxis” that Fuller speaks of in the quote above is not only virtual, but also highly tangible, analogue, real. Establishing temporary radio studios in and attaching aerials on the roofs of deserted office buildings throughout the city, pirate sound practices are actualised at the concrete structures of the urban architecture in order to create the virtual and imaginary power of sonic community building. The significance of pirate radio practices for urban club culture is embedded in a long history of pirates that dates back to the 1930s – a history which cannot be told even rudimentarily in the framework of this book chapter. However, I would like to mention briefly at least one pirate radio station that played a significant role for the dissemination and development of popular music in the 1960s: the offshore radio station Radio Caroline, which was constructed by music producer Ronan O’Rahilly and disseminated its sounds from a ship by London’s seashore. Radio Caroline broadcasted music by bands such as the Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Hollies and the Beatles, which made the station very popular amongst music lovers, while this kind of music was still proscribed by the majority of society as obscene, vulgar and rude. From its beginning, the operators of these stations subverted the regulatory mechanisms of music consumption which were implemented by only a few government-licensed radio stations such as the BBC that decided what kind of music was played, when, and for how long. As Brandon LaBelle noted in Radio Territories, the success of Radio Caroline can be regarded as a direct critique of BBC’s monopoly that “assured diluted and generalized programming” and therefore included a promise to participate in something original and subversive: Radio Caroline essentially galvanized the cultural momentum at this time – countercultural music required countercultural transmission. The promise of transmission from an offshore perspective is also the promise of hearing something one cannot find elsewhere, fully embodying the mythology of the pirate vessel appearing as if from nowhere, thereby participating in the movements of radical autonomy. (LaBelle 2007: 230-231)

This example highlights how, through the sound of pirate radio transmission, the entanglement of radio-technology and social critique becomes manifest. The non-regulated transmission of pirates disturbs the radio signals of the government-licensed radio stations and interferes in the hegemonic programming

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structure (one that is aimed at a mainstream audience) in making audible music that is usually not heard on the radio because of its unconformity with established genres and common social values. The hegemonic relationship between Radio Caroline and the contemporary broadcasting politics have since shifted, as American popular music has become the most prevalent music that is played in the main radio programmes today. Meanwhile, a new kind of hegemony has subsequently been established in the UK and throughout Europe since the 1980s and 1990s, when radio programmes played dominantly Anglo-American chart music featured by white radio producers. In this mainstream radio programming, migrant and postmigrant producers and the musical varieties that have emerged from the postcolonial settlement of people from different parts of the world are still underrepresented. Therefore, pirate radio as a subversive cultural practice in the UK re-attains significance as racial and medial exclusion and social marginalisation persist. The following part explores how the sonic, geographic and social coordinates are shifted when pirate radio stations manifest themselves on rooftops and in provisional studios of central London’s architectures. Especially in the mid1990s and early 2000s, jungle and grime, electronic dance music styles that are derived from Afro-Caribbean music traditions and firmly based in UK club music culture, became closely connected with pirate radio practices. Pirate stations which featured these musical styles linked jungle and grime’s distinctive sounds to a yearning audience which craved for the latest sounds germinating from this underground music culture. The pirate radio practitioners operate along the margins of the urban space and at the same time open up new sonic trajectories which cross the boundaries of the modern metropolis to which they are often confined in terms of ethnicity, and the mainstream channels of the music industry. In this context, the “parasitic noise” (Goodman 2007) that is produced in the ether again hints at the social and political power structures which are entangled with alternative artistic practices of creation and dissemination. Parasitic noise is explored here not as a merely physical noise, but both as interference into the hegemonic structures of commercial broadcasting and as an essential part in the shaping and transformation of new sound cultures. One pirate radio station in particular played a crucial role in the electronic music scene: Rinse FM, which was founded in 1994 in London and featured upcoming music styles such as Jungle and Drum’n’bass, and later grime and dubstep. The main protagonists of Rinse FM are of various ethnic backgrounds and are mostly based in East London boroughs such as Croydon and Bow. To name a few by their stage names, Dizzy Rascal is a grime MC, songwriter and record

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producer with Ghanaian and Nigerian parents. Wiley is MC and record producer with Caribbean roots from Trinidad and Antigua as well as Uganda. Plastician is an English Dubstep and Grime DJ. The postmigrant background of many of the producers and MCs, as well as the fact that they are based in the less privileged areas of East London, is significant when investigating pirate radio practices. As they are usually excluded from white mainstream radio, the particularly intense atmosphere that is created in the pirate radio stations across London amplifies the tension of creating new music at the margins of the city. This sonic, cultural and spatial conglomeration is described vividly in Steve Goodman’s account of a pirate radio studio: The summer of 2003, holed up in a small room on the 12th floor of a residential tower block in Bow, East London, the sweat running down the inside of the walls. The room is built inside a larger room, a hastily constructed endo-architecture to cocoon the studio, protecting the pirate transmission and transmitters from intruders. The electrics are sporadic but functional […] Wires snake their way out of messily drilled holes […] out through windows, trailing and flapping against the outside of the block, leading up to the transmitter on the roof. Inside this pirate radio studio, the megalopolis is screaming through the MCs, at a rapid rate, which seems to exceed the limits of the human system of vocalization. The pressure of millions channelled via a few mouths. (Goodman 2007: 49)

The particular studio setting that Goodman describes creates the architectural backbone of various sound practices of pirate sonic transmission. The thick atmosphere stirred up by the MC’s vocal force is even enhanced by another effect of the pirate radio practice, that is, the background noise from the studio that leaks through the ether and generates a feeling of liveness and immediacy. The secret, provisional and temporary pirate radio stations create alternative, imaginary spatialities. In this respect it seems particularly interesting to ask what kind of new aesthetic and social formations are generated from these encapsulated, micro-structural figurations and the specific “media ecologies” (Fuller 2005). One aspect is the DIY ethos, that is, the way in which these radio stations are constructed and filled with content works in a trial and error mode. The practitioners always have to adapt to the many unforeseeable factors of the whole action. Furthermore, what is played and how it is performed has to be decided on the spot, without a script. It is a complex sonic ecology which incorporates tacit knowledge, as Fuller notes: “The pirates bring together a vast range of skills that are sensual, technical, economic, social, and eminently pragmatic.” (Fuller 2005: 17)

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Early pirate radio practices played a crucial role in the development of the electronic music styles Grime and Dubstep, for instance with regard to the reevaluation and reconfiguration of MCing or toasting: There is a continuum of MCing that is rooted in Afro-Caribbean music styles such as reggae, dancehall and rap which becomes more prevalent in Grime music (which distinguishes it from previous styles such as Jungle and Drum’n’bass which were mainly instrumental). What seemed to have fostered the increasing presence of MCs in Grime was that within the context of pirate radio, the practices and role of the MC were enhanced. The MC started to act as an artist (delivering rhymes) as well as an expert and mediator of the music that is spun by the DJs. The MC must know the right moment to jump in with rhymes and comments, being in the flow with everything, the music, the fellow musicians, the crowd. A recording of a pirate radio transmission by Rinse FM in 1996 serves as an example for a concrete pirate radio practice. This piece of audio features MC Target of the Roll Deep crew, a music collective from London.9 Within one minute of the musical and vocal performance, the diverse facets of pirate radio sound practice become manifest, and the intensifying effects of the complex performative setting become tangible. In the track’s intro, the MC presents the audience with an introduction of the protagonists present in the studio with a big up, i.e. the greeting of the fellow musicians present in the studio; this underscores the important role of recognition and respect to the fellow DJs and MCs. Furthermore, as a way of acknowledging the dispersed listening audience, a particular feedback practice is established: the listeners call a mobile telephone number that the crew announced. When members of the audience dial in, the MC calls out the last three digits of the incoming calls to give the feedback that the call has come through. And these three digits subsequently become part of the introductory music that is played live (playing beats and MCing) in the studio. The following text is delivered in the MC’s short intro: Skip over da riddim Yeah dis is a big war Big up 876 Big up 603 Yeah Big up 533 War

9

(MC Target, Rinse FM, 1996)

For a discography of Roll Deep, see ‹itunes.apple.com/gb/artist/roll-deep/id3083873›.

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This particular practice differs immensely from radio-audience interaction in conventional radio, where radio consumers chat openly with the radio promoters. In the case described here, the interaction is depersonalised and articulated in code. This mode of communication between the crew at the pirate radio station and the attentive audience might enhance a feeling of conspiracy, i.e. of sharing an experience via forbidden channels. As far as the music that is played is concerned, pirate radio became a way to mediate brand new musical material that would have its premiere on the dance floors of East London’s electronic music clubs (such as Plastic People in Shoreditch or Mass in Brixton) later in the night. The pirate radio practitioners as well as the listeners become experts of cuttingedge subcultural musical developments. Another facet of this particular sound practice becomes manifest in the sound of the MC’s voice aired through a microphone, his lips probably tightly pressed against the mic’s metal wire covering. The amplified voice creates a distorted sound, enhancing the massive. As Fuller notes: The voice invented by soul, R&B, and hip hop is based on orality, the live rap, the open throat. The hip hop voice is indexical. As the words are propelled forward through the throat and out from the mouth they also point precisely back to where they come from […] It emerges not only from a particular body, but from a body that has emerged from the violence of racist and class stratification of the United States, the banlieue, the townships, and the fractal colonialism of the U.K. It is an array of voices that has constructed itself as a means of escape from and mode of activation in these zones, while being profoundly marked by the conflicts involved in its “staying hardcore while going global”. The hip hop voice emerges from an interplay of constraints, attempts at and realizations of “practices on encoding”, and, through amplificatory and productive processes, what sociolinguistics names a “domain”. (Fuller 2005: 28)

There are two points in Fuller’s quote that are of paramount importance to the sound practices of pirate radio. One is the entanglement of pirate radio practitioners with the racism that forms part of the colonial legacy, and the voice as a medium which counteracts and transforms this legacy through making use of the voice in unexpected, subversive and new ways. The second point is how the voice of the MC in pirate radio becomes part of a practice of encoding. This sound practice forges new kinds of expression and of intervention that helps generate new communalities, socialities, and spatialities. The complex interaction of sound, text and performance make tangible the rootedness of this sound practice in the aesthetics of Grime’s sonic culture: there is a high amount of distortion in the sonic mix, in juxtaposition with the pace of

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the vocal delivery accompanied by break beats that creates a special kind of intensity. The voice of the MC oscillates between realness and abstraction, and the distortion underscores a form of roughness and deliberate alienation from conventional radio practice. The announcements of the intro are uttered with the same rawness, the same urgency as the following rhymes dubbed on the Grime track. As Brandon LaBelle describes in his article on “Raw Orality: Sound Poetry and Live Bodies”, there is a special tension between the voice, what he calls sound poetry, and electronic sound: Sound poetry thus oscillates between these two threads, between an appropriation of electronics and a recuperation of a primal, original voicing [...] sound poetry literally amplifies these embedded tensions through an agitation of words and breaths [...] the digital ruptures the link between the real voice and the digital, virtual voice. (LaBelle 2010b: 148).

This “real” voice that LaBelle mentions in the above quote is not an essentialist voice, in the sense of an essence and originality of culture, but an originality of practice, a practice that is inextricably linked with digital technologies. And it is exactly this originality of practice that becomes part of a postcolonial sound culture that reinvents the neo-colonial metropolitan power structures. Therefore, as the analysis above has demonstrated, new sound cultures are formed through the materiality of voice and the ability to create “new forms of construction and collectivity” that “sculpts this future orality” (ibid.: 207) – in this way, the sound itself (not only language) becomes meaningful.

C ONCLUSION Postcolonial sound cultures emerge as an area of cultural production and reception that constantly reinvents itself as well as reshapes the cultural forms it creates. The techniques of cutting and pasting, looping, layering and reproducing sounds challenge and transform stereotypical and racist notions of culture through different practices and strategies of sonic mediatisation and reappropriation. This was demonstrated through an analysis of specific sound practices in South Asian British music and pirate radio practices in the UK. Apache Indian’s 1993 track “Arranged Marriage” served as an example of how a bhangra sound is transformed from a Punjabi folk music reference into a transcultural sonic constellation that is firmly connected to the UK-based dancehall production culture.

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Another example demonstrated how pirate radio sound practices become part of the politics of postcolonial spatiality. The pirate radio practitioners operate along the margins of the urban space and at the same time open up new sonic trajectories which cross the boundaries of the modern metropolis to which they are often confined in terms of ethnicity and the mainstream channels of the music industry. The secret, provisional and temporary pirate radio stations create alternative, imaginary spatialities. Therefore, studying sound cultures means exploring the specific social and cultural functions of sound in a particular time and space, across different media formats, production environments and listening habits. Studying postcolonial sound cultures means to critically analyse the discursive potential of sound and to put on the agenda the culturally and sonically diverse sound practices in contemporary music and everyday life.

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Goodman, Steve (2007): “Contagious Transmission: On the Virology of Pirate Radio”, in: Erik Granly Jensen/Brandon LaBelle, Radio Territories, Los Angeles: Errant Bodies Press, 48-54. Großmann, Rolf (2008): “Verschlafener Medienwandel: Das Dispositiv als musikwissenschaftliches Theoriemodell”, in: positionen. Texte zur aktuellen Musik 74, 6-9. Hampson, Simon (2009): “Interview: Geeneus”, in: FACT, 1 January, ‹fact mag.com/2009/01/01/interview-geeneus/›, accessed on 27 November 2015. Howes, David (ed.) (2005): Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, Oxford: Berg. Ismaiel-Wendt, Johannes (2011): Tracks ’n’ Treks: Populäre Musik und Postkoloniale Analyse, Münster: Unrast. Jenks, Chris (1995): “The Centrality of the Eye in Western Culture: An Introduction”, in: Chris Jenks (ed.), Visual Culture, London: Routledge, 1-25. Kosnick, Kira (2010): “Migrant Publics: Mass Media and Stranger-Relationality in Urban Space”, in: Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales 26.1, 37-55, ‹remi.revues.org/›, accessed on 27 November 2015. LaBelle, Brandon (ed.) (2007): Radio Territories, Los Angeles: Errant Bodies Press. — (2010a): Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life, New York: Continuum. — (2010b): “Raw Orality: Sound Poetry and Live Bodies”, in: Norie Neumark/Ross Gibson/Theo van Leeuwen (eds), Voice: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media, Cambridge: MIT Press, 147-173. Lipsitz, George (1994): Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place, London: Verso. Meyer, Petra Maria (2010): Acoustic Turn, München: Wilhelm Fink. Maier [Müller-Schulzke], Carla J. (2012): Transcultural Sound Practices: South Asian Sounds and Urban Dance Music in the UK. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Frankfurt am Main. Ong, Aihwa (ed.) (1999): Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Durham: Duke University Press. Pinch, Trevor/Bijsterveld, Karin (eds) (2012): The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Said, Edward W. (2012, 1978), Orientalism, London: Penguin Books. Schafer, Raymond Murray (1994, 1977): The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, Rochester: Destiny Books. Schulze, Holger (ed.) (2008): Sound Studies: Traditionen – Methoden – Desiderate: Eine Einführung, Bielefeld: transcript.

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Sharma, Sanjay/Hutnyk, John/Sharma, Ashwani (eds) (1996): Dis-Orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music, London: Zed Books. Sterne, Jonathan (2003): The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, Durham: Duke University Press. — (2012a): MP3: The Meaning of a Format, Durham: Duke University Press. — (ed.) (2012b): The Sound Studies Reader, New York: Routledge. Teverson, Andrew/Upstone, Sara (eds) (2011): Postcolonial Spaces: The Politics of Place in Contemporary Culture, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Volmar, Axel/Schröter, Jens (eds) (2012): Auditive Medienkulturen: Techniken des Hörens und Praktiken der Klanggestaltung, Bielefeld: transcript.

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1. I NTRODUCTION Literature, films, exhibitions and artworks dealing with Britain’s former colonies or involving non-Western themes, authors, and artists are en vogue.1 Seemingly every new novel by a postcolonial author, often writing about his or her sense of loss and marginal position within the Western metropolis, is granted attention and, similarly, “the arts grants explosion for painters, actors, and directors of color” has given increasing recognition to an ethnically and culturally diverse creative scene in the cultural hubs of the Western world (Brennan 1997: 48). The reasons for this popularity are manifold: globalization and tourism, continuous migrational movements from former colonial territories to the metropolitan spaces of the US and Europe, the growing presence of diasporic writers and artists in the West, the hunger of Western liberal elites for ‘authentic’ voices from distant ‘exotic’ places, as well as, to some extent, their sympathies for antiimperialist movements and a perception of the global injustice of neoliberal capitalism. Furthermore, we might consider many Western readers’ sentiment of ‘imperial nostalgia’, the rise of the Internet and an increased accessibility of literary texts, or the institutionalisation of Postcolonial Studies in Western

1

For the sake of clarity, in this essay ‘postcolonial literatures and cultures’ refers to cultural texts produced by authors and artists from former colonial territories or involving colonial and postcolonial themes, whereas ‘postcolonialism’ is regarded as a discursive formation.

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universities and, by extension, in secondary education.2 However, another major factor bringing postcolonial literatures and cultures to the fore can be found in the marketing strategies of publishers, cultural institutions and the media in selling ‘postcolonial products’.3 Important as it is, the role of commodification in the context of postcolonial media cultures has not received extensive academic attention in recent years. On the one hand, many scholars might perhaps feel reluctant to regard postcolonial texts as circulating commodities, since this, in their view, clashes with the idea of postcolonialism as a progressive, enlightening movement that exposes ongoing global inequality and thus entails a powerful resistance to global capitalism. On the other hand, viewing postcolonial texts as a commodity not only reduces their alleged subversive potential, but it might also entail unpleasant questions about the way the rise of Postcolonial Studies has offered academic opportunities to many scholars and has thereby itself become a booming, careergenerating industry that seems to undermine its status as an oppositional discursive framework. Needless to say, the commodification of literature, in particular, is everywhere, be it a Japanese comic or the latest crime novel, and, of course, it can be argued that literature without commodification is literature without readers. However, what makes the commodification of postcolonial cultural production particularly interesting is that it is located at the intersection of the discourses of resistance, a strong anti-imperialist mindset and the machinery of global consumption with all the ambiguities, conflicts and social inequalities it generates and perpetuates. The following essay investigates the role of commodification for postcolonial media cultures. It will give a theoretical overview of ‘commodification’ and its history, introduce the concepts of ‘exoticism’, ‘imperial nostalgia’ and ‘staged marginality’, which comprise key factors that shape processes of commodification, and accentuate the role of cultural prestige and stardom in the marketing of postcolonial media culture. To illustrate the aforementioned concepts and processes, two particularly illuminating examples, from literature and film, will be examined: Taiye Selasi’s debut novel Ghana Must Go (2013) and Danny Boyle’s award-winning film Slumdog Millionaire (2009), an adaptation of Vikas Swarup’s 2005 novel Q & A.

2

The term ‘the West’ is generally used to describe Europe and the USA as well as the Anglo-Saxon states of Australia, New Zealand and Canada. For an introduction into the history of the term, see Winkler 2009: 17-24.

3

Cf. the chapter by Ana Cristina Mendes in the present volume.

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2. T HEORIZING C OMMODIFICATION According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘commodification’ can be defined as a process of “turning something into, or treating something as, a (mere) commodity” and also as the “commercialization of an activity, etc., that is not by nature commercial” (OED). The term is closely linked with Marxist thinking on the nature of a ‘commodity’, which, according to Marx, is any product or service that is produced by human labour and that circulates within a marketplace (cf. Marx 1992: 45). Within the Humanities, the term has gained widespread currency with, for example, Frederic Jameson’s influential study Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), in which Jameson views the ubiquitous processes of commodification as a defining principle of the contemporary economic world order (cf. Jameson 1991: 36). Today, as cultural critics insist, culture in its many forms “has been inserted into a system of exchange in which any element can be abstracted from its social and ceremonial context and assigned a monetary value” (Root 1996: 73). Considering the global book market, the growing presence of postcolonial literatures can, to a considerable extent, be regarded as a result of the expansion of the publishing industry, its desire to sell its products to a niche audience of mainly educated, liberal-minded readers and the marketing of English-language fiction as a global commodity (cf. Brouillette 2007: 56). Of course, not all ‘postcolonial’ authors appear to be equally capable of providing literature in tune with the cosmopolitan taste of a predominantly Western reading audience, but mainly those who “write in a European language, who resist thematizing colonialism from a socialist point of view, or who avoid expressing themselves in difficultto-assimilate genres” (Brennan 1997: 42). Generally, processes of commodification in postcolonial literatures and cultures have been examined on the level of cultural products (mostly literary texts) as well as the academic discourse about these products in university departments which, of course, can also be regarded as cultural products, appearing, for example, in the shape of scholarly literature and introductory readers, etc. Moreover, the influential scholar Graham Huggan differentiates ‘postcolonialism’, which he describes as the intellectual framework of anticolonial struggle that “implies a politics of value that stands in obvious opposition to global processes of commodification”, and ‘postcoloniality’, which is a “value-regulating mechanism within the global late-capitalist system of commodity exchange” (Huggan 2001: 6). As Huggan makes clear, despite their different agendas, the two cannot be neatly separated from each other (cf. Huggan 2001: 7).

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Accusations of complicity of both postcolonial texts and Postcolonial Theory with the dictates of the market were raised fairly early by Marxist intellectuals. In his 1992 book In Theory, Aijaz Ahmad hinted at what he saw as the ongoing fetishisation of postcolonial literatures as commodities (cf. Ahmad 1992: 217). Drawing on a fiercely Marxist perspective, Ahmad claims that fictions of cultural difference cater to metropolitan readers and their desire for fantasies of exotic adventures, and that these fictions “come to us not directly or autonomously but through grids of accumulation, interpretation and relocation which are governed from the metropolitan countries” (ibid.: 44). In The Postcolonial Aura (1997), Arif Dirlik also contends that postcolonial criticism helps to sustain the hegemony of capitalism by directing the attention away from global social and economic injustice (cf. Dirlik 1997: 54). In other words, according to scholars like Ahmad and Dirlik, consumption and intellectual criticism are flipsides of the same coin. In order to understand the current status of postcolonial literatures and films in the global marketplace, a brief introduction to the concepts of ‘exoticism’, ‘imperial nostalgia’ and ‘staged marginality’ is helpful. The attraction of postcolonial literatures and films for the (mainly) Western consumer lies to a large extent in his or her desire to experience forms of cultural difference, which, of course, is particularly interesting when located outside the sphere of Western cultures (cf. Root 1996: 30). Books and films provide this encounter in a safe environment so that “unfamiliar cultures can be consumed in the absence of any face-to-face recognition or real time negotiation with their actual creators” (Gilroy 2004: 137). As a mode of representation, ‘exoticism’ is enmeshed in a rhetoric of both otherness and familiarity. As Huggan summarises, the exotic is not, as is often supposed, an inherent quality to be found “in” certain people, distinctive objects, or specific places; exoticism describes, rather, a particular mode of aesthetic perception – one which renders people, objects and places strange even as it domesticates them, and which effectively manufactures otherness even as it claims to surrender to its immanent mystery. (Huggan 2001: 13)

The rendering of non-Western cultures as exotic has, in its emphasis on otherness and an alleged authenticity, played a crucial part in justifying their violent subjugation and exploitation. The Western desire to look at the exotic Other constructs this otherness by targeting specific ‘alien’ characteristics so that “these ethnic worlds are thought to share attributes that bond them together in a ‘fraternity of otherness’, making them mutually intelligible to one another while remaining uniformly foreign […]” (Phillips/Steiner 1999: 4).

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The concept of ‘imperial nostalgia’ also helps to illuminate both the interest of Western metropolitan reading and viewing audiences as well as the status of postcolonial literatures and films as commodities. It describes a desire to hark back to the glory days of the British Empire, in which the presence of the exotic Other serves as a backdrop to the melodrama of either white bourgeois courtship or the imposition of Western order, and which therefore represents a world in which the Western reader or viewer can revel in thoughts on the alleged superiority of his or her culture. As critics warn, one of the most pernicious effects of imperial nostalgia rests in its desire to “whitewash” British colonial history (cf. Gilroy 2004: 3). Taking the lasting success of Karen Blixen’s elegiac novel Out of Africa (1937) as an example, the fascination of ‘imperial nostalgia’ lies to a large extent in an abiding sense of loss, of the disappearance of an Edenic world with its own beauty and rhythms, which chimed in well with her European readers’ sense of the imminent destruction of their own world, or at least, post World War II, its fragility. (Walder 2011: 85)

From a postcolonial angle, much has been written about imperial nostalgia in films like Out of Africa (1985) or The English Patient (1996), in which, as critics argue, a rose-coloured vision of British colonial rule serves as a major source of the films’ commercial appeal (cf. Walder 2011: 87). Imperial nostalgia is also nourished by an idealised vision of state authority, in which a strong British nation could exert its influence abroad, whereas today it is increasingly felt that power rests primarily within transnational corporations and is becoming increasingly diffuse (cf. Root 1996: 43). Postcolonial authors’ attempts at criticising forms of imperial nostalgia are, even when their writing contains a scathing rejection of colonialism or a critique of their homeland’s recent trajectory, likewise commodified, since “the resistance to such nostalgia that is obviously exercised by many of the writers is effectually recuperated by an ‘otherness industry’ that banks its profits on exotic myths” (Huggan 2001: xiii; emphasis in original). The concept of ‘staged marginality’ describes the process of how writers and artists occupying outsider positions within Western literary and cultural landscapes employ and dramatise their ‘alienness’ to cater to the taste of the audience and its desire for exotic otherness (cf. Huggan 2001: xii). Although staged marginality can serve to give a voice to socially and economically underprivileged groups, it can also be viewed as a tool of commodification that uses this location outside the mainstream in order to sell a product to specific reading audiences, thereby serving as another example of the entanglement of the postcolonial with global capitalism.

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In the following, the above-mentioned concepts and their significance for the relationship between postcolonial cultural production and the global marketplace will be illustrated by looking at the realms of literature and film.

3. L ITERATURE After this short introduction of concepts that help to illuminate the commercial appeal of the postcolonial to Western audiences, a consideration of the creation of literary stardom will serve as an example in tracing processes of commodification. In fact, literary prizes, because of their prestige and the media attention they generate, are probably the most visible tokens of commodification in postcolonial media cultures. As James English explains, prizes awarded to cultural texts might convey the aura of disentanglement from the realm of money, but they nevertheless “continue to serve as the most bankable, fungible assets in the cultural economy” (English 2005: 22). There is a broad variety of prizes open to contributions by postcolonial authors, such as the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize (until 2011) and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, the PEN/Beyond Margins Award (an American award for literature fostering racial and ethnic diversity), the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (for authors from the Commonwealth under 36), the Cain Prize for African Writing (for the best short story by an African writer), the Orange Prize for Fiction (the best novel by a female author writing in English) or the prestigious Booker Prize, renamed Man Booker Prize in 2006, which fashions itself on its website as “the touchstone of literary fiction in English of the highest quality” (Taylor 2013). An important sponsor of Anglophone literatures, the Man Booker Prize is the most important literary prize to be bestowed on a work of postcolonial fiction in English. Far from just allocating cultural prestige, the Booker also helps to “define a postcolonial literature subject to domination (and commercial exploitation) by the London metropole” (English 2005: 203). Its impact in authorial prestige and sales figures is so immense that authors and publishers even time the publication of new novels according to the schedule of the Booker Prize’s yearly proceedings (cf. Huggan 2001: 108). The global brand has introduced various spinoffs, namely the Booker of Bookers (1993), the Best of the Bookers (2008), the Lost Man Booker Prize (2010), and the Man Booker International Prize (awarded every two years). Since the early 1980s, many novels by authors from former British colonies have won the Prize, such as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981, winner both of the ‘Booker of Bookers’ in 1993 and of the Best of Bookers in 2008), J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K (1982) and

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Disgrace (1999), Keri Hulme’s The Bone People (1985), Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991), Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006) or Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008). However, critics like Graham Huggan contend that the Man Booker prize, in its selection of winners, often favours the narrative depiction of a revisionist colonial history in which imperial nostalgia is employed and the exoticised ‘other’ is available as a “packageable commodity for metropolitan consumption” (Huggan 2001: 115). In studies on the commodification of postcolonial literatures, the marketing of ‘minority writers’ as well as the “skill with which they manipulate commercially viable metropolitan codes” (Huggan 2001: 80) has also come under scrutiny. There is undoubtedly a group of contemporary postcolonial ‘celebrity authors’, among them Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Hanif Kureishi and others, whose books are marketed through global image-making campaigns that foster an international appeal and who are then, partly as a result of their commodification, also canonised by educational institutions as ‘true voices’ of their respective cultures. By far the most famous author in this field is Indian-born Salman Rushdie, whose global celebrity is to a large extent based on his status as “an author of marketable commodities with a certain political frisson” (Brouillette 2007: 86; emphasis in original) and whose condemnation by Islamist fundamentalists in Iran in 1988 served to increase his reputation as a formidable writer in the field of postcolonial literatures even more. Undoubtedly, Rushdie himself has displayed great mastery in grabbing media attention, for example by staging carefully crafted promotional interviews, reading at literary festivals, appearing in music videos and dating supermodels, thereby even invading the media’s gossip columns (cf. Mendes 2010: 224). In the same vein, in recent years various female authors with African backgrounds have established themselves in the global literary market. The Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie won international acclaim with her novel The Purple Hibiscus (2003), while her second novel Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) won the Orange Prize for Fiction. Zimbabwean-born author NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel We Need New Names (2012) was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize while the author herself is regarded as “one of Africa’s most luminous literary talents” (Smith 2013). Likewise, Helen Oyeyemi, daughter of Nigerian immigrants, and Somalian-born Nadifa Mohamed have recently emerged as ‘new’ Black British novelists. However, if one looks at recent publications of novels from authors with African roots, Taiye Selasi’s debut Ghana Must Go (2013) provides the most vivid example of the promotion of postcolonial

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literature. It exemplifies how the publishing industry launches a “wave of highly publicized first novels by younger authors writing, often experimentally, about their own carefully nurtured marginalities in a sort of highbrow mimicry of the testimonial” (Brennan 1997: 48). Unusual for a literary debut, the novel was published in 15 countries. The following analysis seeks to examine how the text itself and its paratextual features, but also interviews, photo shoots, YouTube clips and other strategies of advertising have combined to generate international interest in the book and to keep it and its author in the headlines. But first I will demonstrate to what extent Ghana Must Go (2013) can be regarded as a ‘typical’ commodity in the field of postcolonial fiction. The globally successful postcolonial novel is often “relatively ‘sophisticated’ or ‘complex’ and often anti-realist; it is politically liberal and suspicious of nationalism; it uses a language of exile, hybridity, and ‘mongrel’ subjectivity” (Brouillette 2007: 61). Furthermore, it usually incorporates a small number of non-English words that help to establish the exotic otherness of the narrative world, but without making it too difficult for Western readers to follow. The relationship between local concerns in postcolonial literary fiction and global success can be difficult, since “ultimate esteem only accrues to texts that are ‘world-readable’, and only the most consumable forms of subnationality make a text ‘eligible’ for global acclaim” (ibid.: 79). Of course, the concept of ‘world-readability’ refers primarily to the way texts manage to render their depiction of non-Western cultures intelligible and meaningful to the predominantly Western reader. The characteristics of ‘sophistication’ and ‘complexity’ are valid for Selasi’s novel which has frequent shifts of time, alternating narratives, is multi-layered and contains numerous metaphysical contemplations. The story itself centres on aspects of migration from Africa to the United States and has its protagonists longing for their African homeland, “lush Ghana, soft Ghana, verdant Ghana” (Selasi 2013: 10), which they eventually (re)visit. Also present is the colour of seemingly ‘authentic’ local African cultures via the inclusion of Yoruba myths, for example that of “ibeji” (ibid.: 83) or words from local African languages (cf. ibid.: 104). Referring to recent Nigerian history, the title of the novel is a phrase used by Nigerians in the 1980s to expel Ghanaian migrant workers from Lagos. However, this nod to West African history and culture is balanced by the plot and the depiction of the characters, both of which Western readers can easily relate to. Indeed, the ‘world-readability’ of Ghana Must Go (2013) resides in the theme of a bourgeois family drama, but also in the depiction of the protagonists’ cosmopolitan, elite taste, combining a love of Tchaikovsky with interest in European art, which allows for the Western reader’s identification with the

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characters. For example, when Olu, the son of the family whose story is narrated in the novel, visits the house of the father of his girlfriend Ling, the living room contains a “huge Ru ware vase” and a “Jingdezhen tea set”, but also a piano, and they listen to Mozart’s Requiem, so that both characters, Ling’s Chinese-born father and Olu as the son of a Ghanaian surgeon, appear to share their love of classical European music and thereby also offer the reader well-known frames of reference (Selasi 2013: 116). The cover illustration of the book for the British market does not show any ‘ethnic’ pictorial signifiers: the bunch of flowers, one could argue, enhances the quality of ‘world readability’, whereas the postcolonial signposting can be found in the title as well as the author’s African name. The commodification of postcolonial literature is perhaps most obvious in the way particularly female authors are marketed. The image-generating campaigns around Arundhati Roy at the time of the publication of her novel The God of Small Things (1997) provide a telling example (cf. Huggan 2001: 76). Selasi herself represents what is by many regarded as a ‘truly cosmopolitan’ type and thereby embodies the qualities of a globally marketed postcolonial star persona. Born in London to parents from Ghana and Nigeria, growing up in Massachusetts and now living in Rome, Selasi obtained a BA from Yale and an M.Phil from Oxford, and had already won a Granta Short Story Award for “The Sex Lives of African Girls” (2011). She has also published a widely-read essay on postcolonial cosmopolitanism, “Bye-Bye Barbar” (2005), which furnishes her with marketable intellectual credibility as a contributor to postcolonial discourse. In this essay Selasi refers to people like herself as “Afropolitans”, a young generation of urban African expatriates with a “funny blend of London fashion, New York jargon, African ethics, and academic successes” (Tuakli-Wosornu 2005). The novel, still unfinished, was sold to Penguin by literary agent Andrew Wylie, who is also involved in the publications of Salman Rushdie’s works (Forbes 2013). Ghana Must Go (2013) quickly won critical acclaim, bolstered by institutions of cultural prestige. Selasi appeared on the prestigious Granta Best of Young British Novelists List in April 2013, only few weeks after the publication of the novel, and she also appeared on The Waterstone Eleven, the list of the British book retailer’s most promising debuts in 2013. The Granta Magazine contained a picture of the highly photogenic Selasi in front of a greyish wall, in an eye-catching purple quilted coat and wearing extravagant gloves, with the author looking downwards, a gesture signalling profound reflection (Feliciano 2013). On other websites one can see Selasi posing in Helmut Lang trousers and flamboyant Alexander McQueen jackets (Wood 2013). This reveals Selasi’s remarkable gifts of self-promotion, while it also bolsters her image as a media personality that effortlessly combines fashion with intellectuality and, because of

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her ethnicity, represents the global consumer. Selasi can be said to embody a poster figure for the highly flexible contemporary capitalism that “has absolutely no need for ideological residua such as homophobia, sexism, nationalism and racism, all of which only serve to impede the smooth flow of commodities […]” (Gilbert 2011: 43). In the many TV interviews associated with doing the media circuit at the publication of Ghana Must Go (2013), the book itself was often relegated to the sidelines whereas the upbringing, the post-national appeal and the ethnicity of Selasi were discussed at length, underlining her status as an outsider to the literary mainstream and thereby conforming to the policy of “staged marginality” (cf. “Taiye Selasi, Lost in Transnation” 2013). A common strategy to market new novels is to obtain the praise of wellestablished authors who explore similar topics. These authors then serve as references for subsequent reviews in newspapers, journals, online platforms etc. The status of Ghana Must Go (2013) is cemented by reports on the praise of a renowned group of postcolonial writers: Toni Morrison, Penelope Lively and even Salman Rushdie (cf. Datta 2013). Thereby, the novel is furnished with some of the glamour that these celebrity figures of great intellectual authority represent as “agents of legitimation” (cf. Huggan 2001: 213). It has consequently acquired credibility and, more importantly, authenticity, so that the reader can be sure of buying the ‘genuine product’, a true voice from the margins. Reviews have a crucial role in the marketing of the latest novel, introducing the book as well as the author to potential readers. A survey of reviews of Ghana Must Go (2013) illustrates that the world of the text itself often takes second stage to an elaborate positioning of the author as outside the mainstream and ‘postcolonial’. Similarly to the aforementioned TV interviews, reviews style Selasi as “citizen of the world” (Datta 2013) or “not quite African and not quite American” (Wood 2013). The publisher’s marketing campaigns are also acknowledged in many reviews, where the book is treated, for example, as “one of the most hyped debuts of recent times” (Evans 2013). With its own YouTube channel, the publisher Penguin actively exploits social media platforms to market its products. The short clip introducing Ghana Must Go (2013) provides a superb example of the commodification of postcolonial literatures. The film starts with a quote by the Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole, who states that Selasi “does more than merely renew our sense of the African novel: she renews our sense of the novel”, which, of course, not only places Ghana Must Go (2013) within a distinct tradition of African fiction and emphasizes its ‘postcolonial’ significance, but it also addresses the ‘worldreadability’ of the book (“Taiye Selasi – Ghana Must Go” 2013). A second quote, by Penelope Lively, stresses the “divided culture” of the protagonists,

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another emphasis on postcolonial hybridity and cross-cultural tensions. The clip also includes snippets from an interview with the author, in which Selasi muses on the trials and tribulations of the protagonists’ family life so that the focus is on the ‘universal’ experience of love and relationships and therefore a topic for the global reader, whereas Selasi’s ethnicity is foregrounded by the close-up shots so that the overall cosmopolitan appeal of author and book are brought out to maximum effect (cf. “Taiye Selasi – Ghana Must Go” 2013).

4. F ILM The British film production Slumdog Millionaire became a huge box office hit in 2008 and 2009. The film was directed by Danny Boyle and is based on a novel by Indian writer Vikas Swarup (2005). It won eight Academy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards and numerous other prizes, making it not only one of the most acknowledged films of the decade, but also bolstering its commercial appeal by the credibility of cultural prestige. The film represents a fusion of filmic cultures and music, combining Western cinema with commercial Indian filmic strategies in complex ways, which gives it a distinctive appeal that sets the film apart from more ‘typical’ Hollywood productions. The story is about the eighteen year-old orphan Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), who grew up in the slums of Mumbai and wins the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, originally a British TV show. Interrogated by the police about this seemingly impossible achievement, Jamal’s life unfolds in flashbacks that portray his childhood and youth in India’s biggest slum, the Dhavari area of Mumbai. Although the film deals with problematic facets of Indian culture, notably the life of the poor in the slums, local race riots, child abductors, or the brutal torture of the protagonist by the police, it was advertised as the ‘feel-good film of the decade’, especially because of the happy ending and the film’s colourful exoticism. This strategy of marketing the film directs the viewers’ expectations towards the conventions of Hollywood family entertainment. The official film poster shows the protagonists Jamal and Latika together so that the ‘universal’ element of love is announced as the thematic core of the film, whereas the nonWestern setting of this rather conventional story of love against all odds is present in the oxymoronic title and the characters’ ethnicity. Despite being celebrated as a window into contemporary Indian culture, the film was also criticised for its treatment of postcolonial India, and many Indians felt that the word ‘slumdog’ was insulting to slum-dwellers (cf. “The Real Roots of the ‘Slumdog’ Protests” 2009). The famous Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan, for instance,

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slated the film’s portrayal of the country as “third world, dirty, underbelly developing nation” (Ramesh 2009). Although India’s colonial past is not an essential part of the plot of the film, Slumdog Millionaire (2009) endorses imperial nostalgia in certain subtle ways. For example, the viewer is introduced to Jamal’s childhood through a game of cricket which the boys enjoy before they are chased away by the police, so that this originally British pastime is linked to juvenile freedom, whereas the police embodies the repressive (postcolonial) Indian authority (cf. 00:05:35). Considering the fact that nowadays cricket has, because of its “old imperial logics” and outdated “civilizing codes” (Gilroy 2004: 122), lost much of its former appeal in Britain, the image of Indian children playing the game evokes a nostalgic reminiscence of Britain’s own imperial past, a token of the greatness of British sport and its ‘civilising’ influence. The role of cricket as India’s most popular sport is further cemented in the film by it becoming a topic in the questionnaire (cf. 01:19:47). The setting also puts emphasis on India’s colonial heritage. This is particularly obvious in the shots showing the famous façade of Mumbai’s Victoria Train Station, a building in the Victorian Gothic style which was built in 1887 in commemoration of the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria. In one scene, Jamal is leaning on a Terminus dedication plaque bearing the name of the architect of the building, Frederick W. Stevens. Thus, the presence of the British as the former colonial authority and their legacy as shapers of urban Indian space is highlighted (cf. 01:45:26). Since there are no negative associations with Britain’s imperial legacy in the film, the role of Great Britain as an erstwhile colonial power comes across as constructive and even benign. The beauty and majestic grandeur of Victoria Train Station can also be opposed to both the unruly sprawl of contemporary urban Mumbai and the general, seemingly anarchic structure of Mumbai’s slums with their garbage heaps and violence. Much controversy was caused by the depiction of poverty in Slumdog Millionaire (2009). On the one hand, some commentators welcomed the issue as necessary, contrasting it favourably with India’s commercial film industry, which tends to neglect social inequality in favour of a thematic focus on escapist romance and luxury. On the other hand, critics saw the extensive depiction of Mumbai’s Dharavi slum as a form of “slum porn”, a commodification of poverty for the pleasure of the Western viewer, which, in its emphasis on the otherness of India, nourishes exoticist notions. The slum, in this perspective, displays the characteristics of a commodity, rendered into an aesthetic spectacle through filmic representation and thereby catering to a voyeuristic Western gaze. While the film also includes picturesque and travel guide representations of India, it

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provides a spectacle of otherness that reinforces the average Western viewer’s sense of cultural and economic superiority. Often shown in aerial shots, India’s poverty is ready for visual consumption by the aloof viewer while remaining at a safe distance (cf. 00:07:18). The notion of slum tourism is addressed in the film when Jamal leads American tourists through his neighbourhood (cf. 00:42:36), and the Westerners are fascinated by the squalor of Mumbai’s poorest citizens who wash their clothes in the river. In fact, the film’s depiction of the Dharavi slum has raised the appeal of the area as a tourist attraction with various tour operators and individual offerings springing up in its wake: commodification has obtained a reality outside the film (cf. Zaidi 2012). The “Taj Mahal episode” in Slumdog Millionaire (2009) centres explicitly on commodification, but this time that of the Western tourists, who come to see ‘romantic India’ and are swindled by Jamal and his brother (00:40:20-00:43:50). The scene is accompanied by the song “Paper Planes”, sung by M.I.A., the British artist with Sri Lankan roots , which features the line “All I wanna do is (bang bang bang) and a, (kacheng) and take your money”. Although the film uses the clichéd scenery of the Taj Mahal to maximum effect in various shots, it at the same time exposes it as an object of Western myths of the exotic, for example when the tourist couple wants to hear about Mughal romance from their guide Jamal who shamelessly thwarts their romantic expectations (cf. 00:41:22), or when a European opera is performed against the backdrop of the location (cf. 00:44:50). Arguably, the tourists, who stand in awe of what they perceive as a glorious Indian past or are guided through the slums of Mumbai while their car is being plundered, occupy a similar position to that of the Western viewer who consumes this filmic version of India. The “Taj Mahal episode” sheds light on the ambiguities of postcolonial commodification, since it here works both ways. The exotic, as Emig and Lindner point out, not only features as commodity in the shape of literature, film or tourist attractions, but the tourist him- or herself can also turn into a commodity, bringing “much needed capital to areas of the world that find it hard to generate capital in any other way” (Emig/Lindner 2010: xii). As already mentioned, Slumdog Millionaire (2009) incorporates several features of so-called ‘Bollywood’ films, the mass-oriented product of commercial Indian cinema, which is nowadays regarded as one of the most productive film industries in the world (cf. Bradley/Elliott 2006: 15) and has also made its appearance in Western cinemas and TV channels over the last fifteen years. Apart from the Indian setting, the film is partly in Hindi, features music by the famous Indian composer A.R. Rahman and contains a song-and-dance sequence (cf. 01:48:03-01:51:00), which stands in the tradition of Indian popular cinema with

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its obligatory musical spectacles. Positioned at the end of the film as part of the credits, the sequence inserts a defining element of commercial Indian cinema without disturbing Western viewing habits. Moreover, with Anil Kapoor as the game show host Prem, the film has a well-known contemporary Bollywood star on board, and it also features some scenes from earlier films involving the distinguished Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan. During the past decade, the commercial appeal of Bollywood productions has been exploited successfully outside India, not only through film productions like Bride and Prejudice (2004), but also through the medium of musicals, as in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bombay Dreams (2002). Slumdog Millionaire can be regarded as another film that introduces strategies of conventional Hindi cinema to the typical patterns of Western film productions and thereby capitalizes on the exotic appeal of a distinctly non-Western culture and filmic tradition. It can be seen as a form of appropriation which “incorporates the objects and sensibilities into the dominant, Western-based culture, sometimes by domesticating and sometimes by erasing the origins of these objects” (Root 1996: 78). This ‘domestication’ of Bollywood cinema draws a distinctly local cinematic tradition into the vortex of global consumption. Moreover, it is also a testimony of how Western film production can gain entry to the lucrative Indian market by tailoring its products accordingly. Hollywood studios are increasingly co-producing films in India and establishing their presence there, and Slumdog Millionaire (2009) is a superb example of a commercially successful convergence of cinematic conventions. Arguably, it even contributes to the emergence of a ‘world cinema’ in which the commodification of various cultures and their traditions is rendered appealing to Western and foreign audiences alike, and in which this circulation of films across national, cultural and ethnic boundaries generates maximum profit.

5. C ONCLUSION The above exemplary investigations into postcolonial literature and film, which are themselves regarded as ‘lifestyle commodities’ of the Western consumer (cf. Brouillette 2007: 57), have attempted to demonstrate the position of postcolonial cultural production within the global marketplace. They reveal the manifold mechanisms by which the postcolonial is employed to cater to reading and viewing audiences respectively. The publication of Selasi’s novel Ghana Must Go (2013) was orchestrated with an impressive marketing campaign by Penguin Press, which stressed the novel’s notions of exile and hybridity as profit-

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generating ingredients and which introduced the author as a young urban cosmopolitan with African roots. In its portrayal of India between tourist heaven and poverty-stricken slum, Danny Boyle’s film Slumdog Millionaire (2009) contains numerous elements that furnish the viewer with a vision of an uncannily alien India, while the film also provides an example of how non-Western filmic traditions are incorporated into Western mainstream cinema. Ultimately, examining processes of commodification in postcolonial literatures and cultures is fraught with ambiguities and contradictions. On the one hand, critics and scholars regularly warn about a ‘sell-out’ of non-Western cultures and the turning of allegedly ‘authentic’ cultures into a commodity. However, the evasion of commodification is illusory, despite numerous, predominantly left-wing claims about its sinister role, since there is simply no “zone or margin of ‘pure’ culture” (English 2005: 10). Similarly, Huggan argues that “the time has surely come to set aside the myth of commodity culture as some vast imperialist conspiracy sucking in its unwary victims” (Huggan 2001: 13). Of course, it is important that postcolonial scholarship never loses sight of the troublesome manifestations of exoticism or imperial nostalgia and their effects in many cultural commodities. Neither should it neglect to investigate the wider economic and political conditions and the inscribed power hierarchies present in the marketing of otherness, which influence the perception of postcolonial texts in the age of hegemonic neo-liberalism. Nevertheless, a more nuanced understanding of the commodification of postcolonial literatures and cultures is useful, one that refrains from viewing readers and viewers as merely passive consumers of ideological fictions disseminated by the powerful. This approach considers how commodification influences the production and circulation of ideas and hybrid subjectivities, and how it can also help to generate Western awareness of commodification’s complex, problematic entanglement with the postcolonial beyond the areas of academic inquiry or political activism. In other words, the commodification of postcolonial media products can serve the profit-driven commodity culture of contemporary capitalism as well as anti-neocolonial movements keen on raising awareness of global injustice among Western consumers: the irresolvable contradiction within the dynamics of commodification.

R EFERENCES Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi (2003): Purple Hibiscus, Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. — (2006): Half a Yellow Sun, New York: Knopf.

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Adiga, Aravind (2008): The White Tiger, London: Atlantic Books. Ahmad, Aijaz (1992): In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, London: Verso. BOMBAY DREAMS (2002) (USA, P: Andrew Lloyd Webber). Bradley, Nicholas R./Elliott, Robert James (2006): Bollywood: Behind the Scenes, Behind the Stars, Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Editions. Brennan, Timothy (1997): At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. BRIDE AND PREJUDICE (2004) (UK/USA, D: Gurinder Chadha). Brouillette, Sarah (2007): Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bulawayo, NoViolet (2012): We Need New Names, London: Chatto & Windus. Coetzee, J.M. (1982): Life and Times of Michael K, London: Secker & Warburg. — (1999): Disgrace, London: Secker & Warburg. “Commodification”, Oxford English Dictionary Online, ‹oed.com›, accessed 26 November 2015. Datta, Sudipta (2013): “An indulgent, complex debut”, in: The Financial Express E-Paper, 12 May, ‹archive.financialexpress.com/news/an-indulgentcomplexdebut/1114574/2›, accessed 26 November 2015. Desai, Kiran (2006): The Inheritance of Loss, London: Penguin Books. Dirlik, Arif (1997): The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism, Boulder: Westview Press. Emig, Rainer/Lindner, Oliver (2010): “Introduction”, in: Rainer Emig/Oliver Lindner (eds), Commodifying (Post)Colonialism: Othering, Reification, Commodification and the New Literatures and Cultures in English, Amsterdam: Rodopi, vii-xxiv. THE ENGLISH PATIENT (1996) (USA/UK, D: Anthony Minghella). English, James F. (2005): The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Evans, Diana (2013): “Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi − Review”, in: The Guardian, 3 April, ‹theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/03/ghana-must-goselasi-review›, accessed 26 November 2015. Feliciano, Kristina (2013): “Nadav Kander Photographs, Britain’s Best Young Novelists”, Stockland Martel, 24 April, ‹stocklandmartelblog.com/2013/04/ 24/nadav-kander-photographs-british-novelists›, accessed 26 November 2015. Forbes, Malcolm (2013): “Book review: Taiye Selasi’s First Novel Lacks Drama”, in: The National, 13 April, ‹thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/bookreview-taiye-selasis-first-novel-lacks-drama›, accessed 26 November 2015.

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Gilbert, Jeremy (2011): “Against the Commodification of Everything: AntiConsumerist Cultural Studies in the Age of Ecological Crisis”, in: Sam Binkley/Jo Littler (eds), Cultural Studies and Anti-Consumerism: A Critical Encounter, London: Routledge, 33-48. Gilroy, Paul (2004): After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?, Abingdon: Routledge. Huggan, Graham (2001): The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, London: Routledge. Hulme, Keri (2001, 1985): The Bone People, London: Picador. Jameson, Frederic (1991): Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London: Verso. Marx, Karl (1992, orig. 1867): Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, New York: Penguin Classics. Mendes, Ana Cristina (2010): “Salman Rushdie Superstar: The Making of Postcolonial Literary Stardom”, in: Rainer Emig/Oliver Lindner (eds), Commodifying (Post)Colonialism: Othering, Reification, Commodification and the New Literatures and Cultures in English, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 221-239. Okri, Ben (1991): The Famished Road, London: Cape. OUT OF AFRICA (1985) (USA, D: Sidney Pollack). Phillips, Ruth B./Steiner, Christopher B. (1999): “Art, Authenticity, and the Baggage of Cultural Encounter”, in: Ruth B. Phillips/Christopher B. Steiner (eds), Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds, Berkeley: University of California Press, 3-19. Ramesh, Randeep (2009): “Bollywood Icon Amitabh Bachchan Rubbishes Slumdog Millionaire”, in: The Guardian, 14 January, ‹theguardian.com/ film/2009/jan/14/amitabh-bachchan-rubbishes-slumdog-millionaire›, accessed 26 November 2015. Root, Deborah (1996): Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation, and the Commodification of Difference, Boulder: Westview Press. Roy, Arundhati (1997): The God of Small Things, New York: Random House. Rushdie, Salman (1981): Midnight’s Children, New York: Knopf. Selasi, Taiye (2013): Ghana Must Go, London: Penguin Books. — (2011): “The Sex Lives of African Girls”, in: Granta: The Magazine of New Writing, 19 May, ‹granta.com/the-sex-lives-of-african-girls/›, accessed 27 November 2015. SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE (2009) (UK, USA, D: Danny Boyle). Smith, David (2013): “NoViolet Bulawayo Tells of Heartbreak of Homecoming in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe”, in: The Guardian, 4 September, ‹theguardian.com/

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world/2013/sep/04/noviolet-bulawayo-homecoming-mugabe-zimbabwe›, accessed 26 November 2015. Swarup, Vikas (2005): Q & A: A Novel, New York: Scribner. “Taiye Selasi – Ghana Must Go” (2013), Penguin Books UK YouTube Channel, 26 March, ‹youtube.com/watch?v=z1TnoDv28_c›, accessed 26 November 2015. “Taiye Selasi, Lost in Transnation” (2013): BBC, 29 May, accessed via ‹youtube.com/watch?v=LgM2X5lqi1E›, accessed 26 November 2015. Taylor, Jonathan (2013): “Man Booker Prize Announces Global Expansion”, 18 September, The Man Booker Prize, ‹themanbookerprize.com/news/manbooker-prize-announces-global-expansion›, accessed 25 November 2015. “The Real Roots of the ‘Slumdog’ Protests” (2009): New York Times, 20 February, ‹roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/20/the-real-roots-ofthe-slumdog-protests/›, accessed 26 November 2015. Tuakli-Wosornu, Taiye (2005): “Bye-bye Barbar”, in: The Lip, 3 March, ‹thelip.robertsharp.co.uk/?p=76›, accessed 26 November 2015. Walder, Dennis (2011): Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation, and Memory, New York: Routledge. Winkler, Heinrich A. (2009): Geschichte des Westens: Von den Anfängen in der Antike bis zum 20. Jahrhundert, München: C. H. Beck. Wood, Gaby (2013): “Waterstones Eleven: Interview with Taiye Selasi”, in: The Telegraph, 14 January, ‹telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/9792918/WaterstonesEleven-interview-with-Taiye-Selasi.html› accessed 26 November 2015. Zaidi, Annie (2012): “Slumgawk Millionaires”, in: The Sunday Guardian, 2 September, ‹sunday-guardian.com/artbeat/slumgawk-millionaires›, accessed 26 November 2015.

The Marketing of Postcolonial Literature A NA C RISTINA M ENDES

1 This chapter focuses on the commercial dynamics of contemporary literary culture as they play out in recent South Asian fiction written in English by cosmopolitan authors. The focus of my analysis rests on literary texts which have emerged as sites where experiences, desires, transitions and anxieties related to the profound social and structural changes that are shaping the socio-economic landscape of the world are drawn on and negotiated. The main argument of this chapter is that, even though these narratives of (dis)possession problematise capitalism’s logics of asymmetrical distribution of power and wealth, the high profile of their authors within the global circuits of production and reception of postcolonial texts is generated by the same logics. In fact, the ways these narratives are made to circulate within the global market at times counteract the expressed agenda of their authors. Altogether, I will approach recent South Asian fiction as a current central paradigm of postcolonial literature marketing, one that can be applied to other contexts. For instance, this paradigm resonates with the appropriation by British publishers of the process of canon-formation of postcolonial Anglophone African writing since the 1960s (cf. Davis 2013). Before elaborating on recent economic and social developments in South Asia and their repercussions in fiction contemporaneous with them, I will therefore develop a conceptual perspective on postcolonial literature marketing, mainly using ideas from the methodology of the ‘new sociology of literature’.

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2 The “new sociology of literature”, one that speaks to “a more ‘sociological’ future for literary studies” (English 2010: v), has concentrated on the connections between the production and consumption of the text through a focus on economic relations. Accordingly, in the introduction to an issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy dedicated to “Fictions of Finance”, Peter Knight defends the need for an economic and financial turn in Cultural Studies, following what has now become an established cultural turn in studies of economics and finance (2013: 2-3). Within this framework, the high profile garnered by South Asian writers such as Vikram Chandra, Aravind Adiga and Moshin Hamid has no doubt been magnified by being published by companies such as Faber & Faber, Atlantic Books, HarperCollins, Penguin and Hamish Hamilton (an imprint of Penguin). Publishing houses’ marketing agendas greatly impact on the “social lives” (Appadurai 1986) of texts and authors. Here, marketing is understood as “a form of representation and interpretation, situated in the spaces between the author and the reader — but which authors and readers also take part in — and surrounding the production, dissemination and reception of texts” (Squires 2007: 3). Established Western publishing houses easily submit titles for prestigious US- and UK-based prizes. Partly because of this, works by Adiga, Hamid and Rana Dasgupta either won or were shortlisted for the Booker, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and were included in lists such as the Guardian’s “Books of the Decade” and the New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”. The “economics of cultural prestige” (English 2005: 4) is one of the strongest factors involved in building global readerships. In fact, during the past two decades, an impressive inventory of postcolonial literary works by South Asian authors achieved visibility in the marketplace mostly as an offshoot of being awarded coveted literary prizes. As early as 1989, Timothy Brennan held up Rushdie as an example of the “highly publicised Third World writers” who had risen to prominence at that time, and who “at the same time possess[ed] ‘callingcards’ in the international book markets because of their authentic native attachment to a specific Third World locale” (2-3). In fact, to the detriment of an earlier Indian English canon, Rushdie and other celebrity Indian writers have been hyper-visible.1 Fundamentally, the access of these writers (mostly diasporic/cosmopolitan ones) to the global literary market is controlled by the editorial

1

For a discussion of competing models of Indian literary canons which includes bhasha literary production, i.e., works in vernacular languages, see Orsini (2004).

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decisions of publishers in metropolitan centres like Paris, London or New York (Casanova 2004). Such are the opportunities, but also the pressures and constraints, of globalization. “Which of these novels” — the acquisitions editor ponders — “has the potential to become next season’s bestseller?” These decisions result in the uneven production, circulation and reception of texts within the literary worldsystem. The Booker is a case in point: winners include Naipaul (1971), Rushdie (1981), Arundhati Roy (1997), Kiran Desai (2006) and Adiga (2008a); the Booker shortlists and longlists have comprised names of South Asian origin over the years, such as Naipaul (1979 and 2001), Rushdie (1983, 1988, 1995, 2005 and 2008), Aw (2005 and 2013), Hamid (2007), Romesh Gunesekera (1994), Anita Desai (1980, 1984 and 1999), Rohinton Mistry (1991, 1996 and 2002), Manil Suri (2001), Monica Ali (2003), Indra Sinha (2007), Amitav Ghosh (2008), Mohammed Hanif (2008), Jeet Thayil (2012), Jhumpa Lahiri (2013) and Neel Mukherjee (2014). Not only the culture of literary celebrity that the Booker feeds (Rushdie being the pivotal example), but also the legacy of nineteenthcentury colonialism that marks the prize (in particular, its patronage by the Booker McConnell company) and its validation of a “literary Commonwealth” have accrued much scrutiny over the years (e.g. Huggan 2001; Strongman 2002). Not even the possibility of a cultural redress quiets the criticism. John Banville, in an interview after receiving the award in 2005 for his novel The Sea, distinguished between a “work of art” and a “work of craft” to support his argument that the Booker “is a prize to keep people interested in fiction, in buying fiction”, so it is in its interest that it “goes to big books by big names that will sell vast quantities” (Soloski 2008). Theories developed in the past two decades within the ‘new sociology of literature’ (in particular, sociological theories on world literary production) have demonstrated that the production, distribution and reception of texts are regulated by specific institutions that canonise particular authors, trends and writing styles. Influential texts in this context range from Franco Moretti’s “Conjectures on World Literature” (2000), which pioneered the discussion of ‘world literature’ as modelled after the world-system school of economic history, and Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters (2004), to Sarah Brouillette’s Literature and the Creative Economy (2014). Moretti begins by stating that “the literature around us is now unmistakably a planetary system” (2000: 54) and a couple of pages later elaborates on the fundamental inequality of this world literary system, one “with a core, and a periphery (and a semiperiphery) that are bound together in a relationship of growing inequality” (2000: 56). Moretti’s essay validated the need, traced back to Goethe’s Weltliteratur (an equal world literary

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system where “inter-related literatures” coexisted), to understand the operations of an unequal system in which texts and genres circulate and strive for preeminence. As in any other production system, “inter-related literatures” interact and interconnect with each other, competing for consumers’ limited time and disposable income. Brouillette (2014), building on earlier work (2007) and writing more than a decade later, documents the creative-economy turn of contemporaneity2 and the impact of changing notions of wealth in a “knowledge economy” (Florida 2002). Arguing that “creative-economy discourse dovetails importantly with neoliberalism”, she documents how this discourse “first emerged in relation to claims about the empirically measurable economic might of the practices, institutions, and individuals ostensibly served by the intellectual property regime” (2014: 2). Contemporary cultural production involved in the production and branding of ‘world literature’ hence reflects and responds to the logics of capitalist postmodernity. Success, in its varied meanings of commercial or critical success, still remains a highly contested notion for postcolonial writers. This is particularly the case for postcolonial South Asian writers (again, mostly diasporic/cosmopolitan ones) who are no strangers to accusations of trading stereotypes and favouring particular literary styles and genres in return for easy profits in Western markets. While the commercial success of these writers was a prime factor in making them desirable to Western publishing houses, another important factor is their critical success and a certain bestowal of canonicity on the part of the Western literary establishment. In what follows, I will further explore these connections and thereby elaborate on recent Southern Asian writing as my example of postcolonial literary marketing. It will be shown how economy is not only involved in publishing and distributing these texts but is also thematically addressed by them. Arguably, compared to earlier writing from the same region, literature and economy have moved closer together in recent South Asian novels.

2

Often, the terms ‘creative’ and ‘cultural’, as in ‘creative economy’ and ‘cultural industries’ are used interchangeably. These uses seem to be also dependent on academic context, with the latter being favoured by European academic circles. British sociologist David Hesmondhalgh defines “core cultural industries” (advertising and marketing, broadcasting, film industries, the internet industry, the music industries, print and electronic publishing, and video and computer games) as the industries that deal with “the industrial production and circulation of texts” (2002: 12). Brouillette’s critique of the creative economy (with particular reference to Britain’s New Labour) follows from the US-based social science and management tenets promoted by Richard Florida’s very influential study The Rise of the Creative Class (2002).

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Connected to them is therefore a particularly dense example of postcolonial literary marketing, one that reflects economy not only outside but also inside the text.

3 Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, LETTER TO LADY BEAUMONT, 21 MAY 1807 I couldn’t convince any newspaper to take my article on the rickshaw-pullers of Kolkata. But in December [2006], when I returned to The White Tiger, what I had heard in that shed in Kolkata came back to me in a flood. ARAVIND ADIGA, 2008

The imbalances of cultural trade — where before the Global North exerted cultural hegemony over the Global South through one-way vertical cultural flows — have been strongly redressed over the past decades by two-way flows, or contra-flows, compounded by the growing importance of horizontal South-South flows (Kavoori 2007: 44).3 In particular, the new ‘Tiger Economies’, with the prominence of India and China, have become ever more dynamic within the circulation of cultural products, and this is generating new horizons in the global landscape. Reflecting geopolitical shifts away from Euro-American dominance, South Asian authors have been actively reconfiguring the literary topographies of ‘rising Asia’. There is now an upsurge of novels and non-fiction works written in English issued from South Asia centred on the rise of ‘Tiger Asia’. Addressing the specificities and complexities of societies in transition (postcolonial,

3

Drawing on Daya Kishan Thussu’s concept, Anandam Kavoori defines contra-flows as “the semantic and imaginative referents for the institutional, cultural and political matrix of a world framed by processes of global cultural power and local negotiation: a world experienced through the identity politics of nations, individuals and cultures and negotiated through contestations of locality, nationality and global citizenship” (2007: 44).

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post-liberal and post-secular), their representations lead the reader through the advertised successes of a newly financially ascendant Asia. Those narratives characteristically start off by mapping out the journey of their protagonists from a rural backwater towards a megalopolis. They promise to disclose to the reader the secret of how they got “filthy rich in rising Asia” via letters, in Adiga’s 2008 novel The White Tiger, or self-help books, in Hamid and Tash Aw’s 2013 novels How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and Five Star Billionaire.4 To begin with, those who want to become wealthy must “[m]ove to the city” or “[m]ove to where the money is”, as advised in the first chapters of Hamid and Aw’s texts, respectively. Literary fiction by authors from rising Asia critiques current governance. Unmasking the political and entrepreneurial rhetoric of rising Asia, the relentless juggling of infrastructural, educational and moral challenges (or frustrations) is thrust into the limelight. On the other hand, Indian fiction in English has also been intent on depicting Dark India, i.e. the unpalatable aspects of modern-day urban India and its underbelly. Routinely written in the voices of the deprived, these representations offer a corrective to the celebratory narratives of economic post-liberalization, particularly those deriving from the 2004 government-sponsored campaign “India Shining” (Korte 2010/11; Detmers 2011; Goh 2011, 2012). Post-2010 Dark India is made to oppose ‘Tiger India’, pitting extreme urban poverty against the affluence that is being experienced by the fast-emerging middle class in the context of a booming economy since the liberalization of the early 1990s. Alongside farmers, rickshaw pullers and construction workers, texts embrace middle-class types such as dot.com employees, financial experts, tycoons, techies and call centre agents, or “customer service specialists”, as characters in Bharati Mukherjee’s Miss New India (2011) rectify it to. Dark Asia coexists with Tiger Asia in literary texts such as The Story That Must Not Be Told by Kavery Nambisan (2010), Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008a) and Last Man in Tower (2011), Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), Aw’s Five Star Billionaire (2013), Manil Suri’s The City of Devi (2013), Sampurna Chattarji’s Dirty Love (2013) and Deepti Kapoor’s A Bad Character (2014). Given their prominence in publishers’ lists, they seem to be part of a relatively new (and potentially profitable) literary trend. To these titles one can add the non-fiction works The Beautiful and the Damned by Siddhartha Deb (2012), Aman Sethi’s A Free Man (2012), India Rising by Oliver Balch (2013), Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo (2013), India Becoming by Akash

4

The setting of Aw’s novel is not India, but rather China, specifically a rapidly changing Shanghai.

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Kapur (2013), A Village Awaits Doomsday by Jaideep Hardikar (2013) and Capital by Rana Dasgupta (2014). Of course, the lists could be much lengthier. Countries of rising Asia are perceived by political and economic powers in the Eurozone as ‘lands of opportunity’ for European industries because they are areas of rapid, exceptional growth. In its January 2013 Global Economy Watch report, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)5 projected that to be the year when developing countries were “to have bigger economies than advanced countries for the first time since reliable records began”. India has been touted as one of the most promising emerging markets. The McKinsey & Company-edited essay collection Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower was published that same year. Highlights include texts from Bill Gates and Google CEO Eric Schmidt, together with leading Indian business executives and award-winning authors such as William Dalrymple, Patrick French and Suketu Mehta. Despite its much-vaunted economic success, the ‘global Indian takeover’ seems to be on a downswing, and evidence of an economic slump began to receive press coverage in 2012. Most relevantly, the trickle-down effects of what multinational audit firms have been consistently reporting for the last decade have been negligible for vast swathes of the subcontinent’s population. Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen note that “[w]hat is remarkable is not the media’s interest in growth rates, but its near silence about the fact that the growth process is so biased, making the country look more and more like islands of California in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa” (2013: ix). The failure of the nearly double-digit economic growth of recent years to make a significant societal impact on people’s standard of living is commonly attributed not only to rising inflation and a weak currency, but also to endemic corruption. In office from 2004 to 2014, India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was caught in various corruption scandals, and his successor Narendra Modi is a notorious figure both within India and worldwide. The erstwhile chai-seller who won the elections against Rahul Gandhi of the Nehru/Gandhi dynasty, Modi was indicted of multiple severe misconducts, ranging from complicity in an antiMuslim massacre in Gujarat in 2002 to “extrajudicial killings” (Mishra 2014). Over the past decade, the international media, as well as NGOs and policymaking bodies, have denounced the pervasiveness of muscular politics in India,

5

The multinational firm PricewaterhouseCoopers has traded as PwC since 2010 as part of a rebranding strategy. Although the legal name of the firm remains PricewaterhouseCoopers, this reference is notoriously difficult to find on the website. PwC is one of the ‘Big Four’ audit firms, together with Deloitte, Ernst & Young and KPMG.

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given the increasing overlap between the political and criminal spheres, as an impediment to reducing poverty and building sustainable growth. As Adiga (2013) gracefully puts it, “idealism and corruption — existing not in simple opposition to each other, but intertwined, almost symbiotically — collude to create [the Indian] political system”. The understanding of progress shared by the political parties in office shifted steadily from a socialist to a neoliberal economic stance. In 1991, when the country was facing a severe economic crisis, the License Raj was progressively dismantled as one of the Congress reforms started by Manmohan Singh (then Finance Minister). These policies gave rise in the 2010s to a specific social materiality grounded in finance capital, middle-class affluence and an expansive urban redevelopment industry. Following the post-independence ‘development-related displacement’ of millions to make way for large-scale projects such as dams and industrial facilities, infrastructure development has remained of national importance. During the Emergency of 1975-77, the clearance of slums — displacing dwellers from their homes in Old Delhi without adequate resettlement — was completed under the pretext of development.6 Dispossession has not been exclusive to sites that fall under the remit of the 1956 Slum Areas (Improvement and Clearance) Act: also in the name of (neoliberal) managerial efficiency and optimization, the 2013 Land Acquisition Act restricts the use of ‘irrigated multicropped land’ to 5% in a district, moving farmers off the land into jobs in the manufacturing industries (and/or the parallel economy). Up to the early 1990s, limits to foreign investment went hand in hand with bureaucracy, patronage and bribery, and this has survived from colonial times to the present. Entrepreneurs and politicians are routinely suspected not only of embezzlement, but of using force in governance via burglary, kidnapping and murder. These topoi have been recurrent in Indian fiction in English. Crime is frequently represented as resulting from entrepreneurs-government-police nexuses, faced only by the apathy of the middle class. For example, the portrayals of ‘India Shining’ offered in Adiga’s Last Man in Tower, of the greed and hypocrisy of the new middle class, suggest that any threat to Western hegemony from Indian ascendancy is counterweighed by exposing rapacious urban redevelopment schemes in Mumbai. This novel was published after The White Tiger, Adiga’s debut novel which won the Man Booker Prize, where the narrator Balram Halwai contrasts an affluent India of Light and an India of Darkness. Last Man in Tower portrays how organised crime is behind redevelopment schemes

6

One of Sanjay Gandhi’s programs, slum-clearance was rendered in Midnight’s Children via the demolition of the “Magician’s Ghetto”.

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regulated by the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, which allowed the government to acquire privately held land for ‘public purposes’ such as housing and slum clearance. Two other examples of the use of the topoi of endemic corruption and ‘developmental’ priorities are Akhil Sharma’s An Obedient Father, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Whiting Writers’ Award in 2001, and Chandra’s Sacred Games, which earned its author an advance of a million dollars from HarperCollins and was awarded the 2006 Crossword Book Award.7 In an evocative passage of Chandra’s novel, the reader is told how “[t]he world is shot through with crime, riddled with it, rotted by it” (2007: 310): The Pakistanis and the Afghans run a twenty-billion-dollar trade in heroin, which is partly routed through India, through Delhi and Bombay, to Turkey and Europe and the United States. The ISI and the generals fatten on the trade and buy weapons and mujahideen warriors. The criminals provide logistical support, moving men and money and weapons across the borders. The politicians provide protection to the criminals, the criminals provide muscle and money to the politicians. That’s how it goes. (Ibid.)

The marketability in the Western marketplace of texts such as An Obedient Father and Sacred Games is an expression of changing socio-political landscapes under globalization. Concomitantly, Western cultural industries have been translating the ‘Asian renaissance’ that emerged from the ruins of empire (Mishra 2013) in ways that continue to betray a post-imperial, melancholic fascination with the Orient. Such fascination translates, for example, in the commercial success of films such as The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012) — in fact, this was one the highest-grossing releases of the year due to its run in the UK, and a sequel was released in 2015. At present, the allure of the East also resides in the socioeconomic dynamism associated with the thriving Asian economies. Even if the extent and import of such prosperity has been under scrutiny, Tiger India is made to contrast with European/Western austerity for global readerships. The orientalist appeal of exotic India is being complemented by a trend that seems to be thriving on the current capital crisis and chronic recession: an interest in the growth of emerging economies and their uneven distribution of income. Recent representations of Asia are reenactments of past European anxieties about the East. In fact, the current fascination with the East maintains orientalist overtones:

7

This prize was instituted in 1998 by the Indian book retailer Crossword to compete with prestitigious Western prizes such as the Booker and the Pulitzer.

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the other remains categorised (and thereby controlled) simultaneously as (shady) Tiger India and (economically-deprived) Dark India. Without lionising or demonising the South Asian authors under scrutiny here, it is relevant to examine, in the long run, whether and how they absorb, recycle or refute (or even conceivably reinforce) the political and entrepreneurial rhetoric of Asia’s economic boom. A few of these authors, notably Sethi and Adiga, are or were also journalists in the print media.8 Social realist literature and literary journalism (in the case of Suketu Mehta’s 2005 text Maximum City, and also Siddhartha Deb and Akash Kapur’s previously cited works) become vehicles to disseminate the ‘reality’ of their countries more widely, as disclosed by Adiga’s words in the second epigraph to this chapter. Representations of postliberalization India as ‘Incredible India’ (c. 2002) (India as tourist destination) and ‘India Shining’ (c. 2004) (India’s thriving economy) coexist with the nineteenth-century ‘Feminine’ and ‘Savage’ Indias — the latter European-created images that Jacques Hymans argues are responsible for present-day “Indian soft vulnerability” (2009: 238). More than being merely a colonial hangover, these images concur with a twenty-first-century Dark India of Indians demonised (by both Western authors and writers of Indian origin) as perpetrators of gendercide, sexual offenders and slum dwellers in abject poverty. Though resisting the simplistic reading of these writers orientalising themselves in order to appeal to a Western audience, a few questions remain: In what ways might new forms of Orientalism be operative in the cultural contra-flows now issuing from Asia? Have representations of wealth and poverty, and opportunity and its lack, become literary commodities in the postcolonial marketplace? Is this part of the process of framing involved in ‘packaging’ transcultural interactions between Asia and the West? Even if Adiga and Hamid’s textual representations of contemporary Asia are issued from the South, and despite the literary standing attained by these socially and politically-oriented authors, their work is inevitably coloured by Western representations. To begin with, the socioeconomic privilege of this new generation of South Asian writers in English — especially the opportunities granted by their educational background — underscores class as a key issue that must be addressed when considering their critical acclaim and commercial success in the global literary marketplace. This is of particular significance when the societies

8

Sethi is currently a correspondent for The Hindu. Adiga’s articles have been published in The New Yorker, The Sunday Times, The Financial Times and The Times of India, and he was a Time Asia/India correspondent between 2003 and 2005. He writes regularly for The Times of India.

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being represented are deeply riven by class and caste. Hailing from a privileged background in Madras (now Chennai), Adiga studied at Columbia and Oxford. An immigrant to the US as a child, Hamid’s migrancy was also not economic, but instead motivated by his father’s enrolment in a PhD program at Stanford. Chandra concluded the undergraduate studies he had begun in Mumbai in California, moved to New York to attend film school at Columbia, and received an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University. Born in Delhi in 1971, Sharma immigrated as a child to the United States; he studied at Princeton and won a fellowship to a writing program at Stanford. Interestingly, both Sharma and Hamid studied under the tutelage of Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison at Princeton, and both went on to enrol in Harvard Law School. Hamid began Moth Smoke (2000), his first novel, during a fiction workshop taught by Morrison. Chandra’s debut novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995) was written after joining the writing programs at Johns Hopkins and Houston Universities, where he was mentored by John Barth and Donald Barthelme. Rana Dasgupta lives in Delhi; he grew up in Cambridge, studied at the universities of Oxford and Wisconsin-Madison, and has held visiting fellowships at Brown and Princeton. On the one hand, South Asian fiction is actively countering the celebratory narratives of progress by which it seems Asia’s leaders (political and entrepreneurial) are enthralled. In the case of India, the recurrence of these topoi betrays a sentiment of the subcontinent’s transition from a centrally-planned economy to a free market as incomplete or lacking. On the other hand, these topoi fit a new orientalist construction of the non-West as the West’s other, a non-modern place, a place of backwardness and darkness. As Jed Esty and Colleen Lye note in a special issue on “Peripheral Realisms”, “the shift from postcoloniality (or the persistence of neocolonialism) to alternative modernities (or the vivacity and varieties of development)” that took place in the 1990s “accorded many new powers to the former subaltern”; however, the “former subaltern” ultimately cannot escape “the intellectual significance of provincializing Europe” (2012: 273). This means, as Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) has influentially argued, that the imaginary Europe continues to be taken as the original site of modernity upon which many histories of capitalist transition in non-Western countries are measured and seen as wanting. Examining these new topographies contributes to elucidating the macro-level interconnections of transnational cultural and economic (contra-)flows, whose contours are as yet unknown. In a context of deep, often unprecedented social and economic transformations which are now altering cultural landscapes, the European Union is rethinking its position relative to the other local economies through its external policies, strategies, instruments and missions. In the context

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of the European Commission’s Multiannual Financial Framework 2014-2020, the European Council has concluded that the key challenge facing EU societies in the forthcoming years is to “stabilise the financial and economic system while taking measures to create economic opportunities”. On an internal level, the crisis in the Eurozone and, more generally, the 2008 financial downturn and its aftermath have intensified feelings of ethnic resentment. Presently in a period of decline, which follows capitalism’s cyclical patterns of accumulation and expansion, these feelings of hostility against the ethnic other threaten to undermine the postcolonial ethics integral to the cosmopolitan project of the EU (Beck/Cronin 2012). Fears linked to sovereign debt, corporate downsizing, layoffs and labour-related migration subsist despite the official narratives of ‘recovery’ and Western capitalism’s regenerative endeavours. The EU is experiencing a change in status from one of the world’s economic powerhouses to being dependent on emerging economies to salvage it from indebtedness and bankruptcy (Sharma 2012; Beausang 2012; Renard/Biscop 2012). The emerging economies represent both opportunity and threat. In the fragile fabric of contemporary Europe, reading about the underside of the emerging economies might counter anxieties over Easternization. It thus becomes of societal relevance to address how identity formations of the self (in this case, Europe) continue to be, in part at least, derived from the interconnections with the other and dependent on the current and future world order. The emerging economies are provoking in the West, particularly in a Europe facing deep financial crisis and the need of identitarian reconfigurations, contradictory post-imperial sentiments that are also being translated into South Asian literature written in English. The Euro-American imaginary of the Asian rising economies consists of several imaginaries — it is a mix of conflicting but also overlapping dreams, fantasies and desires. Adding to this intricacy, this tangled web of imaginaries consists of lines connecting opposite positions. Conflicting desires fluctuate along these lines, as articulated in the texts of Western/European-educated, cosmopolitan authors who write from nations of the erstwhile British Empire. Post-2000 literature on ‘Dark India’ has been regarded as pandering to a Western appetite for voyeuristic viewings of India as poverty-stricken and crime-ridden, in what critics regard as glamorised depictions of life in Indian slums (Duncan 2011). Although — or perhaps because — the key preoccupations of The White Tiger are related to voice/voicelessness, revelation/ concealment and exposure/elusion, Adiga was not able to escape such accusations. These emergent literary topographies are mapped on a two-way movement, whose dynamics can no longer be straightforwardly circumscribed by

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classical postcolonial geographies of the West and its others, modern and traditional, and developed and underdeveloped. However, the issue of authorial authority, given the privileged positionality of authors such as Adiga and Hamid, and the attendant instabilities of representation should be taken into account when analyzing these creative interventions. The work of South Asian authors such as these is caught in the cross-currents of rapid economic growth, volatile politics, driving market forces and post-secularism. For example, Hamid’s 2013 novel does not disappoint expectations of a subversive portrayal of a rising Asia in its step-by-step deconstruction of how to get ‘filthy rich’. Ultimately, texts such as this strengthen representations constructed around the poles of East and West.

4 This chapter centred on the imaginative topographies of the world’s new powerhouses that are being charted from a postcolonial ‘rising Asia’ and are pushing South Asian fiction in English in new directions. Though contemporary South Asian social realist literary works stand as nodes of resistance to the structural inequalities of the capitalist world-system and its enforced translation into other systems in postcolonial contexts, they are usually commercially successful in the West and as such are an integral feature of the expansion of economic neoliberalism. South Asian social realist literary works of the last decades have acquired a privileged positionality, as their authors have been benefiting from both the reach and distribution available to multinational corporations, and also from having managed to carve out global readerships beyond home and diasporic communities. Reflecting the impact of economic pressures on culture both outside and inside the texts, recent South Asian fiction written in English by cosmopolitan authors can thus be approached as a paradigmatic example of the marketing of postcolonial literature.

R EFERENCES Adiga, Aravind (2008a): The White Tiger: A Novel, New York: Free Press. — (2008b): “Taking Heart from the Darkness”, in: Tehelka 5.38, ‹archive. tehelka.com/story_main40.asp?filename=hub270908Takingheart.asp›, accessed on 16 November 2015. — (2011): Last Man in Tower, London: Atlantic Books.

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— (2013): “Reading India’s Soul: Indian Nominee for this Year’s Man Booker is a Masterful Chronicler of India’s Dilemmas”, in: The Times of India, 6 February, ‹timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/opinion/edit-page/ReadingIndias-soul-Indian-nominee-for-this-years-Man-Booker-is-a-masterful-chroni cler-of-Indias-dilemmas/articleshow/18355121.cms?referral=PM›, accessed on 16 November 2015. Appadurai, Arjun (1986): “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value”, in: Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3-63. Aw, Tash (2013): Five Star Billionaire, London: Fourth Estate. Balch, Oliver (2013): India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation, London: Faber & Faber. Beausang, Francesca (2012): Globalization and the BRICs: Why the BRICs Will Not Rule the World For Long, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Beck, Ulrich/Cronin, Ciaran (2012): “The European Crisis in the Context of Cosmopolitization”, in: New Literary History 43.4, 641-663. THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL (2012) (UK, D: John Madden). Boo, Katherine (2013): Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum, London: Granta. Brennan, Tim (1989): “Cosmopolitans and Celebrities”, in: Race & Class 31.1, 1-19. Brouillette, Sarah (2007): Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. — (2014): Literature and the Creative Economy, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Casanova, Pascale (2004): The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000): Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chandler, Clay/Zainulbhai, Adil (eds) (2013): Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower, New York: Simon & Schuster. Chandra, Vikram (2007): Sacred Games, New York: HarperCollins. — (1995): Red Earth and Pouring Rain, New York: Little Brown. Chattarji, Sampurna (2013): Dirty Love, New Delhi: Penguin Books. Dasgupta, Rana (2014): Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First-Century Delhi, Edinburgh: Canongate. Davis, Caroline (2013): Creating Postcolonial Literature: African Writers and British Publishers, London: Palgrave.

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Deb, Siddhartha (2012): The Beautiful and the Damned: Life in the New India, London: Penguin Books. Detmers, Ines (2011): “New India? New Metropolis? Reading Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger as a Condition-of-India Novel”, in: Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.5, 535-545. Drèze, Jean/Sen, Amartya (2013): An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Duncan, Rebecca Stephens (2011): “Reading Slumdog Millionaire across Cultures”, in: Journal of Commonwealth Literature 46.2, 311-326. Eder, Richard (2001): “The Beast in Me”, in: New York Times, 9 September, ‹nytimes.com/2001/09/09/books/the-beast-in-me.html›, accessed on 16 November 2015. English, James F. (2005): The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. — (2010): “Everywhere and Nowhere: The Sociology of Literature after the Sociology of Literature”, in: New Literary History 41.2, v-xxiii. Esty, Jed/Lye, Colleen (2012): “Peripheral Realisms Now”, in: Modern Language Quarterly 73.3, 269-287. Florida, Richard (2002): The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure and Everyday Life, New York: Basic Books. Ghosh, Amitav (2011): River of Smoke, London: John Murray. Goh, Robbie B. H. (2011): “Narrating Dark India in Londonstani and The White Tiger: Sustaining Identity in the Diaspora”, in: Journal of Commonwealth Literature 46.2, 327-344. — (2012): “The Overseas Indian and the Politics of the Body in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide”, in: Journal of Commonwealth Literature 47.3, 341-356. Hamid, Mohsin (2000): Moth Smoke, New York: Farrar. — (2007): The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Orlando: Harcourt. — (2013): How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, London: Hamish Hamilton. Hardikar, Jaideep (2013): A Village Awaits Doomsday, New Delhi: Penguin Books. Hesmondhalgh, David (2002): The Cultural Industries, London: Sage. Huggan, Graham (2001): The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, London: Routledge. Hymans, Jacques E. C. (2009): “India’s Soft Power and Vulnerability”, in: India Review 8.3, 234-265. Jenkins, Henry (2006): Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: New York University Press.

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Kapoor, Deepti (2014): A Bad Character, London: Vintage. Kapur, Akash (2013): India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India, New York: Riverhead. Kavoori, Anandam (2007): “Thinking Through Contra-flows: Perspectives from Post-colonial and Transnational Cultural Studies”, in: Daya Kishan Thussu (ed.), Media on the Move: Global Flow and Contra-flow, London: Routledge, 44-58. Knight, Peter (2013): “Introduction: Fictions of Finance”, in: Journal of Cultural Economy 6.1, 2-12. Korte, Barbara (2010/11): “Can the Indigent Speak? Poverty Studies, the Postcolonial and Global Appeal of Q & A and The White Tiger”, in: Connotations 20.2-3, 293-312, ‹connotations.de/›, accessed on 16 November 2015. Mehta, Suketu (2005): Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, London: Review. Mishra, Pankaj (2013): From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia, London: Penguin Books. — (2014): “Narendra Modi and the New Face of India”, in: The Guardian, 16 May, ‹theguardian.com/books/2014/may/16/what-next-india-pankaj-mishra›, accessed on 16 November 2015. Moretti, Franco (2000): “Conjectures on World Literature”, in: New Left Review 1, 54-68, ‹newleftreview.org/›, accessed on 16 November 2015. Mukherjee, Bharati (2011): Miss New India, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Nambisan, Kavery (2010): The Story That Must Not Be Told, New Delhi: Penguin-Viking. Orsini, Francesca (2004): “India in the Mirror of World Fiction”, in: Christopher Prendergast (ed.), Debating World Literature, London: Verso, 319-333. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) (2013): Global Economy Watch, n.p., accessed via ‹pwc.com/gx/en/issues/economy/global-economy-watch/emerging-mar kets-advanced-economies-january-2013.html›, accessed on 16 November 2015. Renard, Thomas/Biscop, Sven (2012): The European Union and Emerging Powers in the 21st Century, London: Ashgate. Sethi, Aman (2012): A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi, New York: W.W. Norton. Sharma, Akhil (2001): An Obedient Father, London: Faber & Faber. Sharma, Ruchir (2012): Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles, London: Penguin Books.

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Soloski, Alexis (2008): “Talking with Booker Prize Winner John Banville”, in: Village Voice, 25 March, ‹villagevoice.com/arts/talking-with-booker-prizewinner-john-banville-7132919›, accessed on 16 November 2015. Squires, Claire (2007): Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Strongman, Luke (2002): The Booker Prize and the Legacy of Empire, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Suri, Manil (2013): The City of Devi, New Delhi: Bloomsbury. Wordsworth, Dorothy/Wordsworth, William (1969): Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, vol. 2, Ernest de Selincourt/Rev. Mary Moorman (eds), Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Media History

Postcolonial Media History Historical Arguments for a Future Field of Research S VEN W ERKMEISTER

In the context of postcolonial debates in Literary and Cultural Studies, the mediality of (post)colonial practices and cultural phenomena has found little attention.1 A large part of Postcolonial Studies derives from the context of Literary Studies, and even those works that engage with visual and acoustic phenomena like photography, film or phonographic recordings often restrict themselves to questions of content and representation. How medial and (post)colonial practices are interwoven and in what ways media history and (post)colonial history are mutually dependent has not yet been asked systematically. Postcolonial media history and theory is therefore a field of research that remains to be developed. Using some selected examples, the present chapter would like to map this field and argue why the connection of postcolonial and media-historical questions may be fruitful for both sides. The examples relate primarily to the European and especially the Germanspeaking context. The theoretical inquiry concerning the relevance of the medial dimension of colonial and postcolonial phenomena in literature and culture is, however, transferable to other historical, cultural and geographical contexts. The aim of the chapter is, first and foremost, to sketch a theoretical-methodological question and to describe a field of research to which especially new primary material for examination can and must be added.

1

One exception among others was the conference total. Universalismus und Partikularismus in Postkolonialer Medientheorie (16.-18. Mai 2013, HBK Braunschweig), whose results are collected in Bergermann/Heidenreich 2015. The present article employs arguments and examples discussed earlier by the author in Werkmeister 2010.

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As the present chapter focuses, among other things, on the discourse of literary Primitivism in the context of the early twentieth century’s avant-garde movements, the postcolonial perspective necessitates the emphatic clarification that this chapter’s approach focuses on the historical discursive construction of ‘the primitive’. If the term ‘primitive’ is used without inverted commas in the rest of the text, it therefore does not refer to an objective, extra-discursive reality, but to a discursive concept. The power of this concept and of the term of the primitive are, however, discursive historical realities. The term ‘primitive’ can therefore not be avoided, but is – in the sense of a discourse-historical analysis – itself subject of analysis. The texts examined here belong historically to the context of late colonialism, the European imperial exploration (and appropriation) of non-European territories. The discourse of the primitive draws on notions and concepts developed by nineteenth-century ethnological and ethnographical research and thus perpetuates figures of thought which originated in the immediate context of European colonialism. A detailed reading shows, however, that both the argumentative concept and the term of the primitive were ambivalent. By the beginning of the twentieth century, at the very latest, it is no longer simply a concept used to describe non-European cultural phenomena in a degrading and exclusivist way. Instead, the primitive becomes a trigger and starting-point to question and probe European identity and self-evidence. That this is also (or precisely) a selfreflexion about the medial determinedness of European culture is what this article tries to show.2

T HEORETICAL B ASIS : M EDIA H ISTORY One can say that media are the precondition for the possibility of culture. They are the condition and prerequisite of any artistic, social, political, legal or economic phenomenon. Media such as language, image, sound or number are forms in which culture can manifest and express itself. No cultural phenomenon, may it be ever so abstract or spiritual, is thinkable without its medial materialisation. Berlin-based media philosopher Sybille Krämer has spoken of incorporation (“Inkorporierung”) in this context:

2

For a more detailed presentation of the histories of both the term and discourse of the primitive, see Werkmeister 2010: 57-84.

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“Culture” refers to practices by means of which actualities that cannot be perceived by the senses such as “values” or “sense”, are incorporated into what is given in time and space and hence perceptible. There is no spirit, no sense, no value, no abstract subjects – not even God – without incorporation. (Krämer 2003: 167)3

If culture only ever exists in its medial incorporations, this philosophical thesis about media and culture can be historically specified or – in the actual sense of the word – historicized. Media are not only the condition and manifestations of culture as such. Cultures – in the plural – as historically, geographically or socially distinguishable constellations can be investigated in terms of their medial foundations and techniques and differentiated accordingly. Media in this sense are cultural techniques (“Kulturtechniken”) (Krämer/Bredekamp 18), that shape forms of cultural production and organisation and whose differences and change can be described diachronically. The notion of medium used in the remainder of this chapter therefore understands media as the precondition that makes cultural phenomena possible. On a general, basic level, this is motivated by a desire to turn away from an understanding of media as instruments, which sees media as means that give extramedial content a form of presentation and transmission. Instead this chapter assumes the precedence of the medial. Even the most abstract idea (‘God’) does not exist without its medial manifestation. The question of what a medium is, can in this context only ever be answered relationally, can only ever be specified from the observer’s specific perspective.4 Language is thus a medium in which thoughts or linguistic subjects can develop some form. On a different level, writing is a specific medium in which language can find a shape and materialisation. Media history in a narrow sense relates to the historical, techno-medial constellations in which concrete media (e.g. photography, cinematography, music notation) determine and enable the appearance and differentiation of cultures. While examining language as a medium is really an anthropological question, i.e. the question about the fundamental role of language for being human, examining the concrete technical medium of writing – and more specifically of

3

“‘Kultur’ bezieht sich auf Praktiken, mit denen unsinnliche Gegebenheiten wie ‘Werte’ oder ‘Sinn’, demjenigen, was in Raum und Zeit gegeben, und also wahrnehmbar ist, inkorporiert werden. Es gibt keinen Geist, keinen Sinn, keinen Wert, keine abstrakten Gegenstände – noch nicht einmal: Gott – ohne Verkörperung.” (Krämer 2003: 167)

4

Cf. the distinction between ‘medium’ and ‘form’ in communication and system theory in Niklas Luhmann’s Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Luhmann 1997: 190-202).

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alphabetical writing – is a historical question that looks at a medial technique with historical, geographical and cultural boundaries. A cultural history in the shape of media history therefore examines the diachronic change of medial conditions and techniques in cultural formations. In Germany, media history in this sense was inspired first and foremost by the studies of Friedrich Kittler, a Berlinbased theorist of culture and media. Already in the 1980s Kittler formulated the programme of a media-archaeological theory and method. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s historical discourse analysis, Kittler adopted a broader perspective, beyond the narrow relationship to (verbal, written) texts in the Foucauldian notion of discourse, onto other medial practices and techniques as well as their differences and historical change. Kittler defines media as techniques of recording, storing and transferring data and thus gives a new focus to Foucault’s discourseanalytical perspective: “Archaeologies of the present also need to take into account the storing, transferring and computing of data in technical media.” (Kittler 2003: 501) This has not only the consequence that we must observe media practices beyond text and writing, which tend to be the focus of discourseanalytical studies. It draws attention primarily to the differences and historical change regarding the techno-medial foundations of histories of discourse and culture. The subject of a media archaeology in this sense are those historical constellations of medial techniques that enable and determine the recording, storing and transferring of information within a culture. Kittler’s media archaeology, just like Michel Foucault’s discourse archaeology, remains largely focused on the European context and concentrates on the historical change from written culture via technical media (e.g. photography, phonography, cinematography) to the digital code of computers. From a postcolonial perspective this does not only raise the question how Europe’s media history compares to possibly different non-European media histories. It also prompts the question how media-historical constellations and differences are directly interwoven with colonial history, or in what respect they are its condition and origin. Discourse networks (“Aufschreibesysteme”), as Kittler calls the complexes consisting of the medial foundations and techniques of a culture, change and vary not only historically; they also characterise cultures in an anthropological-ethnographical sense. The media techniques that are available in a specific cultural context determine its appearance, structure and organisation. Medial difference always also implies cultural difference. For (post)colonial historiography, which examines the relations of exchange, cooperation, competition and confrontation between Europe and its nonEuropean ‘Others’ and reflects their literary, artistic and cultural forms of expression, the media-theoretical and media-historical question, if put like this,

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plays an important role. The question that really needs to stand at the very beginning of our analysis is which techno-medial foundations and differences occurred and occur in the colonial constellations of cultural contact and cultural reflection. Not only is the (post)colonial perspective a necessary extension of media historiography, which until now has been all too Eurocentric. The mediahistorical dimension of colonialism and its cultural forms of manifestation, too, are a field of investigation which has so far found little attention in Postcolonial Studies oriented towards discourse analysis. Based on several examples this chapter will illustrate that media-historical dimensions play a central role in (post)colonial history and its analysis. Not only does it examine the techno-medial foundations of the European colonial project and different medial constellations outside Europe. It also examines the medial self-image of the colonial project, i.e. the explicit and implicit discursive reflections on medial differences between colonisers and colonised. The most decisive medial difference in colonial history between Europe and its much-invoked Other has without doubt been alphabetical writing. Not only did this medial difference shape the cultural, practical and administrative realisation of the colonial project. The difference between having a written language and not having one also shaped the medial and cultural self-image of European colonialism. In European colonial discourse it is one of the central figures used to explain the difference between Europe and its imagined Other.

W RITING

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C OLONIAL D IFFERENCE

The situation of first contact, the scene of the first encounter between Europeans and non-European cultures, has always been medially coded, and not only in the sense that the representation of the scene functioned as a “supersign of the contingent and imminent” (Scherpe 2002: 199)5 in European travellers’ reports, etchings and photographies, i.e. in the manifold medialisations of this fabulous encounter for the public ‘back home’. Media also played a central role in the encounter itself, namely as means of communication and translation in a situation in which language regularly failed. One prominent example for the presence of the question of media in the situation of first contact is an anecdote told by Georg Forster about James Cook, who in 1773 tried to establish contact with the New Zealanders of the Dusky Bay by handing them a white sheet of paper (Forster 1778: 104).

5

“Superzeichen des Kontingenten und Unmittelbaren” (Scherpe 2002: 199).

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Already since the seventeenth century, writing and paper had had a prominent place in the reports about the scene of medial encounter with nonEuropeans. Anecdotes about European superiority through writing that described the others’ stunned reactions to the European medium of alphabetical writing can be found in the travellers’ reports in countless variants. They evoke a topos referred to again and again in ethnographic reports from the seventeenth century up to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous “Writing Lesson”: the indigenous peoples’ incomprehension of the European cultural technique of writing. Michael Harbsmeier, Erhard Schüttpelz and others have described the anecdotal scene about the media-technological superiority of European alphabetical writing as the literary prefiguration of a European colonial ‘knowledge’ that helped explain the ethnological difference between the Self and the alien Other via the medial difference between writing and orality (cf. Harbsmeier 1992: 3-24 and Schüttpelz 2005: 17-31). Until well into the early modern period, the power that lay in writing had not been a central feature of difference in European discourses about unknown peoples and cultures. Only after the destruction of the Central American cultures of writing by the Spanish conquerors and the spread of the printing press in Europe did the anecdote appear in European travelogues of the seventeenth century and became, in the context of increasing literacy in Europe, a stable topos in representations of the encounter with the Other (Schüttpelz 2005: 18-20). The story is always a variation on the same motif: a European sends off an illiterate to deliver some goods. The (usually indigenous) man steals a part of the delivery and thinks that magic must be involved when the recipient notices the fraud because of a piece of writing contained in the delivery. This anecdote of “talking paper” (cf. Krüger 2003) plays on the knowing complicity of a literate reader. The nonEuropean’s failure to understand, which is presented in this scene, his ‘misinterpretation’ of the European technique, relegates his perception to the realm of primitive superstition and confirms at the same time the unlimited European power of writing. Even the Other’s reaction to the empty piece of paper in Forster’s report relates to this topos of a quasi-magical power contained in the European technique: “The good chap now trembled visibly over and over, but eventually – although still with many vivid signs of fear – accepted the paper.” (Forster 1778: 104)6

6

“Nunmehro zitterte der gute Kerl sichtbarer Weise über und über, nahm aber endlich, wiewohl noch immer mit vielen deutlichen Merkmalen von Furcht, das Papier hin.” (Forster 1778: 104).

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Scenes depicting European superiority based on writing are an element in countless travelogues from the seventeenth century onwards and can even be considered “a ritual that Europeans performed again and again […] because they knew that certain instruments and media were believed to exercise ‘magical power’, especially in situations of ‘first contact’ and of still uncertain gift exchange” (Schüttpelz 2005: 24).7 The ritual of performing one’s own writing power in contrast to the Other’s lack of it is interpreted by Erhard Schüttpelz as a “specific expectation […] that allowed Europeans […] again and again to match their imaginary ethnography with an unexpected reality” (24).8 These two dimensions of performance need to be kept in mind when one approaches the encounter scene today from a historical perspective. The only source of the medial first contact are the notes of European travellers.9 Precisely for this reason it needs to be doubly read and contextualised: first, as a source text able to give insight into the ‘unexpected reality’ of the encounter between two cultures totally alien to each other; second, as an expression of the ‘imaginary ethnography’ that helped establish the European cultural knowledge about the Other using the poetical form of travelogues. The first perspective entails approximation towards the ‘real’ situation of the encounter, the “reconstruction of the habitual and performative character of the scene” (Scherpe 2002: 205) 10 by means of an extremely precarious source text. Without reproducing the European ascriptions of meaning and the implicit hierarchy of values in the European representations of the medial encounter11 one

7

“als ein Ritual betrachtet werden, das Europäer immer wieder inszenierten […] aus der bereits belegten Annahme heraus, daß bestimmte Instrumente und Medien eine ‘magische Wirkung’ ausüben konnten […] insbesondere in Situationen eines ‘First Contact’ und eines noch unsicheren Gabentausches” (Schüttpelz 2005: 24).

8

“Erwartungshaltung […], die es den Europäern erlaubte […], immer wieder ihre imaginäre Ethnographie und eine unerwartete Realität zusammenfallen zu lassen” (Schüttpelz 2005: 24).

9

Or the notes by literate persons who had formerly not known how to write. (Cf. the examples in Krüger 2003 and Harbsmeier 1992).

10 “Rekonstruktion des habituellen und performativen Charakters der Szene” (Scherpe 2002: 205). 11 Gesine Krüger criticizes one-sided readings of the anecdote as a largely unproblematic and reliable historical source text, also in Tzvetan Todorov’s interpretation of the scene in his study about the conquest of America. Todorov uses the anecdote of the Europeans’ superiority through writing not only as a reliable historical source text, but

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can at least state the following: in the encounter with the non-European, media techniques regularly play a central role. Where communication and exchange cannot take place in media – the situation of first contact shows precisely how culturally determined and limited the meaning of language is – media themselves, even an empty piece of paper (!), become the subject of exchange. The mediality of culture, its link to specific media of perception, notation and communication, becomes objectively tangible in the very moment when the European media – and until the nineteenth century the central media shaping the European self-image were primarily alphabetical writing and paper – lose their cultural self-evidence. Only in the encounter with the unfamiliar Other do writing and paper become an extraordinary, incomprehensible object. Whether the others’ reactions to written language, their astonishment, fear, belief in magic, that are reported in the European travelogues, are ascriptions by the Europeans or not is of secondary importance for this conclusion. Media, it is clear, occur as media and become a concrete and discursive subject themselves wherever they manifest in the encounter with the Other as a specific sign of culture and thus become the subject of negotiation. If one reads the medial encounter scene from the second perspective, as a form of imaginary ethnography, as a “European attempt to transform the nonEuropeans’ unfamiliar perception of the Other into European discourse” (Schüttpelz 2005: 25),12 then statements about the magical power of writing depend less on a specific form of perception on the part of the strangers rather than on the European image of the Alien or Other. European medial knowledge about how writing works as a technique is contrasted with the others’ fundamental misjudgement of the medium, the confusion of technique and magic. This specific form of creating difference between the Self and the Other, which is ultimately rooted in Enlightenment thinking, can also be understood as a form of self-assurance concerning the medial situation in Europe. Technical superiority “has usually been understood, since the Protestant travelogues of the seventeenth century, as secular or profane superiority” (Schüttpelz 2005: 25).13 Enlightenment, knowledge and the skill and comprehension of writing are on one side, superstition, error and illiteracy are on the other. Performing the superiority of

also as the basis of his own argument on the thesis of the cultural superiority of writing. Cf. Krüger 2003: 358-359. 12 “europäischen Versuch, die fremde Fremdwahrnehmung der Nicht-Europäer in den eigenen Diskurs zu konvertieren” (Schüttpelz 2005: 25). 13 “seit den protestantischen Reiseberichten des 17. Jahrhunderts meist als eine säkulare oder profane Überlegenheit verstanden” (Schüttpelz 2005: 25; emphasis in original).

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writing therefore demonstrates more than the medium’s technical advantages concerning its abilities of recording and saving data. Interpreting the others’ perception of the unfamiliar as magical instead suggests a much more fundamental value hierarchy between Self and Other. The others’ religion, culture and ways of accessing the world are discredited in an attempt to expose them as misinterpretations and errors. Writing is in this Enlightenment discourse – and the first contact scene of superiority through writing stands for precisely this – not one medial technique among others; it is quite simply the medium of truth, knowledge and power. From a European perspective, the disturbing and confusing element in the situation of medial encounter, namely the Other’s perception of the unfamiliar in one’s own medium of writing and the potential of this viewpoint to question that writing is a self-evident cultural given, is defused by interpreting the Other’s reaction as a mere misreading. The alien and alienating glance of the Other onto one’s own medium, which is central to both the real situation of the encounter and the literary narration of this anecdote in travelogues, is denounced as superstition and thus made to fit into one’s discourse of writing and Enlightenment knowledge. While writing represents the possibility of knowledge and culture, the alien glance of the illiterate can only be non-knowledge. The medial encounter scene, which in the travelogues of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries continually performs anew this encounter between primitive peoples and writing, prefigures in the poetical form of the anecdote the writing-centred discourse of History and Philosophy, which in the first half of the nineteenth century still banished those peoples from the realm of history and culture that did not have a written language. Michael Harbsmeier in particular has tried to historicize the difference of writing and orality and its performance in the reports of European travellers, in the sense of an archaeology of orality. Based on a large number of European travelogues from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, Harbsmeier shows that it was only in the seventeenth century that the term and the notion of orality – in the sense of a form of communication and verbal exchange that is fundamentally different from the culture of writing – became a topos in European descriptions of the Other. The discovery of “orality and spoken language as a mode of communication at once radically different from, but also reducible to, writing” (Harbsmeier 1989: 222) is historically – according to Harbsmeier’s central thesis – immediately linked to the promotion of universal literacy and the spreading of the letterpress in Europe. In the nineteenth century the difference between peoples that use the technique of writing and those who do not becomes a central argument of establish-

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ing difference in order to support the colonial project. The study of cultures without (alphabetical) writing systems was not only at the centre of the new academic discipline of ethnology, which used it to distinguish itself from History, focused on written texts and writing. In nineteenth-century colonial discourse the absence of written language is frequently turned into an argument to justify the superiority of Europe and, on this basis, the colonial powers’ mission to educate the colonised (cf. Werkmeister 2004). The argument of Europe’s media superiority can even be found in the context of more recent attempts to explain the European conquista of America, that are meant as a critique of colonialism. Tzvetan Todorov in particular has tried to explain the quick European appropriation of the Americas by means of the specific power of alphabetical writing and its superior ability of representing and manipulating unknown cultures: There is a ‘technology’ of symbolism, which is as capable of evolution as the technology of tools, and, in this perspective, the Spaniards are more ‘advanced’ than the Aztecs (or to generalize: societies possessing writing are more advanced than societies without writing) […]. (Todorov 1999: 160)

This interpretation has been rightly criticised for how close it is to the “general celebration of writing” (Greenblatt 1991: 12) in the history of European culture since the seventeenth century. Stephen Greenblatt criticizes Todorov’s claim for medial superiority by pointing out that “Monuments to writing are built by writers” (12). While Todorov’s comment on the different media techniques of colonisers and colonised is important, the notion of the technological superiority of writing, which is still discussed in anthropological, historiographical and mediatheoretical discourse, is clearly situated in the tradition of eurocentric selfascriptions and repeats, as it were, an argument from colonial discourse. The example of alphabetical writing shows that media history and the history of colonial discourse are closely interwoven. It is precisely in situations of cultural contact that media techniques and thus medial cultural differences manifest themselves. The hierarchizing difference between those who have a writing system and others who do not is not only an expression of the alphabet-centred culture of the Europeans. It also attempts to capture discursively a real medial difference and to defuse the questioning of the European media system in the face of unfamiliar media techniques by interpreting difference as inferiority. A postcolonial media history, in contrast, would have to look at precisely these challenges that the medium of alphabetical writing undergoes in contact with cultures that are not founded on the medial technique of writing. This not

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only implies special media-theoretical attention to various medial forms of representation such as painting, photography and film in the context of European colonial culture. Even (and especially) European literature from the colonial period exhibits a particular sensorium of questions and challenges relating to mediality. The literature of the European avant-gardes, for example, continuously reflects the medial limits of the European medium of alphabetical writing and experimentally questions it just when it engages with non-European cultural forms. A postcolonial reading of such texts must not be limited to questions of content or representation. Instead it has to address the specifically medial dimension of this kind of literature. The example of early twentieth-century Primitivist literature will show that avant-garde literature not only recognised cultural difference as medial difference but also allowed itself to be infected by the nonwriting Other. From a postcolonial perspective the texts can be read as containing medial counterpoints that relate to the very medium of this kind of literature and thus question the colonial discourse endorsing the superiority of alphabetical writing.

I N THE B ORDERLANDS

OF

W RITING

Literary Primitivism, i.e. the manifold literary discursive references to the ethnological figure of the so-called primitive in the first third of the twentieth century, contains repeated instances where medial and cultural borders are crossed; by exceeding semiotic symbolisation and representation, Primitivism plumbs the possibility and limits of the medium of alphabetical writing. Reflections on the illiterate primitive – the ethnological and cultural figure of the non-European Other – coincide, especially in the texts of Dadaism and the avant-gardes, but also in texts by, for example, Alfred Döblin and Robert Müller, with a semantic and grammatical irritation of the symbolic order in the literary text itself.14 Incomprehensible, exotic terms and names, the choice of rhythms and synaesthetic devices relating to sound and imagery approximate the text itself to its exotic-primitive object. The primitive features not only as a motif on the level of content. It is precisely in the texts’ references to non-European, primitive forms of culture that they establish a Primitivist link between the object and the medium of expression. From this perspective literary Primitivism can be read as a complex reflection of the conditions and limits of European literature, as a prob-

14 For an exhaustive treatment of the question of media in Primitivist literature, see Werkmeister 2010.

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ing of the limits of the literary medium of writing in the medium of writing. In this sense literary Primitivism can also be understood as a trigger of postcolonial questions. By raising queries about non-European textual and cultural forms beyond alphabetical writing in the very medium of alphabetical writing itself, Primitivism reflects the medial challenge which cultures without alphabetical writing systems pose to European cultures that are based on such systems. By explicitly referencing and adapting non-European forms of verbal expression, the texts of literary Primitivism refer to a colonial Other, which – however mediated and translated – has entered European culture and produced its very own influences upon it. German art theorist and avant-garde writer Carl Einstein emerged as a pioneer of both theory and practice in this context. Not only did Einstein, with reference to the model provided by primitive works of art, formulate the theoretical programme of a cubism in visual art in his book Negerplastik (1915) (“Negro sculpture”) – thus the study’s contemporary title. As a literary person and author he also reflected on the challenge posed by other media techniques than writing. “I have known for a very long time that the thing which is called ‘cubism’ reaches far beyond painting”, Einstein wrote to Parisian art dealer Daniel Henry Kahnweiler in 1923, and he continued: The writers, in their poems and little cinematic suggestions, lag so miserably behind painting and science. I have known for a very long time that not only a shake-up of seeing and thus of the effects of movements is possible, but also a shake-up of the verbal equivalent and the emotions. (Einstein 1992: 153)15

The linguistic equivalent of shaking up how art is seen by looking at the primitive is shaking up the very medium of language rather than using the primitive as the object of literature: One always assumes that language only has the task to explain a given thing, i.e. that something unchangeable which merely changes its context, some person in a piece, needs to be explained. […] Isn’t the way one experiences something – and I’m not thinking of a

15 “Ich weiß schon sehr lang, daß die Sache, die man ‘Kubismus’ nennt, weit über das Malen hinausgeht. [...] Die Litteraten [sic] hinken ja so jammerhaft mit ihrer Lyrik und den kleinen Kinosuggestionen hinter Malerei und Wissenschaft hinter her. Ich weiss [sic] schon sehr lange, dass nicht nur eine Umbildung des Sehens und somit des Effekts von Bewegungen möglich ist, sondern auch eine Umbildung des sprachlichen Aequivalents und der Empfindungen.” (Einstein 1992: 153)

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psychological analysis, but of the experience, whose symptom is a group of things or states – more important than a description of consecutive states, and wouldn’t one have to try to adapt this language to the form of the experiences, in the way one translates a specific, decisive experience of space into cubism? (Einstein 1992: 156)16

And further: “Such an undertaking could eventually only be fulfilled by a demolition of grammar, since the linguistic conventions negate the presentation of important processes and relations.” (Einstein 1996: 331)17 The translation of the primitive into literature, that is, must not aim to transfer some given content, which is independent of any medium – an unchangeable thing, as Einstein calls it. The translation of the primitive implies the internal transformation of the linguistic medium itself, the “demolition of grammar”. Against the background of his theoretical reflections about art Einstein also discusses the specific question whether it is possible to translate primitive art into the medium of literature. If art is bound to a process in which something is turned into a material object, and if the forms in which this materialisation occurs are the specific and constitutive element of art, then the translation of primitive art is not achieved by the mediation of medially independent content, but requires the transformation of the medium of translation itself. Einstein tested the translation of primitive forms of art in this sense not only in his expressionistic novels and narratives. His imitative poems based on “Negro Songs” (Negerlieder) and “Negro Myths” (Negermythen), which he published from 1916 onwards in, among others, the expressionistic journal Die Aktion and which he collected, reworked and edited in the volume “African Legends” (Afrikanische Legenden) in 1925, essay a very concrete translation of primitive art into literature. Einstein’s retelling of African legends cannot be captured by the category of authenticity. The line of translations between the oral tradition of African narra-

16 “Man nimmt immer an, dass die Sprache nur die Aufgabe habe eine Sache zu erklären, also dass eine unveränderliche Sache, die lediglich ihre Entourage wechsle, irgend eine Person in einem Stück, erklärt werden müsse. [...] Ist denn die Art des Erlebens, wobei ich keine psychologische Analyse verstehe, sondern das Erlebnis, dessen Symptom eben eine Gruppe von Dingen oder Zuständen ist, nicht wichtiger als die Beschreibung aneinander gereihter Zustände und müsste man nicht versuchen, diese Sprache der Form der Erlebnisse anzupassen, wie man im Kubismus ein bestimmtes, entscheidendes Raumgefühl übersetzte?” (Einstein 1992: 156) 17 “Solchem Wagnis müßte endlich ein Abbruch der Grammatik entsprechen, da die sprachlichen Konventionen die Darstellung wichtiger Prozesse und Beziehungen ausschließt.” (Einstein 1996: 331)

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tors and the European collection of texts is problematic because already Einstein’s sources were exclusively written ones. The status of these written translations of oral narratives is already critical because the European ethnologists and missionaries who created them did not know the languages and relied on the help of translators. Moreover, a first transformation into writing had to be created already in the field and put an end to the line of oral traditions.18 Einstein did not really know the oral narrative tradition at first hand, but only as mediated by these written documents. The comprehensive list of literary works and sources that Einstein added to his volume Afrikanische Legenden contains a large number of French, English and German sources, collections of texts compiled by missionaries and theoretical studies by ethnologists such as Diedrich Westermann or Adolf Bastian. Although this list of sources suggests an ethnologically correct proof of transmission, it does not allow the reader to comprehend whether Einstein really consulted all the sources that are listed, nor can we know, since there is only one comprehensive list at the end of Einstein’s compilation, which of Einstein’s retellings correspond to which source. The form used to present the legends thus renders it impossible to understand all individual steps of the translation process; in addition, the transpositions themselves show little inclination to ethnological-ethnographical objectivity. They are far more strongly concerned with a Primitivist transformation of language itself, as Marion Pape has demonstrated on the basis of many comparisons between ethnological source texts and their retellings by Einstein: By means of alliterations, onomatopoeia, placing words differently and by omitting conjunctions, expletives and particles and sometimes repetitions of words, he strengthens the words’ rhythmic effect and thus gives the texts a note of his own. [...] Because of his translation the movement and dynamism in the language itself become palpable, through changes in tempo, climax and anticlimax, rhythmical strings of verbs etc. (Pape 1993: 135-136)19

18 For work on language and processes of enscription by missionaries and ethnologists cf. Schlieben-Lange 1999 and Wendt 1998. 19 “Durch Alliterationen, Laut- und Klagmalerei, Veränderungen der Wortstellung, Streichung der Konjunktionen, Füllwörter und Partikeln, manchmal auch der Wortwiederholungen verstärkt er den Wortrhythmus in seiner Wirkung und gibt den Texten dadurch seine eigene Note [...] Durch seine Übersetzung wird die Bewegung und Dynamik in der Sprache selbst spürbar, durch Tempuswechsel, Klimax und Antiklimax, rhythmische Reihungen von Verben etc.” (Pape 1993: 135-136).

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The fact that Einstein’s laconic style does not really quite follow that of oral narrative forms marked by ornament and circumscription reveals once again the problem posed by a literary primitivism: unlike the visual medium that (in the context of artistic Primitivism, cf. Rubin 1984) seemed to be able to transfer laws of form and presentation in an evident and comprehensible way, a direct transfer of this kind was not possible in literature. To which degree African forms of narration and presentation are manifest in Einstein’s retellings is thus a question without definite answer. Regarding Einstein’s conception of transferring primitive texts into literature one can state the following, however: literary Primitivism in Einstein’s sense does not aim to transfer extra-literary content (Einstein frequently omits precisely the kind of moral maxims or explanations of events that can be found in the source texts); instead it aims at the alienation and primitivisation of literary language itself: “demolition of grammar”, language as material, rhythm and means of sound. The written medium of literature thus evokes once again the sensuous dimensions of language. These Primitivist devices manifest themselves in the literary experiments of Dadaism in a similar and at the same time more radical way. “The word Dada symbolises the most primitive relation to surrounding reality […] Life appears as a simultaneous confusion of noises, colours and spiritual rhythms”, the Dada Almanac, published in 1920, has it (Huelsenbeck 1993: 46).20 Already in 1916 Hugo Ball had noted with regard to the opening of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich: “Huelsenbeck has arrived. He pleads for stronger rhythm (Negro rhythm). He would prefer to drum literature into the ground.” (Ball 1974: 51) The Dadaist reference to the primitive is accompanied by a radical attack on the foundations of European literature as a form of art and medium. The primitive songs – “Unearthed and translated” (Tzara 1993: 141) – presented by Tristan Tzara in the Dada Almanac thus completely abandon the representational and referencing function of language. Under the title “Sotho Neger” (“Sotho Negroes”) it says: “Building song / a ee ea ee ea ee ee, ea ee, eaee, a ee / ea ee ee, ea ee, / ea, ee ee, ea ee ee” (Tzara 1993: 146). A reconstruction of the original ‘translation’ seems even more difficult here than in Einstein’s case. The Primitivist defamiliarisation of the linguistic medium, the push towards pure sound has here been driven to the utmost. That the result is neither pure fiction nor mad babble, however, has been shown by J.C. Middleton who, on the basis of Ball’s sound poems, has

20 “Das Wort Dada symbolisiert das primitivste Verhältnis zur umgebenden Wirklichkeit [...] Das Leben erscheint als ein simultanes Gewirr von Geräuschen, Farben und geistigen Rhythmen.” (Huelsenbeck 1993: 46)

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drawn attention to the fact that at least parts of the sound material were not freely invented but really follow African forms of language and sounds: “Only soundpatterns are there, and in four of the poems the sounds are from African languages, notably Bantu and Swahili.” (Middleton 1971: 198) In many cases, the Dadaist references to primitive forms of language show thorough engagement with the ethnological and Africanist research into language around 1900. Not only the chants nègres, which the Dadaists presented at the Cabaret Voltaire “in black cowls and with big and small exotic drums” (Ball 1974: 58), referred to primitive forms of language in their performance and literary realisation. The Dadaist concept of the poème simultan, a “contrapuntal recitative in which three or more voices speak, sing, whistle, etc., at the same time” (ibid.: 57), also indirectly evokes those contemporary ethnological theories of language according to which the primitive languages of ‘peoples without writing’ present objects and movements in synaesthetic sound images. The voices of the poème simultan behave in a way “that the elegiac, humorous, or bizarre content of the piece is brought out by these combinations. […] The ‘simultaneous poem’ has to do with the value of the voice.” (Ibid.: 57). The main concern here is not phonocentrism, nor onomatopoeia, but a Primitivist experiment with the medium of writing itself. This is evident in the typographical realisation of the sound poems. A Dadaist poem such as Hugo Ball’s “Karawane” thus transfers the exotic motif not only into the sound space of the language. Rather, the very layout of the written poem attempts a mimetic approximation to the text’s sound shape.

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Figure 1

Source. Ball 1920: 61.

The sound shape of the poem does not only imitate the sounds, movements and forms of the caravan of elephants evoked by the expression “jolifanto”. The Primitivist sound and pattern poems realize the ethnological theories about the form and procedures of primitive non-written languages in the medium of alphabetical writing. The Primitivist element lies precisely in the omission or subversion of the representational and symbolic form of alphabetical writing as a sign code. Not only the sound dimension of language in these poems, also their graphic shape emphasizes the sensuous dimension of the medium. In a way,

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what is foregrounded is the analogous side of the symbolic medium of alphabetical writing.21 “The use of ‘grammologues,’ of magical floating words and resonant sounds characterizes the way we both [Huelsenbeck and Ball] write”, explains Ball in his diary. “Such word images, when they are successful, are irresistibly and hypnotically engraved on the memory.” (Ball 1974: 67) The texts of literary Primitivism exhibit a particular media-theoretical sensitivity. The European medium of alphabetical writing reaches its limits in the encounter with the non-European Other, the oral forms of narrative and expression. In contrast to the colonial discourse of superiority, the encounter with the medial Other here challenges and questions how the European is conditioned by its own media technology. Those avant-garde texts that are inspired by and reference the ‘primitive’ texts of non-European cultures, again and again test the potentials and limits of European alphabetical writing systems. Awareness for the medial dimension of cultural ‘texts’ makes it possible to engage with unfamiliar media techniques whose reception and adaptation always also implies the change and defamiliarisation of the European text. While the ethnological and Primitivist discourses at the beginning of the twentieth century historically still belong to the field of colonial discourses, they simultaneously also mark its ambivalences and faultlines. Looking at primitive cultures indirectly also implied a questioning of the medial foundations of European culture and thus qualified the Eurocentric focus in literature on the textual traditions of alphabetical writing.

O UTLOOK In this sense the discussion that took place around 1900 can serve to inspire today’s postcolonial debates about the perception and inclusion of alien voices into the literary canon. At their core is precisely the different mediality of these unfamiliar voices. The biggest difference between European literature and its Other lies right in its medial form, the alphabetical code of writing and its specific ways of working and its limitations. A postcolonial reading that wishes to confront the questions of media history must be intent on looking at precisely those medial counterpoints, the moments of doubt and experiment as literature is transgressed in its very own medium of writing. The present chapter has focused on questions of writing and thus on the context which is most relevant for a historical (post)colonial reflection on media.

21 About typography as an analogous dimension of writing, see Böhnke 2004: 182-190.

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The focus also shows that media-historical questions open up new perspectives for Postcolonial Studies of literature since the medium of literature itself – especially in a colonial context – can no longer be regarded as a neutral medium, but needs to be examined in terms of the hazardous legacy it derives from its role in the history of colonialism. A postcolonial media history must moreover look at other – European and non-European – media techniques. It must take into consideration not only how the European media system has developed from alphabetical writing via analogous recording media (like photography, phonography and cinematography) to digital forms of recording. In examining the historical parallels between colonialism and how the European media system has developed, one would have to ask, for example, about the relationship between the analogous media emerging in Europe in the nineteenth century, that superseded the European focus on alphabetic writing at least partly, and the cultures overseas that never used the alphabetic writing system. This reveals relationships that go beyond the field of literature, for example into the field of Musical Ethnology, which is starting to question the European assumption that music is based on musical notation by referring to both non-European musical traditions and analogous recording techniques like the phonograph (cf. Werkmeister 2010: 116153). A postcolonial media history also requires the examination of mediatechnological experiments in observing, recording and describing the nonEuropean Other. Already in the nineteenth century, Ethnography and Ethnology experimented with the most diverse media techniques in order to represent and describe unfamiliar cultures. In fact, this is a line that can be traced well into the twentieth century to the roots of, for example, Visual Anthropology. Linguistics, Musicology, Cultural Theory and Philosophy, too, reflected again and again, through the encounter with non-European cultures in the context of colonialism, how they themselves were conditioned and limited by media. Another topic to be pursued would be not only the diverse medial figurations of the Other and the Alien, but especially also the moments in which European discourses and media systems were affected by non-European cultural encounters. A postcolonial media history must look at precisely those counterpoints, breaks and contradictions within European media history that become manifest during the colonial situation at the points of intersection and encounter with nonEuropean cultures. It does not only explore colonial forms of presentation and representation, but also their medial conditions in diachronic change. Postcolonial perspectives become manifest wherever a medium is questioned because of an encounter with the Other, and traces of unfamiliar cultures therefore enter European colonial history.

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R EFERENCES Ball, Hugo (1920): “Karawane”, in: Richard Huelsenbeck (ed.), Dada Almanach, Berlin: Erich Reiss, 61, accessed via ‹sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/dada/da/ pages/053.htm›, accessed on 9 October 2015. Bergermann, Ulrike/Heidenreich, Nanna (eds) (2015): total. Universalismus und Partikularismus in post-kolonialer Medientheorie, Bielefeld: transcript. Böhnke, Alexander (2004): “Digital/Analog – Typologisch, Analog/Digital – Opposition oder Kontinuum? Zur Theorie und Geschichte einer Unterscheidung”, in: Jens Schröter/Alexander Böhnke (eds), Analog/Digital – Opposition oder Kontinuum: Zur Theorie und Geschichte einer Unterscheidung, Bielefeld: transcript, 169–190. Einstein, Carl (1992): “‘Ich dachte mir da eine Sache’ (Brief an Daniel Henry Kahnweiler)”, in: Hermann Haarmann/Klaus Siebenhaar (eds), Werke, vol. 4, Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 153–161. — (1996): “Georges Braque”, in: Herrmann Haarmann/Klaus Siebenhaar (eds), Werke, vol. 3, Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 251–518. Forster, Georg (1778): Johann Reinhold Forster’s Reise um die Welt, vol. 1, Berlin: Haude und Spener. Greenblatt, Stephen (1991): Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Harbsmeier, Michael (1989): “Writing and the Other: Travellers’ Literacy, or Towards an Archeology of Orality”, in: Karen Schousboe/Mogen Trolle Larsen (eds), Literacy and Society, Kopenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 197– 228. — (1992): “Buch, Magie und koloniale Situation: Zur Anthropologie von Buch und Schrift”, in: Peter Glanz (ed.), Das Buch als magisches und Repräsentationsobjekt, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 3–24. Huelsenbeck, Richard (ed.) (1993, orig. 1920): Dada Almanac, Commissioned by the Central Office of the German Dada Movement, trans. by Malcolm Green, Derk Wynand, Terry Hale, Barbara Wright, Antony Melville, Susan Barnett, London: Atlas Press. Kittler Friedrich A. (2003, orig. 1985): Aufschreibesysteme 1800-1900, München: Fink. Krämer, Sybille (2003a): “‘Schriftbildlichkeit’, oder: Über eine (fast) vergessene Dimension der Schrift”, in: Sybille Krämer/Horst Bredekamp (eds), Bild, Schrift, Zahl, München: Fink, 157–176.

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—/Bredekamp, Horst (2003b): “Kultur, Technik, Kulturtechnik, Wider die Diskursivierung der Kultur”, in: Sybille Krämer/Horst Bredekamp (eds), Bild, Schrift, Zahl, München: Fink, 11–22. Krüger, Gesine (2003): “Das ‘sprechende Papier’, Schriftgebrauch als Zugang zur außereuropäischen Geschichte”, in: Historische Anthropologie: Kultur, Gesellschaft, Alltag 11.3, 355–369. Luhmann, Niklas (1997): Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, 3 vols, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Middleton, J.C. (1971): “The Rise of Primitivism and its Relevance to the Poetry of Expressionism and Dada”, in: Peter F. Ganz (ed.), The Discontinuous Tradition: Studies in German Literature in Honour of Ernest Ludwig Stahl, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 182–203. Pape, Marion (1993): “Auf der Suche nach der dreidimensionalen Dichtung: Carl Einsteins Afrikanische Legenden”, in: Willfried F. Feuser/Marion Pape/ Elias O. Dunu (eds), ‘Wahlverwandtschaften’: Eine Gedenkschrift, Tributes and Essays on Germanic and African Studies in Memory of Edith Ihekweazu (1941–1991), Bayreuth: Bumerang, 125–144. Rubin, William (ed.) (1984): ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Scherpe, Klaus R. (2002): Stadt, Krieg, Fremde: Literatur und Kultur nach den Katastrophen, Tübingen, Basel: A. Francke. Schlieben-Lange, Brigitte (ed.) (1999): Katechese, Sprache, Schrift, Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler. Schüttpelz, Erhard (2005): Die Moderne im Spiegel des Primitiven: Weltliteratur und Ethnologie (1870–1960), München: Fink. Todorov, Tzvetan (1999, orig. 1982): The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Tzara, Tristan (1993, orig. 1920): “Negro Songs”, in: Richard Huelsenbeck (ed.), Dada Almanac: Commissioned by the Central Office of the German Dada Movement, trans. Malcolm Green, Derk Wynand, Terry Hale, Barbara Wright, Antony Melville, Susan Barnett, London: Atlas Press, 145-147. Wendt, Reinhard (1998): “Einleitung: Wege durch Babylon oder Waldläufer im Dschungel der Idiome”, in: Reinhard Wendt (ed.), Wege durch Babylon: Missionare, Sprachstudien und interkulturelle Kommunikation, Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 7–42. Werkmeister, Sven (2010): Kulturen jenseits der Schrift: Zur Figur des Primitiven in Ethnologie, Kulturtheorie und Literatur um 1900, München: Fink. — (2004): “Koloniale Erziehung, Montag, 25. Juni 1906: Der erste Schultag in Fumban/Kamerun”, in: Alexander Honold/Klaus R. Scherpe (eds), Mit

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Deutschland um die Welt: Eine Kulturgeschichte des Fremden in der Kolonialzeit, Stuttgart: Metzler, 347–356. — (2014): “Die Frage der Schrift und die Medialität der Kultur: Herausforderungen für eine postkoloniale Literaturwissenschaft”, in: Gabriele Dürbeck/Axel Dunker (eds), Postkoloniale Germanistik: Bestandsaufnahme, theoretische Perspektiven, Lektüren, Bielefeld: transcript, 105-141.

Notes on Contributors

Rinella Cere is a Reader in Media and Cultural Studies at Sheffield Hallam University. She has researched and taught extensively in the Media and Cultural Studies field and her publications include books, chapters and articles on news media and popular culture in Italy and Britain. Publications include the edited collection Postcolonial Media Culture in Britain (with Rosalind Brunt, Palgrave 2011); a chapter on “Media and Crime: A Comparative Analysis of Crime News in the UK, Norway and Italy” in the Routledge European Handbook on Media and Crime (with Thomas Ugelvik and Yvonne Jewkes, 2013); a chapter in the collection Sport and its Female Fans on “‘Forever Ultras’: Female Football Support in Italy” (Routledge 2012) and a chapter in Beyond Monopoly: Contemporary Italian Media and Globalization on “Globalization vs. Localization: antiimmigrant and hate discourses in Italian media” (Lexington Books 2010). Brian Creech is an Assistant Professor in Temple University’s department of journalism in Philadelphia, PA. His research focuses broadly on the public epistemologies and discourses of journalism and popular culture from a poststructuralist and postcolonial perspective. He has published on travel journalism, terrorism and war, global social movements, digital technologies, and photography. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in the journals American Journalism; Journalism History; The Communication Review; Communication, Culture and Critique; Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies; Convergence; Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism; Journalism Studies; and Digital Journalism. Lars Eckstein is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures outside of Britain and the US at the University of Potsdam, Germany. His research interests include Postcolonial and Decolonial theory, literary and cultural memories of empire, and the study of global popular cultures. Among his publications are

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Re-Membering the Black Atlantic (Brill 2006), Reading Song Lyrics (Brill 2010), and a range of edited works, most recently Postcolonial Piracy (Bloomsbury 2014, with Anja Schwarz). He is co-spokesperson of the DFG Research Training Group Minor Cosmopolitanisms. Terry Flew is Professor of Media and Communications in the Digital Medias Research Centre at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. He is author of The Creative Industries, Culture and Policy (Sage 2012), Global Creative Industries (Polity 2013), New Media: An Introduction (Oxford 2014) and Media Economics (Palgrave 2015), and the founding editor of Communication Research and Practice. He was a member of the Australian Research Council College of Experts from 2013-15, and in 2011-12 chaired a review of Australia’s National Classification Scheme. He is an International Communications Association (ICA) Executive Board member, and chairs the Global Communication and Social Change Division. Kai Hafez is Professor for International and Comparative Media Studies at the University of Erfurt, Germany. He was a Research Fellow at the German OrientInstitut, Hamburg, and a Visiting Scholar/Professor at the Universities of Oxford, Bern and the American University of Cairo. He is on the editorial boards of many international academic journals. Among his English publications are: Islam and the West in the Mass Media (Hampton 2000), The Myth of Media Globalization (Polity 2007), Arab Media – Power and Weakness (Continuum 2009), and Radicalism and Political Change in the Islamic and Western Worlds (Cambridge University Press 2010). Anandam Kavoori works in the area of International Communication, New Media and Media Literacy. He has published scholarly articles in most major international journals including Media, Culture and Society, Journal of Communication, Global Media Journal, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication Monographs, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Journal of International Communication, and International Journal of Cultural Studies. Amongst his recent book publications are Reading Youtube (Peter Lang 2011), The Logics of Globalization (Rowman & Littlefield 2009), and Global Bollywood (New York University Press 2008). He is the recipient of the Asian Journal of Communication award in International Communication given at the AEJMC Conference in 2006.

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Lucia Krämer is Professor for British Studies/Cultural and Media Studies at the University of Passau, Germany. Her research is largely prompted by an interest in productive reception. She started out as a specialist on Oscar Wilde, obtaining her PhD for a thesis about biofictional representations of Wilde in novels, dramas and films (Peter Lang 2003). She continues working sporadically on late Victorian culture, but her current research is focused on the theory and practice of adaptation and related phenomena like remaking and transmedial storytelling, as well as on Hindi cinema. She has co-edited volumes on the construction of authenticity (transcript 2011) and on Remakes and Remaking (transcript 2015) and is currently co-editing a German handbook on Adaption (De Gruyter 2017). Her monograph Bollywood in Britain, which investigates the forms and reception of the Bollywood phenomenon in the UK is forthcoming (Bloomsbury 2016). Oliver Lindner is Professor of British Cultural Studies at the Universität Leipzig, Germany. His research interests include eighteenth-century culture and literature, Daniel Defoe, British youth cultures and science fiction. He has published two monographs, ‘Solitary on a Continent’ – Raumentwürfe in der spätviktorianischen Science Fiction (2005) and ‘Matters of Blood’ − Defoe and the Cultures of Violence (2010), and three edited collections of essays, Teaching India (2008), Commodifying (Post)Colonialism (with Rainer Emig, 2010) and Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation (with Pascal Nicklas, 2012). He is currently working on a research project titled “London 2010plus”. Carla J. Maier received her PhD from Goethe University Frankfurt/Main for her thesis on “Transcultural Sound Practices: Urban Dance Music in the UK”, in 2013. She worked as a Researcher in the research project Sound Studies Lab: Functional Sounds, funded by the German Research Foundation, and currently works in the base project “Analog Storage Media” at the Cluster of Excellence Image Knowledge Gestaltung at Humboldt-University Berlin. Here she works in a collaborative project with sound artist and composer Marianthi PapalexandriAlexandri on “The Materiality of Notation: Instruments as Analog Archives”. She has taught Postcolonial Theory, Cultural Studies, Sound Studies and Literary Studies in Potsdam, Berlin and Münster. Her research interests include: sound in popular music, sound art, everyday and functional sounds, transcultural, diasporic and urban club culture, contemporary Anglophone postcolonial literature. Recent publications include “Driftende Klangzeichen” in Situation und Klang: Zeitschrift für Semiotik (2012), “Listening to Diasporic Urban Music” and “Sound Practices” in Sound as Popular Culture (2016) and “Situative Signals in Sonic Conflicts: An anthropology of sound design” in The Auditory

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Culture Reader (2015). She co-edited the special issue Functional Sounds for SoundEffects: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience (with Holger Schulze, 2015). Monika Mehta is Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University, SUNY. Her research interests include cinemas in South Asia; postcolonial critique; Feminist and Sexuality Studies; and cultural production and globalization. She is the author of Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema (University of Texas Press 2011; Permanent Black 2012). She is co-editing From Bollywood to Hallyuwood: Mapping Power and Pleasure Across Pop Empires (under advance contract with University of Hawaii Press). Ana Cristina Mendes has been a Researcher at the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (CEAUL/ULICES) since 2005. Her areas of specialization are Postcolonial and Migration Studies, with an emphasis on the cultural industries and exchanges in the global cultural marketplace. She has recently been pursuing research in the subfields of Poverty Studies (slumming), visual arts, cinemas and literatures of the Asian emerging economies. Her recent publications include Salman Rushdie in the Cultural Marketplace (2013) and a special issue of Transnational Cinemas entitled “Walls and fortresses: borderscapes and the cinematic imaginary” (2015). She is currently co-editing a special issue of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature entitled “New Directions in Rushdie Studies” (forthcoming), as well as the edited collection Victorians Like Us: Domestic Intimacies, Public Performances (forthcoming). Kai Merten is Professor of British Literature at the University of Erfurt, Germany. He has taught on British Literature, British Cultural and Media Studies as well as on New English Literatures and Media. He has written books on the role of classical culture in contemporary poetries in English, among them Irish and Caribbean (2004), as well as on British Romanticism as a textual theatre (2015). He has also edited (with Hansjörg Bay) a collection of essays on the construction of ethnical, national and civilizational differences in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Europe (2006). In general, he is interested in looking at British literature from both a Media Studies and a Postcolonial Studies perspective. Bonnie Rui Liu is a Research Associate in the Digital Media Research Centre at the Queensland University of Technology. She is currently involving the research projects on media, communication and journalism in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology, including the impact of

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digital media on journalism education in China, and comparative research into attitudes of Australian and Chinese cultural producers. Her research interest includes innovation and competition in the media, journalism and communication areas. Uriya Shavit is an Associate Professor at the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies and the Religious Studies Program at Tel Aviv University. He specializes in the study of Modern Islamic Theology and Law and Muslim minorities in the West. Among his recent books: The New Imagined Community: Global Media and the Construction of National and Muslim Identities of Migrants (Sussex Academic 2009), Islamism and the West (Routledge 2013), Shari’a and Muslim Minorities (Oxford University Press 2015). Barbara Thomass is Professor for International Comparison of Media Systems at the Institute for Media Studies, Ruhr-University in Bochum, Germany. Her main fields of interests are international communication, media politics, media in transition countries, and media and journalism ethics. She is member of the Board of the ZDF, a national PSB, and head of the Akademie für Publizistik, an institution for further training of journalists in Germany. Earlier, she was a Lecturer and Researcher in communication science at the universities of Hamburg, Göttingen, Lüneburg and Bremen and at the universities in Vienna and Paris. She has worked with international organisations for several years in courses on journalism standards and ethics in different parts of Eastern and South Eastern Europe, West Africa and India. Prior to her academic career she worked as a journalist. Sven Werkmeister works as a Science Manager for planning and development at Justus-Liebig-University Giessen. He studied Literature, Philosophy and Communication Sciences at Johannes-Gutenberg-University (Mainz), Universidad de los Andes (Bogota, Colombia) and Humboldt University (Berlin). He undertook his PhD studies with a scholarship from the German Research Foundation (DFG) as a member of the Research Training Group “Codierung von Gewalt im medialen Wandel” at Humboldt University. In 2010, he published his doctoral thesis “Kulturen jenseits der Schrift. Zur Figur des Primitiven in Ethnologie, Kulturtheorie und Literatur um 1900”. 2007/08 he worked as a Research Assistant with Prof. Joseph Vogl at Humboldt University. From 2009 to 2014 he directed the Information Centre of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in Bogota and taught German literature at Universidad Nacional de Colombia. His research interests include Media and Discourse Theory, German

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literature and the History of Anthropology and Ethnography. He published essays and books on the discourse of primitivism, the European imagination of the Amazon, language politics in colonial Germany, Alexander von Humboldt, Walter Benjamin, Alfred Döblin and the Simpsons. Among others: Los Hermanos Alexander y Wilhelm von Humboldt: Huellas históricas de la cooperación cinetífica entre dos continentes (with Angélica Hernández Barajas, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana 2013), Techniken der Übereinkunft: Zur Medialität des Politischen (with Hendrik Blumentrath, Katja Rothe, Kulturverlag Kadmos 2009).