The Digital and the Postcolonial
The Digital and the Postcolonial
- Sangeet KumarSangeet KumarDepartment of Communication, Denison University
Summary
The growth and expansion of the field of digital media studies and critical internet studies opens up opportunities for it to engage with other existing areas of scholarship that can infuse it with new questions, vantage points, and conceptual categories. The field of postcolonial studies that begins with an attempt to understand the material and symbolic dynamics of colonial rule and extends to making sense of the varied aspects of the postcolonial condition, is one such potential area. The existing debates within postcolonial theory about how the symbolic, psychic and material structures of the past animate and shape power dynamics in our world today hold many lessons for analyzing what is arguably the most global media technology ever. This article presents three areas of convergence between digital media studies and postcolonial studies in order to draw out their common concerns and show how the lessons from the latter can help animate scholarship of the former. The three areas that focus respectively on the consequences of the global digital divide, the nature of cultural power in the digital world and the emerging global division of labor each show the value of existing debates within postcolonial studies in deepening and expanding the scholarship in digital media studies. As they traverse national boundaries effortlessly, create unprecedented national and global solidarities, and seemingly democratize cultural and knowledge production, the web and the digital media ecosystems have also handed unprecedented abilities to nation-states and corporations to surveil, control, and modulate the behavior of citizens and users. The complex layers of these dynamics where Western digital platforms spread globally and expand their userbase under the guise of doing global good and spreading liberal values while authoritarian regimes often push back using tropes of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism can best be understood when filtered through some of the analogous lessons of postcolonial theory. Bringing in those lessons about how the past lives in the present, control in freedom and the colonial in the postcolonial can make analyses of global power in the digital domain historically informed and theoretically nuanced.
Keywords
Subjects
- Communication and Technology
- Communication Theory
- Critical/Cultural Studies