Communication forms the infrastructure of Hindutva, constituting its ideology based on ongoing processes of creating the “other.” As a nationalist project, Hindutva draws its pedagogy from far-right fascist movements, constructing India as a Hindu nation based on a monolithic Hindu race and a homogeneous Hindu culture. The production and circulation of disinformation shape the hate-based politics of Hindutva, with the movement securing its hegemony through the deployment of extremist violence. The global network power of Hindutva draws on its capacity to continually produce the other while simultaneously appealing to Western multiculturalism by projecting the image of Hinduism as the religion of unity and harmony. Equivocation, the communicative practice of using ambiguous language to hide the truth, is one of the core strategies of Hindutva, speaking a language of hate to an internal audience while making claims of peace and democracy to an external audience in Western democracies. Equivocation enables Hindutva’s diaspora proponents to uphold and perpetuate the political economy of Hindutva that is directly tied to terror and violence while simultaneously performing the narrative of Hinduism as a religion of peace for a Western audience. The networked structure of global Hindutva draws on funding, volunteer resources, material infrastructures, and symbolic flows of disinformation and hate across the diaspora, interconnected in an ecosystem with the Hindutva machinery in India. Resistance to Hindutva disrupts these communicative infrastructures through witnessing, co-creation of voice infrastructures, and expelling discursive gaps.
11-20 of 797 Results
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Global Hindutva: Communicative Strategies and Resistance
Mohan Jyoti Dutta, Balamohan Shingade, and Richa Azad Sharma
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Global Political Economy, Platforms, and Media Industries
Dal Yong Jin
Critical political economy has emphasized the tensions and power relations between global forces and local forces as well as the political and the economic. Since media ownership has become one of the major elements to widening the existing gaps between a few powerful actors and the majority of underprivileged players, critical political economy focuses on the significant role of ownership in media and communication studies. Critical political economy has also continued to emphasize the structural change in media industries in the broader socio-economic milieu. In the early 21st century, critical political economy has shifted its emphasis toward digital platforms, such as over-the-top service platforms like Netflix, social media platforms like YouTube, and search engines like Google, as these digital platforms supported by artificial intelligence algorithms and big data are primary actors in the global cultural industries. They are not only shifting the milieu surrounding cultural industries but also transforming the entire value chain in cultural production, including the production of popular culture, the circulation of cultural products, and the consumption of cultural content. Critical political economy needs to analyze power relations between platform owners and platform users as well as between a few countries in the Global North that possess these digital platforms and the majority of countries in the Global South that, owing to the lack of capital, manpower, and know-how, cannot advance their own platforms. This implies that critical political economy needs to analyze how global digital platforms as part of Western cultural industries have controlled and manipulated local cultural industries. By discussing the change and continuity in the cultural industries in the digital media–driven media environment, which expedites the concentration of the industry, new international division of labor, and platform imperialism practice, critical political economy will shed light on the existing debates about power relations within the broader society.
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Latinx Media Production: The (In)Visibility of Bilingual Spaces in the American Media Landscape
Jessica Retis
Latinx media have been part of the U.S. cultural industry for more than two centuries. In the realm of ever-changing scenarios, these outlets have encountered spaces to communicate with bicultural and bilingual audiences at transnational and diasporic levels. By reviewing the origins, development, and early 21st-century trends and future scenarios, this essay examines how even though Latinx media have played a relevant role in the American media landscape, they have remained (in)visible. Historiographical perspective is implemented to compare the growth of Latinx communities along with the launch of print and broadcast media as well as the advent of new technologies and social media.
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Political Identity and the Indigenous Media in Bolivia: Ethnicity, Politics, and Communication
Juan Ramos-Martín and María Reneé Barrientos-Garrido
The history of Bolivia has been marked by racism and the exclusion of the vast majority of its own inhabitants. From colonial times, through the creation of the republic, and until the 20th century, the Indigenous population in Bolivia (which historically constitutes around 60% of the total of its inhabitants) was excluded by the state of their social and political rights, remaining absent from the decision-making mechanisms of the state, thus being excluded and silenced for centuries. Indigenous movement in Bolivia has been aHistorical stakeholder for the incursion of its peoples in Republican politics. After the Revolution of 1952 and the first recognition of universal voting rights and the attempts of agrarian and educational reforms, the first forms of political organization of these Indigenous communities were made as peasants’ unions. Precisely, the denaturation and loss of their own deep identities, leading to the forced “peasantization” of the Indigenous population, was the main claim, during the 1970s, of the Indianist-based revolutionary movements, which built their thinking around the claim of their own forms of economic, cultural, and political organization. The origins of the first experiences of community and Indigenous communication arose from the movements’ own questions, claiming for their own forms of organization, structure, and narratives, which show as a whole the identity and political and cultural complexities and specificities. Beyond the colonial elements of understanding, emerge as a dialogical sense of understanding their own cosmologies, but also vindictive, in the need to build their own communication and action mechanisms. Thus, the different cultural and cosmopolitical resistances have assumed a central role as a mobilizing element of sociopolitical awareness in the face of the powers established by the institutional management of public space, beyond the formal organization of their structures, in the construction of intersections that take advantage of interstitial spaces to develop identity stories with a clear emancipatory vocation. However, this reflection not only belongs to an exclusive past, but in a scenario as identifiable as the current onein 2024, in which one of the great issues present in social and political construction in Latin America has to do with the great problem of representation as a form of political-identity construction in the complex societies of a Global South. Focused on the definition and political-cultural configuration of the Indigenous movement, the different Bolivian subalternities, far from having forged their own discourse around the multiplicity of daily resistances, still suffer from a systematic lack of voice in the deepening of abysmal differences that necessarily refer to rerecommending the question beyond the discursive exercise, from a perspective closer to the political economy of knowledge.
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(Re)Visiting the Potentials and Limitations of New Media as Tools for Resistance Among Arab Diasporas
Sahar Khamis
When the Arab Spring uprisings erupted in 2011, the high hopes for democratization and reform were accompanied by an equally high degree of confidence in the liberating potentials of new media. These new media, especially social media, were perceived as viable alternatives to state-controlled mainstream media, excellent tools for resisting autocratic regimes, and unmatched platforms for amplifying marginalized voices.
However, over a decade later, just like the Arab Spring uprisings took unexpected detours, resulting in far-from-ideal outcomes in the so-called post-Arab Spring countries, there were equally disheartening reversals in the role of social media from tools for liberation in the hands of freedom fighters to tools for repression in the hands of autocratic regimes. This raised many questions over the validity and effectiveness of new media and their democratizing potentials, thus necessitating a careful scrutiny and reassessment of their shifting roles.
This qualitative study relied on in-person and virtual in-depth interviews with ten activists, journalists, and artists living in the diaspora from three Arab countries—Egypt, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia—to investigate the deployment of new tools of communication by Arab diasporic communities to resist their autocratic regimes at home. The study pays special attention to the various potentials and limitations of this complex phenomenon and its varied implications.
Providing examples from these three Arab resistance communities in the diaspora, this article illustrates the similarities and differences, and the overlaps and divergences, in their deployment of social media tools in the domains of political and social activism and resistance.
It examines how diasporic Arab communities contributed to the struggles against their dictatorial regimes through deploying new communication technologies to disrupt, expose, and resist authoritarianisms back home. It also explains why, and how, some of these efforts and techniques have been more successful than others in achieving these goals.
Moreover, through the voices and experiences of these Arab diasporic dissidents, the potentials, limitations, and future prospects of “cyberactivism” will be explored.
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Black Diaspora and Media Use
Ola Ogunyemi
The article contributes to the understanding of the historically evolving and contemporary nature of how Black diasporas make use of the media.It examines how diaspora was appropriated to describe Black diasporas and their lived experiences in retaining the memory of the homeland and identity formation in their new environment. Drawing on the prism of physical and psychological dimensions of Black diaspora enables us to gain an insight into how diasporic media not only perform connective and orientation roles, that have received dominant attention in scholarly studies, but also perform entertainment/lifestyle and advocacy roles. These roles have been repurposed for online platforms as new media technology requires journalists to reimagine what constitutes the Black press in the new media age. Literature shows that Black diasporas are active audiences judging by their high educational attainment and media literacy. Hence, there is a need to focus on the motivations that drive their media consumption by using the concept of uses and gratifications to elucidate how Black diasporas engage with the media to meet their information, entertainment, and education needs.
The article observes that scholars of Black diasporas employ methodological pluralism, that is, finding value in a variety of sources of information, to address the complexity of issues about Black diasporas and their media use. It concludes by highlighting some areas where there is a need for more research and some areas that have been overlooked in the literature. Filling these gaps in future research will enhance the understanding of Black diasporas and their media use in the 21st century.
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The Digital and the Postcolonial
Sangeet Kumar
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.
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Indigenous Resistance in South Asia
Mohan Jyoti Dutta, Pankaj Baskey, Rabin Mandi, and Indranil Mandal
This article examines the wide range of practices of Indigenous resistance across South Asia. It conceptualizes the interplays of power and control that shape the expressions of Indigenous agency in precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial contexts, depicting the multiple layers of erasure that shape the historic and ongoing displacement of Indigenous communities from land, cultural resources, knowledge, and ways of livelihood. By looking at the communicative practices of resistance in historic and contemporary contexts, it theorizes the openings for transforming the forces of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and imperialism. The article concludes by drawing on the key tenets of the culture-centered approach to map the role of voice infrastructures in Indigenous struggles across South Asia, drawing out the centrality of voice in transforming the communicative inequalities that shape the production of colonial-imperial-capitalist knowledge.
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Rhetoric of Health and Medicine
Justiss Wilder Burry and Lisa Melonçon
This article offers a review of relevant books from 2016 to 2024 to illustrate trends in the field of rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM). This article first traces the history of RHM from an emerging field to an established field within rhetorical studies. One of the markers of success for the field is that RHM, as a field, demonstrates the interdisciplinary nature of the RHM. The article next describes the relevance of rhetoric to the field and then it synthesizes themes and commonalities within RHM scholarship. The article concludes by considering future directions for scholarly inquiry and ways for those new to RHM to learn about and contribute to the field.
Article
Articulation and Recognition of San Firstness in Southern Africa and the Contestation Over Citizenship
Nhamo Anthony Mhiripiri, Keyan Tomaselli, and Julie Grant
Different groups of contemporary San or “Bushmen” peoples in southern Africa have a different status. Bantu and White Europeans’ subjugation and marginalization of the San over the past centuries has traceable influences on the way that the San have been represented and are perceived in the public consciousness. Public perceptions are often based on what the mass media present as San identities. This also has implications on the way different countries recognize them as people and as citizens. In the best of situations, they have at least been accorded the status of First Nation within the multiracial and multiethnic modern nation-state. At worst, they lack recognition and are stateless or without citizenship.
