Frantz Fanon was one of the most important voices in decolonial and black liberation struggles of the mid-20th century. Writing about race and colonialism in Martinique, France, and Algeria, he articulated the importance of blackness to Western frameworks of the human. The black studies scholarship influenced by Fanon has continued in a similar vein, arguing that much of modern, Western thought either does not discuss race at all or considers race as an add-on to the larger discussion of Western subjectivity. Alternatively, Fanon and his interlocutors argue that race is the central function of the larger fields of Western philosophy and science, even if race is not mentioned at all. To make this claim, they largely point toward two tendencies in Western thought. First, Fanon and his interlocutors often examine the centrality of time and space in modern Western philosophy. Indeed, much of Western philosophy and science has implicitly and explicitly examined time as a linear trajectory that is largely monopolized by the Western European and North American white male subject; alternatively, space has been theorized as the static and nondynamic measure of the Western subject’s capacity to progress. Second, Fanon and his interlocutors also critically interrogate the related discussion of mutual recognition that is assumed in much of Western thought. As such, Western thinkers have often contended that, historically, the self recognizes itself in the other, and vice versa, and that self/other relationship is the basis for concepts of subjectivity. Yet, Fanon and his interlocutors have also pointed out that the lack of recognition of black people as human or as subjects has done little to foreclose whiteness as the position overrepresented as the human. Rather than recognition, white people have historically enacted racial violence against black bodies as a central mode through which to enter into humanity. As such, time and space and the lack of recognition as outlined by Fanon and his interlocutors suggest that nonwhite bodies have always provided a crisis for Western concepts of universality and subjecthood.
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A Fanonian Philosophy of Race
Armond Towns
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Affect in Critical Studies
Brian L. Ott
Affect has historically been conceptualized in one of two dominant ways. The first perspective, which has its roots in psychology and neuroscience, tends to view affect as an elemental state. This tradition is reflected in Silvan S. Tomkins’s theory of primary affects and Antonio Damasio’s theory of basic emotions. Recent extensions of this tradition include the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lisa Cartwright, and Teresa Brennan. The second perspective, which is typically associated with developments in philosophy and the humanities, treats affect as an intensive force. This tradition, whose most famous proponent is Gilles Deleuze, is evident in Brian Massumi’s theory of autonomous affect and Nigel Thrift’s non-representational theory. Recent extensions of this tradition tend to emphasize the importance of materiality, or what Jane Bennett has called “thing-power.” A number of scholars working in communication and cultural studies have created a third, hybrid tradition that attempts to bridge or mediate the two dominant historical accounts. This third perspective includes Lawrence Grossberg’s notion of affective investments, Christian Lundberg’s Lacanian-inspired view of affect, Sara Ahmed’s work on the sociality of emotion, and Gernot Böhme’s theory of atmospheres.
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Alain Badiou’s New Constructivism and Universalism
Antonio Calcagno
French philosopher Alain Badiou (b. 1937) is one of the more important European thinkers to emerge after May 1968. His work may be read as a response to the structuralism, post-structuralism, existentialism, and postmodern thought characteristic of post-World War II French theory. Through the use of set theory, he argues that our understanding of reality is largely determined by major, world shifting events in politics, mathematics/science, aesthetics/poetry, and love. A Maoist, he maintains that true changes in human reality require decisive interventions that create a new sense of temporality, subjectivity, and order. Events radically change the order of an existing world and create new worlds. For example, the Russian or French revolutions brought an end to absolutist monarchies and the rule that were specific to them. A new order and form of political power were introduced by the ascendant regimes. The sense of who and what human beings living under such regimes were changed from that of subject to citizen. The idea of subjects being absolutely ruled and determined by divine monarchs only responsible to God and themselves would no longer be possible as a legitimate form of political rule. The contents and relations constitutive of a world come to be structured by the event, though the worlds regimented by an event are never identical to the event itself. The event always lies outside, though it conditions, the sets of relations and contents that express it. His work is often read in conjunction with and in opposition to the philosopher Jacques Rancière. Both thinkers form part of what is seen as the new constructivism and universalism.
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Alternative Organizational Culture
George Cheney and Debashish Munshi
Alternative organizational culture is an evocative yet ambiguous term. In disciplines like communication, sociology, anthropology, management, economics, and political science, the term leads us not only to consider existing models and cases of organizing differently from the norm but also to imagine paths and possibilities yet to be realized. The ambiguity and referents of the term are important to probe. The term and its associations should be understood historically as well as culturally. Alternative organizational culture also implies certain dialectics, leading to questions about both principles and applications.
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Althusser and Structuralism in Communication Studies
Matthew S. May and Kate Siegfried
Louis Pierre Althusser (1918–1990) is widely recognized as one of the most significant and influential Marxist philosophers associated with the structuralist turn in the middle of the 20th century. The ongoing publication of scholarly monographs that develop his conceptual legacy, the depth of his impact in disciplinary debates in fields across the humanities and social sciences, and the continued translation of his work from French into multiple languages, to offer only a few examples, testify to the consensus regarding the enduring importance of his theoretical innovations and often controversial interventions. He devoted tremendous intellectual energy toward a critique of humanism and phenomenological-based Marxism even as he eschewed traditional positivist economic explanations of history and exploitation—engaging in what amounts to nothing less than an effort to fundamentally shift the way the West reads and interprets Marx. Despite the controversial aspects of his interventions, there is little disagreement that the concepts produced by Althusser irreversibly affected and continue to affect the trajectory of Marxist and post-Marxist thought throughout the world, albeit often through the back door, smuggled in and unrecognized—in his lexicon: as an embedded but nevertheless absent cause.
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Alzheimer’s, Age Panic, Neuroscience: Media Discourses of Dementia and Care
E. Ann Kaplan and Sally Chivers
Age discrimination, long habitual internationally, is now developing into age panic as longevity becomes the norm. People are increasingly living through their 80s and 90s, threatening social systems—not just health care, but also education, transportation, and economics. A by-product of longevity is Alzheimer’s disease (AD) or dementia more broadly, and this the focus of our essay. Five million people in the United States (the greater part women) currently have Alzheimer’s or dementia, and the figure is projected to grow exponentially as the baby boom generation ages. Fear, and other powerful affects, are generated in the aging Eurocentric public through overwhelmingly negative images of dementia. Prominent circulating AD images portray white, middle-class women and men; they are typically cared for by heroic family members, with the occasional, backgrounded appearances of racialized care workers. Such discourses betray a noticeable ageism, together with gendering, racialization, and medicalization of the illness. The reification of neuroscience studies of AD perpetuates understanding of AD subjects as having lost their subjectivity and as a burden to health-care systems. As the politics of care becomes ever more fraught with the increase in numbers of diagnosed elderly people, media discourses take on particular significance. Largely negative, images have obvious implications for long-term care in discourse and in practice. Since improving care depends on how the AD subject is visualized and conceptualized, critical analyses of works dealing with age panic, and especially how it arises in relation to cultural understandings of dementia, are essential. Critiques by humanists and psychologists may contribute to improving care of AD subjects, both in long-term facilities and “in place.” Improved care can contribute to transforming the popular understanding of a dementia crisis, thus addressing the central impetus of age panic. Meanwhile, new films, fiction, memoirs, and graphic arts projects are powerful complements to psychological studies aimed at developing new ways of seeing AD subjects.
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Angela Y. Davis and Communication Studies
Catherine R. Squires
Angela Yvonne Davis is an American-born, internationally acclaimed intellectual, activist, and icon. Davis’s groundbreaking work and generative theorizing synthesizes Marxist, feminist, critical race, and cultural studies to illuminate workings of power. Her many books, articles, and essays pose crucial questions that have inspired the work of generations of scholars, cultural workers, and activists. Spanning from the late 1960s to the early 21st century, her writings and speeches have provided rich understandings of history, justice, representation, identity, and resistance.
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Antisemitism and Communication
Amos Kiewe
Anti-Semitism is the systematic hatred, discrimination, and attack on Jews. Antisemitism often manifests itself in hateful speech that functions as the precursor to hostile actions against Jews. Antisemitism is a subject matter that has occupied scholars dating back from antiquity, through the Middle Ages, and more intensely in modern times. Different perspectives have been employed to explain this scourge, covering the terrains of historical, political, psychological, and even pathological perspectives but rarely in rhetorical studies. Considering antisemitism as hateful speech enables a rhetorical explanation whereby suasive forces are employed to strategically find faults with one group functioning as a scapegoat for the action of others. From this perspective, antisemitism is a form of victimization that scapegoats Jews for causes not of their doing, yet their existence is argued time and again as the reason for various societal ills. Ostensibly, Jews have been targeted throughout history and faulted for events not linked to them. From charges of conspiring with the Devil in antiquity, to poisoning wells in the Middle Ages, to causing Germany’s defeat in World War I, and many more, antisemitism has consistently been employed at critical historical junctures as a convenient explanation for complicated and troubling events. The Holocaust and the systematic plan to decimate Europe’s Jewry was perhaps the most overt and egregious case of antisemitism. It was based on a powerful propaganda machine that dehumanized Jews first, blamed them for all that befell Germany, and readied the grounds for the mass murder of some six million of them.
One root cause stands at the center of antisemitism: the death of Christ on the cross, and with it the charge that Jews are forever guilty of this crime. With religious interpretation and theological dogmas of the early Christian Church, the charge of Jews as Christ killer would establish the theology that Jews are forever guilty of this crime and fault every Jew at any time, even those not yet born, of this crime. This foundational charge has allowed other charges, including social, racial, and economic explanations, to be piled up against Jews, eventually identifying them as permanent pariahs. From a rhetorical perspective, an inherent guilt is the motivating force that has allowed antisemitism to survive through millennia. Hatred of Jews and hateful speech directed at them has never been erased, though one significant exception to the charge of eternal guilt was advanced by the Vatican II Council in 1965 in its document Nostra Aetate, and in it, the Church repudiated the charge of the eternal guilt of the Jew. The horrors of the Holocaust, more than any other cause, has brought the Catholic Church to change a century-old dogma, seeking an end to antisemitism. The Church correctly identified the charge of eternal guilt of the Jew as the root cause of antisemitism and stated its rejection of the faulty reasoning associated with the charge of eternal deicide. This significant move has done much to improve Christian–Jewish relations but it has not erased antisemitism. Recent incidents in various parts of the world have increased concerns that a new wave of antisemitism is under way.
Antisemitism appeals to people’s base instincts and is often rationalized as the fear of the “other” and the preservation of the self and the dominant community. Antisemitism flourishes because the rhetorical process therein is simple: It absolves culprits of answering tough questions by scapegoating an "other" who has already been accepted as the pariah and whose “responsibility” for past iniquities has long been established. Antisemitism is processed through a tried-and-true persuasive formula that is manifested rhetorically in speech and in images. Antisemitism succeeds where people do not employ basic critical skills when confronting messages, preferring instead to accept convenient, if spurious, explanations.
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Antonio Gramsci and Communication Studies
Marco Briziarelli and Eric Karikari
The strong affinity between the work of Antonio Gramsci and communication is based on several Gramscian communication-related themes and particular modes of his thought that significantly resonate with this field of studies. They include his drawing on the rhetorical tradition inspired by Vico, his assumptions of the constitutive role of language in creating an intersubjective reality that shapes common sense, and the fact that language provides the conditions of possibility for a hegemonic project. The strong tie between communication and Gramsci’s thought creates a vantage point for understanding both how Gramsci developed his political theories based on communication concerns and how those theories in turn advanced the field of communication.
On the one hand, Gramsci by his intellectual formation, as well as via life experiences, became extremely receptive of theories that linked language, culture, and society. Those theories can help illuminate Gramsci’s key ideas, such as hegemony, common sense, national popular, the strategic concept of translation, and the relational nature of concepts. On the other hand, Gramsci’s own reflection on the nexus between language and history significantly contributes to a theorization of language as a cultural practice resisting hypostases, an important qualification of Saussurian structural linguistics, and finally can offer the basis for a materialist approach to communication. Thus, the common denominator of a Gramscian perspective on communication must be found in the consistent use of dialectical thinking, which mediates binarisms like diachronic–synchronic, stability–change, individual–collective, unity–diversity, and symbolic–material. This article discusses the above-mentioned connection between Gramsci and communication in more detail. First, it explicates the ways in which Gramsci’s work was influenced by communication concerns, and then it analyzes how Gramsci’s work influences the realm of human communication today.
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Argumentation and Rhetoric
John Kephart III
The study of argumentation is inherently interdisciplinary. Broad in scope, argumentation theory generally refers to descriptive and normative attempts to understand the products and processes of disagreement and the attempts by participants in argumentative discourse to make their standpoint prevail. Rhetoric, informal logic, pragma-dialectics, and other approaches to argumentation theory describe specific theoretical approaches to the study of argument. While there is some difference of opinion as to whether the focus should be on the arguments themselves, the process of their exchange, the procedure for making and evaluating arguments, or some combination of the three, as well as over what constitutes normatively good arguments or even what counts as an argument in the first place, the range of theories that fall under “argumentation” are motivated to understand what happens when differences of opinion come into conflict with one another. Rhetorical approaches initially focused on the role of argument in contingent situations where a rhetor appeals to an audience to change a behavior or belief, adopt a policy, or reason to consensus in a disagreement. Later developments critiqued the idea that all argument assumes an attempt at reasonable resolution obscures the value in dissensus and ignores that some arguments are advanced for the purpose of demonstrating support for a cause or political faction, to undermine an opponent’s position, or to frame the terms of a debate for one’s own advantage. While this may not be ethical or “productive” argumentation, rhetorical scholars consider such tactics important to understanding the rhetorical strategies of a speaker wishing to persuade an audience. Development of rhetorical argumentation saw: criticisms of science and academic inquiry as rhetorical; the importance of controversy in generating dissensus in challenging the norms of public deliberation; approaches to nondiscursive arguments such as visual, sound, spatial, and embodied argument; and the ways that postmodern, critical, feminist, and race-conscious theories’ challenges to epistemology and ontology refigured considerations of arguer/rhetor, text, persuasion, and audience. Four areas of development for the field are: carrying elements of argument into nondiscursive forms such as aesthetics and affect, digital media (including the role of technological infrastructure on argument), argument designed to evade consensus and reasonability, and further developments in cross-cultural perspectives in argument.
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Arjun Appadurai and Critical Cultural Studies
Swapnil Rai
Globalization as a phenomenon was seen by scholars as a compression of the world, where the world comes together as a global village in thought and in action. Arjun Appadurai, in his theorization of globalization, challenges this view. He argues that globalization is primarily disjunctive, scalar, and contextual. He defines five basic landscapes that are about people and their migration (ethnoscapes), technology (technoscapes), media (mediascapes), ideology (ideoscapes) and finance (finanscapes). Globalization, according to Appadurai, occurs at the points of rupture and disjuncture between these different landscapes. In this context he defines “imagination as a social practice” and situates the work of imagination at the center of all globalization processes. Media flows decidedly play a large role in shaping the imagination, therefore mediascapes are critical to the understanding of globalization in any given context. Similarly, the flows of capital, of people, of ideologies and technology help create new imagined worlds that are fluid and capable of producing a “globally variable synesthesia.” That is, one type of imagined world can trigger similar imaginaries in other parts of the world, yet they possess different shapes and forms.
Appadurai’s theorization was later criticized for presenting too optimistic a view of globalization, for ignoring its dark side. So, in his later work Appadurai explores the “dark” side of globalization. In Fear of Small Numbers, he addresses the widespread global violence against minorities and uses Freud’s “anxiety of incompleteness” to explicate the majority group’s predatory behavior. Globalization has deepened this behavior and thought because it intensifies the possibility and related fear of the majority morphing into the minority and vice versa. Collective group identities, therefore, are forever under threat as “volatile morphing” becomes a reality brought about by rapid global migrations across national boundaries. Appadurai’s later work also points in the direction of hope by presenting the idea of grassroots globalization which is happening alongside the pervasive violence. Grassroots globalization is the idea of globalization from below that is done by non-governmental organizations and transnational advocacy networks that work toward redressing lack of access, injustice and inequity. Appadurai also offers scholars a new framework for how to do globalization research which is not fixated on its “internationalization” but is focused on questions and is inclusive of other worldviews and approaches from around the world.
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A Survey of Materialism in Thought and Communication
Kathleen E. Feyh
Materialism emerged as the beginning of philosophical (as opposed to mystical or religious) thought in ancient India and Greece around the 6th century bce and has from the beginning been associated with the investigation of the world in its complexity beyond the relatively immediate appearance of phenomena to human sense and thought. The thinkers whose concepts inform contemporary materialist approaches to critical communication studies can be traced through historical developments of materialist thoughts in antiquity, the premodern and modern eras, and leading up to the present day. Familiar, emerging, and potential discussions of the nature and formation of consciousness in natural and social life inform the critical study of communication, particularly rhetoric. Particular attention is paid to the relation of materialism and varieties of Marxist and post-Marxist thought, and these are situated within debates in the field of critical communication studies, particularly rhetoric. Concepts originating from the early-20th-century USSR, associated with “creative” Soviet philosophy and activity theory, are less familiar (to this field) but are pertinent to the area of materialist thought. While this area of philosophy has not yet developed deeply or been promulgated widely in communication studies, it is suited to participate in the current conversation about materialism in communication, consciousness, and practice. Its chief contribution is a treatment of the ideal in materialism that resists both reduction and dualism. It also brings to the fore important questions about the place of human activity, including thought, in the material world.
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Becoming Chinese: Sinicization, Nation, and Race in Xinjiang, China
David O'Brien and Melissa Shani Brown
“Chineseness” is often depicted in public discourses within the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as an identity that blurs together varied notions of shared cultural heritage, as well as common descent, within discourses of a unified national identity. This combines what might be called “ethnicity” (as cultural heritage), “race” (as common descent, physical or intrinsic characteristics), and “nation” (as territory and political state) in complex ways. And yet, a standard position within Chinese discourses (and often replicated in non-Chinese scholarship) is that historically informing the present, Chinese notions of “ethnic difference” are based on differences in “culture,” thus precluding “racism.” This characterization in part derives from the narrative that Chinese history was an ongoing process of “sinicization”—namely “backwards,” “barbarian” ethnic groups eagerly assimilated into the “more advanced” Han “civilization,” thus becoming “Chinese.” However, there are numerous scholarly challenges to this narrative as historically inaccurate or overly simplistic, as well as challenges to the positioning of this narrative as not “racist.” The idea that an emphasis on civilization versus barbarism is “cultural” and not “racial” delimits racism to a narrow definition focusing on “biophysical” difference. However, wider scholarship on race and racism highlights that the latter rests on diverse articulations of hierarchical difference; this includes and mobilizes cultural difference as an active part of racist discourses predicated on the acceptance of ideas of the “inferiority” versus “superiority” of peoples, as well as notions of “purity” within discourses of homogeneous imagined communities.
Increasingly, “being Chinese” is being conceptualized in PRC official rhetoric as a culturally, and racially, homogeneous identity. That is, not only is Han culture being positioned as emblematic of “Chinese culture” generally but also it is being asserted that all ethnic groups are descended from the Han and are thus genetically bound by “Chinese bloodlines.” Such discourses have repercussions for ethnic minority groups within China—most clearly at the moment for Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities who are positioned as “infected” by “foreign influences,” namely their religion. This is particularly clear in the contemporary sinicization campaign in Xinjiang (XUAR: Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region), a region in northwest China that has gained increasing international attention due to the government’s use of “re-education” camps in a program it argues is designed to eliminate terrorism.
The accompanying sinicization campaign involves a combination of propaganda emphasizing “Chinese socialist characteristics” and “core values” that should be adopted, an emphasis in the media on Uyghurs engaging in Han cultural practices as a demonstration of their loyalty to the state, as well as the removal of many visible signs of Chinese Islamic history and Uyghur culture. The turn toward politically policing culture is hardly new in China; however, the increasing emphasis on racial notions of identity—foregrounding physical appearance, genetics, lineage, and metaphors of “bloodlines”—is an attempt to turn a national identity into a “natural” one, something that raises urgent questions with regard to how China deals with the diversity of its population and the stakes in being, or becoming, “Chinese.”
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The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies
Sean Johnson Andrews
The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies refers to the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), which was housed at Birmingham University from 1964 to 2002. The shorthand “Birmingham School” refers to a site, a moment, a movement, and a method. Emerging alongside other intellectual and activist currents in the British New Left, it posed a radical democratic alternative to traditional higher education and the available methods and methodologies of communication and media studies. Centre researchers expanded the possible objects worthy of critical academic research—arguing it was imperative that we look at the products of the mass media or so-called popular arts—as well as the means through which those objects and their potential effects were understood. Central to the methodological approach espoused by CCCS scholars is the need to look at the way the meanings and values of cultural texts are articulated to and through a “cultural circuit”: A text emerges from a context, and its meanings are contingent on the frameworks of ideology and experience of both that context and audiences that read it. Under the leadership of Stuart Hall, and then Richard Johnson, the CCCS developed pathbreaking research into cultural politics more generally, looking at the way identities and subjectivity were developed, reinforced, and lived, and intersecting with emergent theories from and research in postcolonialism, poststructuralism, nationalism, feminism, gender and sexuality studies, science and technology studies, studies of race and ethnicity, and a variety of other subfields in the humanities and social sciences. Despite the closure of the Centre, these tendencies and emphases remain important, especially to the many academic monographs, journals, and conferences in cultural studies each year.
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Brian Massumi and Communication Studies
Marnie Ritchie
Brian Massumi (1956–) is a contemporary political theorist of communication, critical and cultural studies, philosophy, political theory, science, and aesthetics. One of the foremost thinkers of “radical empiricism,” he is responsible for enabling the widespread use of Deleuzean philosophy in communication and inaugurating the so-called “affective turn” in the theoretical humanities. Massumi is Professor of Communication at the Université de Montréal and a collaborator with the experimental art and activism lab SenseLab, founded by Erin Manning. His most well-known translation is Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987), and he is the author of ten books, including the widely influential Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002).
Massumi’s radical empiricist approaches concern the aesthetics of communication and power in the context of global capitalism. He opens the field of communication to the study of relationality, what he calls “being-in-becoming,” which he describes in terms of Gilles Deleuze’s “the actual” and “the virtual.” His critical embrace of becoming reframes the concept of “the event” as a processual unfolding of forces of expression, or experience. Instead of remaining wedded to communication models that limit language to designation, manifestation, and signification, Massumi’s focus on becoming calls for accounts of the extra-linguistic. Three key concepts include expression, affect, and perception. Through creative and experimental dispositions, Massumi position the fields of communication, critical and cultural studies, philosophy, political theory, science, and aesthetics toward vibrant scenes of relations-already-underway, or how feeling, thinking, and being begin, again, in the middle of something already underway—a “happening doing.”
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Celebrity Politics and Cultural Studies Within the United States and United Kingdom
Mark Wheeler
Celebrity politicians are having a profound impact on politics within the United States and United Kingdom in the 21st century. With the adoption of social media, celebrity and image candidates have deployed new strategies for attracting constituents. Taken together, the proliferation of celebrity politics and the ubiquity of digital platforms have fostered a political moment, wherein “outsider” candidates have launched themselves into the public spotlight. Through their digital celebrity brands, populists such as U.S. President Donald Trump and U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson established an “authenticity” in which they “occupied” a public space. Consequently, as celebrities promote political agendas among target audiences/citizens, it is necessary to reflect upon their significance in election campaigns, policymaking, and activism.
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Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Communication Studies
Madhavi Murty
Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s intellectual projects have consistently foregrounded a deep and rigorous critique of power—the power of capitalism, colonialism, and racialization, ethnic nationalism and heteropatriarchy—and have established the significance of feminist perspectives for struggles for economic and social justice. Her work is generative and provocative for critical cultural communication scholarship in providing methodological tools with which to think about the nexus between power and knowledge, discourse, the appropriation of the local and the particular for the formation of the global and vice versa, the formation of universals abstracted from their histories and social formations such as the “Third World Woman,” identity, and historical materialism. Hers is an intellectual project, grounded in feminism, that takes on the thorny task of carving out solidarities through critique. Her project delineates its own ideological standpoint and formulates a feminist historical materialism that strives methodologically to hold local particularities and their global implications in a tight grip. Mohanty’s work is, in fact, a provocation to formulate modes of analysis that are founded on a careful epistemological critique, such that it has often been used most productively to unravel the formulation of ethnocentric universalism. As such, Mohanty’s work has been particularly relevant for the fields of black cultural studies, feminist media studies, postcolonial communication studies, transnational media studies, race, and communication within critical cultural communication studies.
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Chicana Studies
Bernadette Marie Calafell
The field of Chicana studies was born out of the experiences of Mexican-American women in the southwestern United States. Chicana leaders, such as Dolores Huerta were central activists in the Chicano civil rights movement in the 1960s, working alongside leaders like Cesar Chavez and cofounding the UFW. Others were involved in social movement activity in New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas with activists Reies Tijerina, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzáles, and José Ángel Gutiérrez. While fighting for labor, political, and educational rights, Chicanas contested the machismo, sexism, and heterosexism that they experienced from Chicanos. Chicanas were urged to perform stereotypical feminine roles or activities, while men served as the public face of the movement. They were disciplined further by the invocation of the virgin/whore dichotomy, based in Catholicism around the Virgin of Guadalupe; and Malintzin Tenépal, Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes’s translator and lover. In addition, Chicanas were encouraged to take a single-axis approach to social justice and keep silent about their concerns in order to highlight the fight against ethnocentrism and racism, which were deemed by male leaders to be of the utmost importance. Similarly, Chicanas who looked for solidarity in the mainstream women’s movement were encouraged to put aside their racial concerns in favor of an agenda that focused solely on their identity as women. Put in the untenable position of lacking a space in which their complex and intersectional experiences were honored, and of being subjected to the virgin/whore dichotomy and its unrealistic expectations, Chicanas needed to create a space of their own.
The late 1970s and 1980s saw the birth of Chicano Studies departments in academia, as well as the rise of Chicana studies and Chicana feminism. Chicana studies blossomed through works by artists such as Yolanda Lopez, Judy Baca, Patssi Valdez, and Ester Hernández, and scholarship by Deena J. González, Antonia Castañeda, Angie Chabram, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Sandra Cisneros, Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Ana Castillo. The publication of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color became an important benchmark for Chicana feminist writings, and women of color feminism in general. In addition, Moraga’s Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios and Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza were foundational texts in the development of Chicana feminist thought. Moraga’s work (originally published in 1983 and republished in an expanded edition in 2000) addresses her experiences as a queer Chicana born to a White father and Mexican mother, while Anzaldúa’s book (published in 1987) theorizes about the possibility of a mestiza consciousness or borderlands identity. A central theme in Chicana feminist writings is the reinterpretation of Malintzin Tenépal, also referred to as La Malinche, through poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, while Chicana feminist artists have visually reimagined the Virgin of Guadalupe queerly and in their own images as everyday women. Through the reinterpretation of these figures, Chicanas have created possibilities for Chicana identifications that resist the binary virgin/whore dichotomy.
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Colonialism and Postcolonialism
Jenny Burman
Colonial powers used electronic media and communication technologies to assert and extend control over spaces as well as attempt to influence the “hearts and minds” of colonized people, colonial settlers, and Europeans in the metropole. Colonized people adapted and repurposed these technologies, often toward anticolonial ends. In the early mid-19th century, the telegraph effectively became the “nervous system of empire,” collapsing distances and enabling colonizers to surveil and dominate colonized people and institutions from the metropole (with varying degrees of success). In the early 20th century, new media forms like wireless radio were used to “educate” and “civilize” colonial subjects, entertain and relieve the anxiety of settlers, and spread propaganda in the colonies and the metropole about the benefits of imperialism.
These technologies helped to build both deliberate and accidental, colonial and anticolonial, transnational networks. Some of those networks assisted in anticolonial political mobilizations, particularly in India, where the telegraph was accessible to the public and facilitated nationalist organizing, and Algeria, where radio helped to galvanize support for the revolutionary FLN. Postcolonial media landscapes hold the histories of colonial power asymmetries; we see present-day continuities in the concentration of ownership of media and communication technologies among racial and economic elites, and in the Eurocentrism of dominant regimes of representation.
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Communication and the Global South
Doug Ashwell and Stephen M. Croucher
The Global South–North divide has been conceptualized in political, cultural, economic, and developmental terms. When conceptualizing this divide, issues of economic growth/progress, technology, political and press freedom, and industrialization have all been used as indicators to delineate between the “North” and the “South.” The North has traditionally been seen as more economically, technologically, politically, and socially developed, as well as more industrialized and having more press freedom, for example; the South has been linked with poverty, disease, political tyranny, and overall lack of development. This conceptualization privileges development efforts in the Global South based on democratic government, capitalist economic structures with their attendant neoliberal agenda and processes of globalization. This negative view of the South is a site of contest with people of the South offering alternative and more positive views of the situation in the South and alternatives to globalization strategies. While there may be some identifiable difference between some of the countries in the identified Global South and Global North, globalization (economic, political, technological, etc.) is changing how the very Global South–North divide is understood. To best understand the implications of this divide, and the inequalities that it perpetuates, we scrutinize the Global South, detailing the background of the term “Global South,” and examine the effect of globalization upon subaltern groups in the Global South. We also discuss how academic research using frameworks of the Global North can exacerbate the problems faced by subaltern groups rather than offer them alternative development trajectories by empowering such groups to represent themselves and their own development needs. The culture-centred approach to such research is offered as alternative to overcome such problems. The terms usage in the communication discipline is also explained and the complexity of the term and its future is explored.