Media and Development CUT Flashcards
What is Media Development?Reaction on conceptualization, Dependency Theory
In a critical reaction to the conceptualization of the dichotomy between the so-called first and third worlds, researchers later looked at the effects of dependency in the peripheral nations and postulated a state of dependency and underdevelopment, which was seen as a result of the domination of the industrialized world over the patterns of development
Neocolonial Discourse
-Neocolonial discourse of geopolitical homogeneity often includes the reduction of decolonized peoples, their cultures, and their countries, to an imaginary place, such as “the Third World.“
-Including everyone under the Third World concept ignores the why those regions or countries are considered Third World and who is responsible.
What is Dependency Theory?: roots, description, model (elements)
- Has ist roots in Latin America in the 1960s.
- Is a school of thought in social science which
seeks to contribute to an understanding of
underdevelopment, an analysis of its causes, and to a lesser extent, paths toward overcoming it. - Provided an alternative approach to looking at
unilinear growth models
Perifery (cheap labour raw materials) -> Semi perifery -> Core (high-cost consumer goods)
Dependency theory: definition and examples
Dependency theory explains the global economic system by describing how developing countries depend on developed countries for economic growth
Definition: Lustig (1977) explains dependency theory as a: body of thought that explains the persistent poverty of most developing countries by the fact that they are dependent on advanced countries for trade, investment, and technological progress
Example: Colonial exploitation: The earliest example of dependency is colonization whtn European nations made colonies through their superior military technology. They exported natural resources from other places to Europe. They then manufactured these materials and sold them back into colonies, creating an economic system of exploitation.
- The idea that resources flow from a
“periphery” of poor and underdeveloped
states to a “core” of wealthy states - This is enriching the wealthy states at the
expense of the poorer states. - A central contention of dependency theory
is that poor states are impoverished and
rich ones enriched by the way poor states
are integrated into the “world system”.
Criticism of Dependency Theory
- The principal criticism of dependency theories has been that the school does not provide any substantive empirical evidences to support its arguments.
- Many exceptions are there which do not fit in with their core periphery theory, like the newly emerged industrial countries of South East Asia.
- Dependency theories are highly abstract and tend to use homogenising categories such as developed and underdeveloped, which do not fully capture the variations within these categories.
- Base their arguments on received notions such as nation-state, capitalism and industrialisation
Eurocentric biases are inherited in these theories of dependency school
- They assume that industrialisation and possession of industrial capital are crucial requisites for economic progress.
- There is an inability to think beyond the state as the primary and essential agent of economic development.
- There is a Eurocentric bias in overlooking or de- emphasising of production
undertaken by women, and in not realising the dangerous implications for the environment of industrialisation and over exploitation of resources.
Colonialism
Colonialism refers to the combination of territorial, juridical, cultural, linguistic, political, mental/epistemic, and/or economic domination of one group of people or groups of people by another (external) group of people.
Colonialism is the maintenance of political, social, economic, and cultural domination over people by a foreign power for an extended period (W. Bell, 1991).
The long control exercised by the British Empire over much of North America, parts of Africa, and India is an example of colonial domination.
Colonialism has often led indigenous people, such as tribal groups, to become a minority in an area they once were the majority (dominant) group.
The colonial subjects are generally limited to menial jobs and the wages from their labor. The natural resources of their land benefit the members of the ruling class.
Approximately from ancient times to 20 century
What is Postcolonial Theory?: what it examins and what thinks
- Postcolonialism examines the social and political power relationships that sustain colonialism and neocolonialism, including the social, political and cultural narratives surrounding the colonizer and the colonized.
- Postcolonial theory holds that decolonized people develop a postcolonial identity that is based on cultural interactions between different identities (cultural, national, and ethnic as well as gender and class based) which are assigned varying degrees of social power by the colonial society
What is Postcolonialism?: definition, focus, example of theory
- Postcolonialism deals with the long term and ongoing effects of colonisation on cultures and societies
- Focus is often placed on the material effects of colonialism, as well as the way in which colonialism shapes discourse (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 2007)
- Eric Williams (1944) argued
that in Capitalism and Slavery that colonialism supposedly ended in the West Indies for economic reasons, rather than humanitarian reasons.
Defining Postcolonial
- Postcolonialism: Ashcroft, Griffiths und Tiffin primarily refer to ‘discursive practices’ and ‘cultural strategies’, but define the field as ‘the totality of practices… which characterise the societies of the post‐colonial world from the moment of colonisation to the present day’ (1995: xv).
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Williams and Chrisman have a narrower understanding of postcolonial theory and see it as the ‘critique… of the
process of production of knowledge about the other’ (1994: 8). - A similar focus can be found in the work of Young: ‘Postcolonial cultural analysis has been concerned with the
elaboration of theoretical structures that contest the previous dominant western way of seeing things. …
‘postcolonial theory’ involves a conceptual reorientation towards the perspectives of knowledges, as well as
needs, developed outside the west’ (2003: 4, 6). - Loomba, on the other hand, wants to broaden the field beyond the analysis of structures of knowledge and
regards the central quality of postcolonial approaches in their ‘contestation of colonial domination and the legacies of colonialism’ (1998: 12).
Tension between Postcolonial Studies and Development Studies: difference
Both have a common object (the global South and North‐South relations) a closer look reveals significant differences in the following points:
- Applicability
Both is related to different disciplinary origins (economics vs. literature).
DS Knowledge in development studies as a rule has to abide by the principle of leading to/being translated into practical applications and solutions.
PS Knowledge in postcolonial studies is often confined to the critique of representations.
- Theoretical objective
DS The traditional aim is the transformation of society according to expert plans and universal concepts.
PS Postcolonial studies question theses concepts because of their Eurocentrism (‐ the concept of ‘development’ being the classical example). - Methodological focus
DS Primarily concerned with measurable socio‐economic change, mostly on the macro‐level (economic growth, purchasing power, income distribution).
PS Concerned with questions of culture, representations and identities and with processes and experiences on the micro‐level
Postcolonialism and the Media
- The postcolonial intellectual tradition is crucial to articulating
cultural, film, and media formations from the perspective of
(formerly) colonized people and countries. - Postcolonial theories and concepts potentially repoliticize media
theory by questioning Western assumptions about technological progress and innovation. - Postcolonial theories of media force a rethink of the tenets of traditional media theories while, at the same time, media theories demonstrate the centrality of media, in all its forms, to understanding the postcolonial condition.
Homi K. Bhabha: Terminology
Hybridity
* Describes the emergence of new cultural forms from multiculturalism.
* Instead of seeing colonialism as something locked in the past, its histories and cultures constantly intrude on the present, demanding that we
transform our understanding of cross-cultural relations
Ambivalence
* Culture as consisting of opposing perceptions and dimensions.
* Duality that presents a split in the identity of the colonized other— allows for beings who are a hybrid of their own cultural identity and the colonizer’s cultural identity.
* Colonial signifiers of authority only acquire their meanings after the “traumatic scenario of colonial difference, cultural or racial, returns the eye of power to some prior archaic image or identity.
* Paradoxically, this image cannot be ‘original’ (repetition that constructs it) —nor identical (difference that defines it.)
* The colonial presence remains ambivalent, split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference.
Homi K. Bhabha: Cultural difference: definition, difference with cultural diversity, “fixity”
- Alternative to cultural diversity. Cultural difference is a process of identification, while cultural diversity is comparative and categorized.
- Cultural diversity: culture is an “object of empirical knowledge” and pre-exists
the knower - Cultural difference sees culture as the point at which two or more cultures meet and it is also where most problems occur, discursively constructed rather than pre-given, a “process of enunciation of culture as ‘knowledgeable.’”
- An important aspect of colonial and post-colonial discourse is their dependence on the concept of “fixity” in the construction of otherness.
- Fixity implies repetition, rigidity and an unchanging order as well as disorder. The stereotype creates an “identity” that stems as much from mastery and pleasure as it does from anxiety and defense of the dominant, “for it is a form of multiple and contradictory beliefs in its recognition of difference and disavowal of it.”
Homi K. Bhabha: Terminology
Mimicry
- Mimicry appears when members of a colonized society imitate and take on the culture of the colonizers.
- Colonial mimicry comes from the colonist’s desire for a reformed, recognizable
Other, as a subject of a difference that is, as Bhabha writes, “almost the same,
but not quite.” - Mimicry is a sign of a double articulation; a strategy which appropriates the Other as it visualizes power.
- The colonized’s desire is inverted as the colonial appropriation now produces
a partial vision of the colonizer’s presence; a gaze from the Other is the counterpart to the colonizer’s gaze that shares the insight of genealogical gaze which frees the marginalized individual and breaks the unity of
man’s being through which he had extended his sovereignty. Thus, “the observer becomes the observed and ‘partial’ representation rearticulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence.”
What is Neo-colonialism?
- Neo-colonialism is a term
which refers to various forms of influence or control of former colonies after their political independence. (Ashcroft,
Griffiths, & Tiffin, 2007) - In 2018, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad warned of ‘new colonialism’. “there is a new version of colonialism happening because poor countries are unable to compete with rich countries…”
- In what ways is this a valid concern today
How the Heritage of Postcolonial Studies Thinks Colonialism
- Liberators of India took possession of the already existing colonial state-machine and modify it for postcolonial purposes, with a new constitution, whose land reform statutes were quickly suppressed (Bardhan 1984; 2003; 2018).
- So-called national liberation is not a revolution because it is not in fact a national liberation.
- As Marx and Engels warned in 1872: “The Commmune
[Paris Commune of 1871] has provided a particular piece of
evidence, that ‘the working class [read “the national
liberators”] cannot simply take possession of the readymade state-machine and set it in motion for its own goals’” - With the simultaneity brought in by globalization,
precolonial structures of power and corruption are
coming back and beginning to inhabit the polity. - This catches the relay of the difference between the
national liberators and the masses and becomes part of
the difficult burden of the heritage of postcolonialism. - In India it is the caste system, which never quite went away
and is much older than colonialism. Colonialism was
yesterday. This is thousands of years old. - “To come to grips with the heritage of postcoloniality, the only solution that I have so far
proposed has been a holistic education—from elite to subaltern, primary to post-tertiary, everything nestled within the humanities beyond the disciplines—
that can only be a dream.” - By subaltern I mean Gramsci’s minimal definition:
“social groups in the margins of history” (1975, 2277). - The heritage of postcoloniality leads to global labour export and migration
- We will be a global community, each one of us globalizable, upstream from politics, an island of languaging in a field of traces.
- Postcolonialism was focused on the nation state. To supplement globalization, we need archipelago-thought.
Édouard Glissant, the thinker of creolity, has said: “Translation is therefore one of the most important kinds of this new
archipelagic thinking” (1996, 27). We must displace the heritage of postcoloniality into island-thinking.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Island-Consciousness
- In today’s world everything is modern. The promise is of a level playing field.
- If we develop island-consciousness, know that the globe is a cluster of islands in a sea of traces, and approach the heterogeneity of the ocean-world with patience, collectively, and bit by bit, rather than all at once, it’s maybe the only way to find out why that field, that cluster, floating in the world-ocean, is so uneven a reliefmap.
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Postcoloniality celebrates a national liberation based on an orientalist nationalism, I have argued. Creolity as history celebrates archipelagic thinking. Think creolity as history, then, rather than the bounded nation upon
a bounded continent which was colonialism and its heritage. A hard task, to
save a world.
What is creolity?
- Neologism which attempts to describe the cultural and linguistic heterogeneity of places
- An archipelago, sometimes called an island group or island chain, is a chain, cluster, or collection of islands, or sometimes a sea containing a small number of scattered islands
Connection to Media Development
- Cultural, political and economic legacy of colonialism and
imperialism impacts media and cooperation today - The field of postcolonialism addresses the matters that
constitute the postcolonial identity of a decolonized people,
which derives from the colonizer’s generation of cultural
knowledge about the colonized people - Derives from how Western cultural knowledge was applied to
subjugate a non-European people into a colony of the
European mother country - After the initial invasion it was effected by means of cultural
identities of ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’.
Postcolonialism and Media Development: what is new for Hallin & Manchini system + example
- Factors of race, class and gender and intersections hereof as well as nation-building should be added to the Comparative Media Systems Model by Hallin and Mancini to better suit the analysis of media development in post-colonial societies.
- Example: the study of the South African news media in the transition from autocracy to democracy contributes to the comparative framework for media analysis in the way that lessons can be drawn for other post-colonial societies in which race and ethnic politics have shaped, and continue to shape, the structure, content and the role that the news media is assumed to play
Green Capitalism and its Intersections With Green (Neo)Colonialism
- A fundamental mechanism of capitalist production is the
extraction of material from nature to transform it (through labor) into tradable commodities. - The promise of “green capitalism” is to reconcile
development, growth, and environmental protection. - Political and economic strategies such as carbon trading and offsets, net zero, and sustainable consumption allow states and corporations to continue the destruction and exploitation of the commons.
- The destruction of the livelihoods of local and indigenous communities is inextricably linked to socio-ecological change in the Europe, North America, Australia and other highincome countries.
Climate Coloniality
- Extremely uneven and inequitable impacts of climate change
mean that differently-located people experience, respond to,
and cope with the climate crisis and related vulnerabilities in
radically different ways. - The coloniality is weighing down and curtailing
opportunities and possibilities through global capitalism,
colonial dispossessions, and climate debts. - Decolonizing climate needs to address the complexities of
colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, international
development, and geopolitics that contribute to the
reproduction of ongoing colonialities through existing
global governance structures, imagined solutions, and
interventions.
Farhana Sultana
Climate Colonialism
- The narrative merchants bring up concepts such as
nature-based solutions (NBS). - So-called nature-based solutions include carbon
offsetting mechanisms that allow polluters to carry
on polluting while claiming that their pollution or
emissions are offset by mitigating activities such as
tree planting or corralling off of forests as carbon sinks. - When nations speak of carbon neutrality, they are
basically speaking of solving the climate crisis
through mathematics and not through any real
climate action. It does not suggest changes in
modes of production and consumption. The same
can be said of having Net Zero carbon emissions. - The burden of climate action is being forced on the victims without any regard for historical responsibilities, without regard for justice. This posture rides on the same track as slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism and their
cousin, neoliberalism. - The link between neoliberalism and climate
colonialism is becoming more evident to people all over the world
