Non-Aligned Media and its Infrastructure of Decolonization

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Aesthetics across Media IV: Transcultural Flows and their Socialist Valences: Different Scales of Second and Third World Exchange

Abstract

During the decolonization process in the second part of the 20th century, media professionals across the world strove to reshape the dominant dynamics of global media. They united in creating international media infrastructures and protocols of collaboration attuned to the conditions of the regions they come from and, in that way, opposed the dominance of global communication channels set up by Western companies such as Reuters, Associated Press, and Agence France Presse. As Paula Chakravartty and Charlie Muller argue, these efforts were part of the larger project of ‘anti-colonial worldmaking” (Chakravartty and Muller, 2024). This paper centers on two specific media configurations, the Non-Aligned News Agency Pool (NANAP) and the Broadcasting Organization of Non-Aligned Countries (BONAC), founded in the late 1970s. Both presented important international bodies that gathered socialist-minded media practitioners and policymakers from India, Tunis, Cuba, Yugoslavia, and many other countries.
Relying on the archival documents from the founding meetings of BONAC and NANAP, and interviews with Yugoslav experts who took part in them, I examine the aspirations of these organizations. I consider this in relation to the logistical conundrums that underlay these transnational projects.

Author

• Sima Kokotovic, U of Pennsylvania