Provincializing Habermas: Decolonising the Public Sphere in Theory and Practice

• In Event: Voicing New Frontiers in African Communication Scholarship: The Case for Constructive Etic-Emic Interventions

Abstract

Since the late 1990s and 2000s, a number of calls have been made by scholars to ‘internationalise’, ‘de-westernise’ or ‘decolonise’ the field of media and communication studies (Downing 1996; Chen 1998, 2010; Curran and Park 2000; McMillin 2006; Thussu 2009; Wang 2011; Lee 2015). More recently, a wave of student protests in South Africa, United Kingdom, United States and the Netherlands has also pointed to the need to ‘decolonise’ academic knowledge, university curricula and institutions. Against this background, this paper examines what postcolonial and decolonial approaches may be able to add to a different understanding of publics. Drawing on the work of a number of African scholars, it argues that it is crucial to link the way in which Habermas’ conceptual ideas have been criticised theoretically with the more practical media-oriented activism and commentary that has continued to expose the limits of the (‘global’ or ‘transnational’) public sphere.

Author

• Wendy Willems, London School of Economics and Political Science