Communicative Offerings in Postcolonial Near-Death Discourses

• In Event: Why Postcolonialism (Still) Matters for Media Studies

Abstract

With notable exceptions, Communication Studies was behind the humanities in its postcolonial uptake. When trends caught traction in the mid-1990, the greater postcolonial discipline was in a state of exhaustion, grasping its last breath from globalization studies (Zabus 2015). While literary criticism debated the death, Communication scholars quietly embraced the more seductive rhetorics of transnational, neocolonial, and coloniality. Now, as globalization’s underbelly, the postcolonial revitalization is witness to new publications and proceedings that reject a preoccupation with European colonialism, and instead embrace critical reading practices that make sense of globalization’s nuances, its imperial past, and its future possibilities. The new commitments include embracing non-European citations, a lack of secular pretenses, backing environmental justice collectives, upholding queer rejections of heteronormativity, and seeking insights from science and technology studies among other inquiries. It is in these currents that Communication–specifically, media studies, is interpolated to offer its most pressing and radical interventions.

Author

• Rae Lynn Schwartz-DuPre, Western Washington U