De-centring Western Enlightenment: Revisionist Histories, Contestation and Communication Theory, Vol. 25 - 2018, No. 4
Guest Edited by Shakuntala Banaji
Vigilante Publics: Orientalism, Modernity and Hindutva Fascism in India
This paper explores the interconnections of Hindutva fascist repertoires in India and quasi-orientalist discourses. History and common sense are re-written through audiovisual communications to appeal to one section of a dangerously split Indian public and a neoliberal-touristic sensibility elsewhere. Enlightenment rhetorics of progress, democracy and technological development are apparently embodied by WhatsApp groups, electronic voting machines and laws to protect cows. Voting—as a marker of democratic citizenship—becomes a masquerade protecting a resurgent far right Hindutva (Hindu fascist) regime under the aegis of Narendra Modi and the BJP. Caste Hinduism’s association of cows with deities, and the proscription on meat-eating in certain versions of religious practice, are used as pretexts for unimaginable violence against Muslims, Christians, Dalits, and working class/lower caste Hindus. Violence against those who dissent is rationalised as patriotic. Hindutva’s banal and spectacular audiovisual discourse overwhelms public communication. Its consequences are a form of vigilante citizenship that is marked on the bodies of dead victims and of vigilante publics ready to be mobilised either in ethno-cultural violence or its defence and disavowal. Meanwhile, attracted to India as an enormous market, Western governments and corporations have colluded with the Hindutva regime’s self-promotion as a bastion of development.
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Arab Thought and People’s Movements as Event: Towards New Affective Registers of Critique
Historical events create the conditions under which thought processes develop in ways that make them symbolic of a whole generational shift, where a new cultural temporality comes to the fore both as un-concealment and as strategy. Significant shifts in the production of knowledge often suggest an epistemic and temporal break with the past where the relationship between event and theory is moved not merely by the new forms of knowledge it creates, but also by the new cultural temporality that these forms of knowledge bring to the fore as a strategy. In this article, I rehearse questions of an epistemological nature that grapple with the relationship between the people’s movements in the Arab region, as ethical events, and how these may have played a role in shifting the focus of Arab philosophical debate concerning questions of time, history and the body. Here, I rehearse the following questions: What kind of a thought/event conjecture are we dealing with in the case of the Arab/North African region? What is the connection between the movements as events, and the emerging Arab intellectual subject? And finally, what have the movements taught us about the relationships between thought, theory and the everyday?
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White Nationalism and Publicness in the United States
This is an analysis of the mainstreaming of white nationalism in the USA and its connection to nativism, publicity theory and colonialism. The analysis is set against the backdrop of white nationalist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, my hometown, and the public persona of Stephen Bannon, the influential adviser to President Trump’s campaign and an intellectual leader of white nationalists in the United States. Using the public debate on speech rights and the right to bear arms in the United States, and the way in which Bannon’s media career has relied on the spectre of violence, the article proposes the need to re-theorise publicity for contemporary life in the USA. I argue that traditional notions of publicness are rooted and depend on troubling fantasies of peaceful communication that hide the violent means by which the state construct the rules of public participation. In the US context, these fantasies are exploited by white nationalists like Bannon, who engage in public dialogue while threatening with armed violence. The fantasies politically sanitise what is coercive, racist and fascist.
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Modernity as a False Deity: Takfiri Anachronism in the Islamic State Group’s Media Strategy
This article focuses on the way the Islamic State (IS) group communicates and performs a return to the origins of Islam in seventh-century Arabia. IS performs what it imagines to be a caliphate that follows the “methodology of the Prophet”—in what represents an operationalisation of long-alluded-to Islamist rhetorical aims about a return to an Islamic authenticity and about undoing Western influences. It deems everyone who disagrees with it as simply anti-Islamic. I refer to that media strategy, which IS deploys to target its enemies as infidels, as takfiri anachronism (takfiri in Arabic is an adjective describing accusations of apostasy). I seek to demonstrate how IS’s takfiri anachronism relies on mixed discursive textual and visual tactics that aim to conceal its contemporary political hybridity, vulnerability and its presentist approach to Islamic texts. I analyze IS’s self-presentation as a caliphate in a number of its official videos and statements. I focus on the initial IS announcement on the establishment of the caliphate and how its leader Abu-Bakr Al-Baghdadi performed his role as “the caliph” in the summer of 2014. I also examine how the parallelism between its videos showing the destruction of the Iraqi-Syrian common border, and its videos displaying the destruction of pre-Islamic archeological monuments, presents an absolute binary between the categories of “Muslim” and “infidel,” which is projected across time.
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The Context Is the Message: Theory of Indigenous Knowledge Communication Systems
How should media and communication studies approach the study of indigenous knowledge communication systems (IKCS)? In recent years, there has been a call to dewesternise and decolonise media and communication studies. Many of these debates have focused on rethinking the curriculum and the analytical frameworks and theories therein. This paper seeks to contribute to that debate by arguing for the need to pay attention to IKCS, which continue to shape socio-economic relations in much of the global south. Since the 1960s, there has been an increasing implication of the West and the East in providing development assistance to the global south, which is coincidentally experiencing a rapid exponential growth of the telecommunications and ICT sectors. In these places, however, the spoken word and its orality remain powerful articles and conventions for the generation, exchange and consumption of social meanings and their reference phaneroscopes. The discussion proposes a theoretical framework for studying IKCS. It rejects the location of such systems outside of modernity and contends that indigenous knowledge communications are co-existing with modernity. This critical analysis contributes to the meta-debate on de-centring the enlightenment in media and communications in two ways. First, it discusses an intellectual constitution that has oftentimes been footnoted by dominant media and communication teaching and scholarship. Second, this discussion is framed to undermine the modernistic approaches to media and communication that disregard the ways of speaking and communicating that lie at the periphery of modernity.
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Rethinking Censorship: A Case Study of Singaporean Media
Singapore is often represented as an example of a successful “postcolonial” society that transitioned into a developed nation and economy. The government articulates its reliance on enlightenment ideals such as reason and meritocracy, separation of church and state, and equality; but at the same time draws its legitimacy from articulations of “tradition” based on “ethnicity” and “culture.” These contradictions extend to censorship, particularly since the state actively censors the media when it comes to issues of race and religion whenever they threaten to disrupt the appearance of equality, while selectively using repackaged “Asian values” to justify their interventions. To convolute matters further, critics and academics often employ quasi-Western concepts of “freedom of expression” to critique state censorship. So, what underlying assumptions do these various representations articulate? And how do these rival articulations relate to the ways censorship work in practice? Drawing on ethnographic materials obtained during an intensive 15-month fieldwork conducted between 2012 and 2013, this article aims to complicate dominant conceptualisations of censorship by shifting its focus onto situated practices.
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White Nationalist Rhetoric, Neoliberal Multiculturalism and Colour Blind Racism: Decolonial Critique of Richard Spencer’s Campus Visit
This essay examines white nationalist discourses within the U.S. context of the alt-right movement from a decolonial perspective. It challenges concepts grounded in the enlightenment era that connect whiteness and European identity with civilisation and progress, thereby positioning whiteness as a disciplinary discourse. Specifically, our essay will use the hateful rhetoric of Richard Spencer, who is credited with coining the term alt-right movement, and analyze the white nationalist rhetoric surrounding his visit to Texas A&M University as a case study. It examines the fallacy and violence of white supremacist rhetoric that constructs Europe and North America as a “white” space, thus symbolically and politically erasing complex indigenous histories and peoples. It investigates how diversity, inclusion and multiculturalism are utilised to normalise discourses of white supremacy within historically white institutions. This type of multiculturalism serves as a form of colourblind racism that reinforces rather than challenges white supremacy. Specifically, it examines the University’s response to Spencer’s visit by hosting the Aggies United entertainment performance emphasising unity as an expression of neoliberal multiculturalism, which is contrasted with critical anti-racist pedagogy and other more meaningful forms of resistance such as protests.
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