A Conversation with Paula Chakravartty

ABSTRACT

On October 6, 2022, Armond Towns met via Zoom with Paula Chakravartty to discuss her research on race, communication, colonialism, and capitalism. Chakravartty is James Weldon Johnson Associate Professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University and has published extensively on the intersections of political economy, critical race theory, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and media and communication theory. Chakravartty is co-author of Media Policy and Globalization (with Katharine Sarikakis) and co-editor of both Race, Empire and the Subprime (with Denise Ferreira da Silva) and Global Communications: Towards a Transcultural Political Economy (with Yuezhi Zhao). The conversation is edited for clarity and length.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• communication
• colonialism
• capitalism

Armond Towns: I want to thank you for joining me for this interview today. My goal is to get through a few questions that set the terms for this new journal, Communication and Race. As you know, these first interviews will act as agenda setters, meaning that the terms of engagement on communication and race for our readers and authors will be guided by some of our conversation today. And I think that there's a direct correlation between your work and the inspiration for this journal, so thank you for your time and your effort.

Paula Chakravartty: First off, thank you so much Armond for your invitation. I am truly delighted that this new journal is coming into being and that you will be its inaugural editor. Part of doing this work for a long time is to witness real changes taking place. Of course, we must be wary that such changes ensure resolution. But it is meaningful to recognize that some changes in our field are taking place, and that there's possibilities for new openings in conversations, debates and broader societal interventions, which is encouraging.

AT: So, I want to begin by asking about one of the pieces that you're very well known for, the “#CommunicationSoWhite” piece from 2018. And one of my own annoyances associated with that article’s reception is that a lot of people view it in a fairly narrow sense. So, I know quite a few scholars who really reduce that article to a lack of citation of their work. But when I read that article, one of the most important things that sticks out to me is that citation corresponds to knowledge production. At the end of the article, I see you repeating this claim, “[o]ur attention to citational representation is not about pluralistic difference; it’s about attending to structures of power embedded within knowledge production.”¹ At stake in the article is not merely citation, or a lack of citation of scholars of color, but also the politics of knowledge in communication studies. So, what do you think are the dominant forms of knowledge in communication studies? And what happens to that knowledge when we introduce race, capitalism, and colonialism into our approaches?

PC: Our article, “#CommunicationSoWhite,” was part of a 2018 special issue marking the 35^th anniversary of a previous “Ferment in the Field” collection of articles in the Journal of Communication. Our piece was one of 20 articles reflecting back on this earlier collection published in 1983, which was seen as celebrating the breadth of communication research at the time, since it had encompassed both mainstream and critical approaches. Our piece begins by stating that this “breadth” of perspective was in fact a series of essays by a group of mostly white male scholars, who failed to address the anti-colonial and racial ferment of the 1960s and 70s that paved the road to the Reagan-Thatcher era marking its publication. Your point about the article’s traction as a piece that focuses exclusively on the question of citation versus the broader implications about knowledge production is on point and speaks to the larger issue of “elite capture” of contemporary identity politics that Olúfẹ́mi O Táíwò writes about.² In fields like communications and especially today, Information or Digital Media Studies, limiting our critique to pluralistic difference means accepting the increasingly problematic enmeshing of the university with research priorities and funding from the Department of Defense, Homeland Security or local police departments, and funding from big tech itself, all of which should raise more alarms than it does today in most universities.

If you read the introduction of the 2018 special issue of the Journal of Communication, you find that the editors’ summary frames our contribution in a very narrow sense; they say we provide a quantitative analysis that shows the lack of citation of racialized authors is problematic. I would say that this summary is representative of the additive approach to race that is the norm in our field across both mainstream and critical approaches to communication. The assumption that all we have to do is “add race” (like “adding gender”) to the normative foundations of the study of media and society or simply citing a few more authors of color on your bibliography or your syllabus solves the problem is the problem.

Your question makes me think about the impetus for #CommunicationSoWhite, which might better illustrate the problem at hand. The paper grew out of frustrations that many of us who teach in the U.S. felt with the discussion within communication as a field in the wake of the election of an explicitly white supremacist president in 2016. In 2017, I was invited to participate as part of a keynote panel for a pre-conference at one of our main professional conferences, focusing on normative theories of democracy and communication research. Normative theories of media and democracy are rarely the analytic focus of communication scholarship, and the organizers of the workshop had argued in their justification for the day-long discussion that we need to address this gap. I had assumed that discussions about normative theories of media and democracy in the aftermath of the financial crisis of the neoliberal economic order and the ascendance of post-colonial right-wing strong men, from Bolsanaro in Brazil, Erdoğan in Turkey and Modi in India, to Duterte in the Philippines, etc., the passing of BREXIT, the election of a white supremacist president at home, all of this would have logically and urgently led to an interest in discussing the intertwining histories of race, capitalism, and democracy. I was wrong. Instead, the parameters of the debate returned to an earlier, and we have to recognize, failed debate within the field between liberal variations of the capacities of homogeneous deliberative publics and the dangers of manipulation and misinformation. As in other race-neutral and race blind analyses of populism in the social sciences,³ the common figure of the misinformed, and deluded voter seemed to lie at the explanatory core of the group’s discussions. Missing from this day-long set of panels was any pretense of engagement with over a century or more of thinking and writing about racial capitalism and colonialism. Of course, I had been invited to address these missing bits, and my presence on the keynote panel helped alleviate the post-racial, symbolic embarrassment of an all, or mostly white, and mostly male panel, workshop, etc. After a long day of astonishing theoretical silences, insistent methodological nationalism and condescending moral neutrality, I wondered aloud why we were being asked to “return to Dewey and Habermas,” yet again?

So that's the backstory to the article which was co-written with my colleague at NYU, Charlton McIlwain, a leading and long-time scholar of race and media, along with two of our brilliant doctoral students from our program, who have emerged as important scholars of media, culture and race, Rachel Kuo, Victoria Grubbs. Together, we based our larger argument around the historical grounding of modern European colonialism and racism as a political relation of antagonism between institutionally dominant, white and non-white populations. Here, we drew specifically from Barnor Hesse, but also other scholars of Black Studies including Black Studies feminist theorists like Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Saidiya Hartman, and Denise Ferreira da Silva, among others, who allow us to think about the racial both analytically and methodologically in more productive ways.⁴ We argued that citation matters because of the ways that racial inequalities and violence are normalized and institutionally re-articulated in the present and across time, whether we're talking about black versus white or white versus black and brown, or even citizen versus foreigner. We were also thinking about how logics of race can be elastic in terms of caste, in terms of religious and sectarian majorities and minorities. This is not to say, as I've said in other pieces, that race encompasses these antagonisms. But rather that the political relation of racialized antagonisms, over the past four decades of violently unequal neoliberal transformation, has led to a crisis over the kind of colonial rendering of borders and thereby nations, which is where we are today. So, to answer your original question, engaging theoretical and historical analyses from the Black radical tradition, including Black feminist theory alongside anti-colonial, post-colonial and decolonial theory and history deepens our conversation about media and democracy, about information technologies, and cultural transformation. Our intervention which honed in on the tangible quantitative fact of citations was intended to de-exceptionalize and historicize the BREXIT-Trump moment, in order to think about the wider historical and structural experience of violence, of discrimination, of humiliation and of diminished life chances within which contemporary mediated politics unfolds.

AT: I like your statement on the relationship between race and knowledge. Going back to your earlier thoughts about how scholarship on race exceeds sought-after citations, I also want to add that we must ask how we got to our current knowledge systems as well. So, you can't tell the history of communication studies without the Cold War and the Cold Warriors who would go across the globe trying to spread propaganda, essentially about how great the U.S. is—that’s going to be central to the field’s knowledge constructs as well. You speak to the foundation of such knowledge systems in your follow up to “#CommunicationSoWhite,” “#CommunicationSoWhite in the Age of Ultra-Nationalisms,” where you argue that the discussion of race and colonialism must consider the rise of right-wing forces in the Global South.⁵ And you connect that to this history of the Cold War. So, could you speak more to that relationship between the Cold War and the spread of right-wing thought in the Global South, specifically in relationship to the Cold War spread of the ideas of media and communication studies?

PC: Numerous critical scholars have pointed out that our field doesn't pay sufficient attention to geopolitics.⁶ One example that always stands out to me is, Edward Said’s 1981, Covering Islam: How the Media and Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, a crucial intervention that is rarely taught in Communications. As a result, when it comes to questions of media and democracy, a core area of research interest across multiple sub-fields in our disaggregated discipline, we see an uptick of publications on disinformation and misinformation almost always within the confines of the national. The methodological nationalism in our field is unfortunate, especially given the obvious global providence of media and information infrastructures and the rules by which they are governed. Political economists and cultural studies scholars alike have long made the case to center questions of geopolitics, colonialism and empire, but these calls have remained at the margins of our field. In a special issue on the “Infrastructures of Empire” published back in 2016, Miriyam Aouragh and I examined why even critical global media studies scholars have systematically overlooked the question of European and U.S. empire historically and in the present.⁷ Reflecting on the unabashed optimism around the “Facebook” and “Twitter Revolutions” that marked discussions of the Arab and subsequent digitally mediated global uprisings after 2011, we were struck by the conspicuous absence of discussions about the devastating U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that had completely transformed the region. By 2017, the tide suddenly turned with many of the same authors who had extolled the virtues of digital deliberative democracy taking a pessimistic U-turn reacting to the BREXIT-Trump era with new nationally contained theories of digital disinformation leading to authoritarian populism.

Theoretically, in thinking about media, whether we follow the insights of Walter Benjamin or Frantz Fanon, the point is not what do digital infrastructures undo, but how they maintain and allow politics to continue. This politics in question is situated in our shared colonial/racial history, and so yes understanding the Cold War origins of communications as a field helps us see the normative limits to our ideals of liberal democratic media freedom. I have been working for a while on a manuscript tentatively entitled “Media and Economic Violence,” where I want to revisit the naturalization of our common understanding of media freedom as distinctly political freedom from state control.

Beginning in the inter-war period, but really becoming mobilized in the post-WWII era until the early 1980s, you have various highly placed white American men, whether liberal or neoliberal in the fields of communications and Information Studies, who conceptualized a narrow and racially coded understanding of technological freedom against a growing global consensus for colonial reparations and racial reordering of global governance, resources and technological know-how. So what we find when we go back to this period is that the Cold War framing of the field elides the monumental project of decolonization throughout the long twentieth century.

The Cold Warriors who establish some of today’s revered Communications departments and Information Technology labs in the U.S. and then exported their pedagogic models to the “developing world,” had a limited and skewed understanding of technological “freedom.” For example, globally institutions of “free” commercial media would be corrupted by figures like Edward Bernays, who helps launch the enterprise of public relations—the blurring of news and advertising—to then play a pivotal role in the U.S.’s settler conquest of Hawaii and help engineer the U.S.’s first coup against a democratically elected government in the Americas in Guatemala. So, what does “media freedom” look like to the dispossessed native Kānaka ‘Ōiwi Hawai’ian people? Or the indigenous Guatemalan citizens who had voted for democratic socialist President Jacobo Arbenz in 1951, and would following the U.S. backed coup, suffer the authoritarian fortification of U.S.-backed illiberalism and ultimately “genocidal violence” in the 1980s with repercussions to this day?⁸

We see a consistent through-line from seemingly liberal figures like Bernays, who believed in racial pluralism, to Ithiel de Sola Pool, who starts off as a Kennedy liberal and then becomes a right-wing apologist of U.S. imperial and racial violence in Vietnam. De Sola Pool was branded as a “War Criminal” by anti-war protesters in the 1970s for his enthusiasm for predictive counterinsurgency computing technologies deployed in rural South Vietnam, which were themselves based on experiments in predicting what he would have called “riots” and we would call “uprisings” in urban centers in the U.S. in the wake of the backlash to the Civil Rights movement.⁹ De Sola Pool’s later goes on to make a maximalist case for digital “technologies of freedom,”¹⁰ which you see echoed today by plutocrats like Elon Musk. De Sola Poole argued that to ensure digital freedom we would have to reverse the mid-twentieth century legacy of some modicum of control over naturally scarce analogue technologies like broadcasting. These ideas and interventions in educating experts and shaping policy debates by the likes of Edward Bernays, Walter Lippmann (who I haven’t had time to discuss here but is an important figure extolling the virtues of what we today call neoliberalism)¹¹ and Ithiel de Sola Poole—and many other white American men—helped lay the theoretical foundations for telecommunications reform in the 1990s, that would pave the way for the deregulated and privatized world of austerity and Big Tech.

So, what was left out with this hollowing out of our understanding of media freedom, or today, digital freedom? Here, if we want to address your question about the rise of the mediatized global right, more than the Cold War, it becomes helpful maybe even necessary for media and information studies scholars to spend more time thinking about twentieth century anti-colonial struggles and movements, including movements for racial justice and indigenous sovereignty in the Global North. How was media freedom, and more importantly economic and radical anti-racist democracy understood in this period? We needn’t romanticize this history which of course was fraught and complicated, in order to revisit and draw lessons from the kinds of parallel processes of “worldmaking after empire,” as political theorist Adom Getachew has generatively put it.¹² In this period, there were attempts by the “others of Europe”¹³to imagine a world in which information resources could create different kinds of worlds and redress the kinds of violence and dispossession that colonialism had enshrined over much of the world. And in in engaging with this legacy, we can pivot our research and teaching to move beyond the Eurocentrism and methodological nationalism of our field.

AT: You just touched on something that really connects well to the next question, related to the postcolonial rise of right-wing thought. In you 2006 article, “White Collar Nationalisms,” you talk about this rise in India, particularly how that ideology starts to play into US and Indian labor relations. So, in this article, you show that the US and India have similar yet different concerns when it comes to what was called “high skilled” Indian immigrant labor, particularly in the late 1990s and in early 2000s, although, of course, those concerns have yet to die down. So, on the one hand, both progressive and conservative voices in the US spoke out about Indian immigrant labor as a hindrance to US employment; and, on the other hand, in India the promotion of immigration to the US has been seen as a weapon for circulating right-wing Hindutva ideologies. In your thinking, what role does right-wing nationalist ideology play in both the US and in Indian labor relations? And do you envision communication and media studies capable of a possible critique of such ideology?

PC: In the early 2000s, I did a qualitative study of Indian information technology (IT) workers in the U.S., who were at the time generically referred to as H1-B workers—that's the visa category that was introduced in the 1990s to allow for temporary migration of what is problematically called “high skilled migrants.” My study was in the aftermath of the “dot-com bubble” in 2000 when the U.S. media narrative echoing as you say the strange bed-fellows made up of some strands of the U.S. labor movement alongside anti-immigrant, right-wing politicians and activists, at that time agreed that temporary Indian IT workers, who were routinely characterized as “techno-coolies and slaves,” should be blamed for driving down wages of newly precarious white male IT workers. Based on what I had learned from my interviews with over 100 migrant workers, the temporary visa program—the H1B program and others that have since emerged—were designed to subsidize corporate flexibility at the expense of both labor and immigrant rights. The design of immigration policy to favor what we today would call Big Tech at the expense of both U.S. born workers—well-paid white male workers who resented losing their high-paying jobs and Black and Latino male and female workers who never had access to those jobs in the first place—as well as the racially marked H1-B workers exemplifies what Cedric Robinson’s identified as racial capitalism.¹⁴ In the early-2000s, this research revealed that racialized hostility against Asian workers reinforced racial and class hierarchies between “native” and “foreign” workers, while also helped to sediment class, caste, and gender hierarchies within the Indian IT workforce—which was and remains, a relatively small and privileged sector of the overall workforce in India.¹⁵

To answer your question about the rise of global right-wing authoritarianism today, specifically in terms of labor, I think the important thing is to avoid the kind of Technological Darwinism—the disavowal of colonial/racial violence that you write about in On Black Media Philosophy.¹⁶ In thinking and writing about digitally mediated Hindu nationalism in India or comparable political movements across the Global South, I have tried to trace the genealogies, or lineages of contemporary forms of majoritarian populism or authoritarianism with my co-author, Srirupa Roy, a political scientist who has written extensively on the postcolonial state and democracy.¹⁷ In thinking about the role of technology vis-à-vis labor, race and right-wing authoritarianism, we have to consciously avoid the default tendency to both fetishize technological innovations and assume technological neutrality. It is such a powerful tendency, whether we are talking about “revolutionary” developments in AI, algorithmic bias, etc., to assume either a neutral starting point or for the reformists and revolutionaries among us, a neutral end point. This tendency in scholarship on media and digital technologies tends to skew narrow, usually giving geo-historically specific attention to every “new” technology as we are continually forgetting the colonial and racial preconditions of our capitalist digital economy.

Returning to the migrant Indian IT worker in the U.S., more recently, when Trump imposed the Muslim Travel Ban in 2017 and started implementing aggressive deportation tactics, his administration simultaneously embraced an immigration policy that claimed to prioritize “merit-based,” “skilled migrants.” This was an opening that civil society groups representing Indian temporary migrants in the IT sector led by upper-caste Hindus embraced—distancing themselves from both Muslim migrants from Muslim-majority states and undocumented migrants who were seen in a sense as polluting “merit-based” pathways to citizenship. At the time, I remember the head of a group called Immigration Voice, representing largely Indian IT migrants, make statements in the press saying something to the effect of: Indian “high-skilled workers” would enthusiastically help pay to “build the wall” (keeping undocumented migrants out) if the Trump administration decreased the wait time to a Green Card for them!¹⁸

Through work with migrant and labor justice movements, I’ve become interested in the histories that shape how governments and corporations around the world regulate and benefit from the racially, caste-coded and false dichotomies between “low-skilled” versus “merit based high-skilled” migrants. In the U.S., legal historian Mae Ngai has quite firmly established that these hierarchical forms of U.S. migration policy created the subject of the “illegal alien.”¹⁹ Globally, a vast array of critical interdisciplinary research points us to assess the current neoliberal digital order through the colonial history of forced migration, chattel slavery, and indentured labor.²⁰ The colonial-racial framing leads legal scholar, Tendayi Achiumbe to make the persuasive claim that we need to understand migration today as decolonization.²¹ Returning to your question about whether communication and media studies can offer analyses that contest hetero-patriarchal authoritarianism and the inequalities of our current global economy where Big Tech is dominant, it becomes necessary to trace the variegated terms of global mobility and connectivity, technological freedom and what it means to be counted as “human” today, precisely because all of these technologically-infused dreams and promises have clear nineteenth century legal and institutional roots of enforcing inequality, precarity, and humiliation.²²

One last note on this topic is that to understand these questions specifically in India or across the Indian diaspora, we have to also consider caste—a sorely under-studied area that requires much more attention in all caste-affected societies, including the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and elsewhere. In the U.S., organizations like Equality Labs and the Ambedkar-King Study Circle and other Dalit-led initiatives, have worked hard to show that lower caste communities face the double disadvantage of caste and race. Caste has its own logic and therefore requires its own analytic tools. Although caste was abolished, de jure, by the post-colonial Indian state, caste remains a de facto descent-based structure of graded inequality. In South Asia, caste privilege has worked through the control of land, through labor, through education, through media, through barriers to white collar professions and political institutions. And while power and status are more fluid in the intermediate rungs of the caste hierarchy, Dalits, formerly known as “the untouchables,” and other lower caste communities, have experienced far less social and economic mobility especially in the much hyped tech sector.²³ To this day, Dalits are stigmatized as inferior and polluting and typically segregated into hazardous and low-status forms of labor and their activism and dissent against Hindu nationalism in the everyday and in the form of the current Indian national government has led to intense backlash, from political incarceration to social media harassment.²⁴ Recently, Murali Shanmugavelan, a Communications scholar at the Oxford Internet Society, has put together a “Critical Caste and Technology Study” annotated syllabus that is a timely resource on this subject.²⁵ And in the years to come, I hope that this journal becomes a home for work on communication and caste as well as race.

AT: I think caste would be a very fruitful area to develop in this journal as well. On a related note to my previous question, one of the commonalities that I see throughout a lot of your work, in places like “Postcolonial Media Policy Under the Long Shadow of Empire” or “Media Pluralism Redux,”²⁶ is what I perceive to be the importance of a Global-South-led form of socialist thought in relationship to media and communication. In “Infrastructures of Empire,”²⁷ for example, you argue that the Cold War is the structuring logic in the study of media technologies, modernization, and liberal democracy in the laboratories of the Third World, a logic that you say must be resisted. And in “Media, Race and the Infrastructures of Empire,”²⁸ you likewise note that the U.S. Cold War logic situated media as these kinds of modernizing gifts for the decolonizing world, these gifts that were designed to provide capitalism as the political-economic model to be followed at the end of Western colonization, as opposed to the goals of the Soviet Union. But you go beyond the twentieth-century Cold War to argue for an understanding of a new Cold War in the twenty-first century, organized around BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa] economies, and the Western need to dictate the terms of those economies. So, what can we, as a field, gain from a more direct connection between the critiques of racism and critiques of capitalism? And how must our critiques of racism and capitalism shift under the terrain of what some are calling the new twenty-first century Cold War?

PC: Critical communications scholars who studied the political economy of media and information systems, whether historical studies of the nineteenth-century era of technological colonial expansion or the Cold War era we just discussed, contested the analytic assumptions of liberal media studies scholars and the normative assumptions about commercial media freedom. We can think of scholars like Jill Hills, Herbert Schiller, Dallas Smythe, Armand Mattelart, or more popular figures like Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky—all of whom critiqued U.S. imperialism and military interventions in the twentieth century and the power of private media and technology corporations. While these critical White American and European scholars and many others in this tradition focused on U.S. and Western-supported corporate colonial power in the context of the Cold War, we see in their work, limited direct engagement with anti-colonial or post-colonial thinkers, or for that matter engagement with the Black radical tradition, which had long raised questions about capitalism in relation to the colonial and the racial. As you suggest in your question, I have worked with a number of scholars over the years in trying to address these very gaps in debates about global media and information policy and politics.

In my current research, I am revisiting some of my earlier writing about the liberalization of telecommunications across much of the Global South in the 1980s and 1990s and the subsequent “digital revolution” that coincides with global austerity and post-racialism.²⁹ What becomes more apparent with the benefit of hindsight is that the hype around race-neutral technological freedom that became hegemonic by the 1990s in institutions of governance and in commercially mediated popular culture, does so by pathologizing earlier anti-colonial and anti-racist claims for technological and economic sovereignty and inter-dependence.

So, I would say to understand the contemporary moment where you have new calls for decolonizing media, we have to do a better job understanding the lead up to the so-called “post-racial digital revolution”. One work that helps map this terrain is Stuart Hall and his co-authors’ prescient book on media and the early politics of neoliberalism, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order.³⁰ Published in 1978, this work of conjunctural analysis gives us tools to think about mediation and the neoliberal transformation of racial capitalism. For critical scholars today of the crises of neoliberal digital media and carceral state violence against racial subaltern populations, this work remains resonant. It allows us to think through a parallel conjuncture, where we might parse the conspiracies and mythologies of racial reasoning, and right-wing authoritarianism, and the imperial legacies of our contemporary crises of democracy and extreme inequality.

Another way to map the politics that were undone in the 1980s and 1990s, as I mentioned above, is to revisit the era of decolonization. We have to remember that between 1945 and 1980, most of Africa and Asia would become independent nations attempting to free themselves from European direct or indirect political rule. The same period would see political movements in the Caribbean, Central America, and Latin America for political and economic sovereignty especially over natural resources from both Europe and the U.S. and calls for collective economic and technological self-reliance. The complex legacy of the 1955 Bandung conference and subsequent internationalist efforts to liberate communications and information infrastructure with an anti-imperialist and anti-racist (racialist in the language of the era) agenda and praxis defined technological freedom as a path towards reparative and collective justice and freedom. In Afro-Asian initiatives like Bandung and in pan-African, pan-Arab and Tri-Continental efforts of the 1950s and 1960s into the early-1970s, the struggle against what Kwame Nkrumah would call “neocolonialism” translated to new demands for economic rights, “including rights to development and to ‘Permanent Sovereignty Over Natural Resources.’”³¹ These calls for what we might think of as “positive freedom” in the racially marked lexicon of the Cold War by political theorist Isiah Berlin,³² were pivotal to more expansive understandings of freedom and equality as abolition of poverty and hunger by both W.E.B. DuBois in the U.S. and by B.R. Ambedkar, the Dalit intellectual in India who was the architect of the Indian constitution.

AT: To switch gears a little, in your collaboration with Sarah J. Jackson, “The Disavowal in Race in Communication Theory,”³³ you both argue that quite a few graduate syllabi in some of our top communication studies graduate programs focus on concepts like democracy and publics, with little attention to race and colonialism. To push the field forward, you show that there is space to connect democracy and publics to race and colonialism by pointing to Susan Buck-Morss and her important article, “Hegel and Haiti,” from 2000.³⁴ So in a field that's so connected to this liberal democratic project, can you elaborate on the role that race and colonialism play in communication studies and its concepts of democracy and publics?

PC: I know Sarah herself has been thinking about these questions in her work and writing, and we both felt it useful to publish the piece from a pedagogic perspective. I think for me, the question has long been, how do we change our understanding of the commercial or private media in relation to theories of the state, of politics and citizenship that accounts for colonial/racial power? As critical scholars of communication we really need to wrestle with the violence of racial colonialism historically and in its present articulation in relation to the workings of modern media and information infrastructures and how they are governed.

Your question makes me think about Simone Browne’s, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness,³⁵ where she uncovers the ways in which the disciplining and marking of human bodies in the slave ship is an “antecedent” to today’s digital technologies of surveillance. Similarly, postcolonial historians of technology like Radhika Singha and others have shown how photography for identification and fingerprinting emerge to facilitate the policing of racially marked mobile indentured laborers in the nineteenth century under British imperial rule.³⁶ It’s this kind of work that locates colonial racial violence in the shaping of our contemporary media and technology infrastructures that we need to engage with much more centrally.

Instead, the dominant theories of media and democracy and technology and publics that undergird debates in our field are grounded in the historical experiences of the birth of the free press as the Fourth Estate, and the emergence of the public sphere as it has evolved in Europe and the United States. As you point out in your introduction, our core understandings of human and societal communication are rooted in theories associated with liberal enlightenment normative ideals. And while, Susan Buck-Morss wrote her “Hegel and Haiti” essay some 22 years ago, I'm not sure that it's something that most scholars in our field contend with even today. It is surely well past time to rethink how Jürgen Habermas’ influential theories about the idealized public sphere as a deliberative social space of rational debate is taken as a universal starting point in our discussions about media and democracy. This, without much heed to the fact that the Enlightened white European bourgeoise men in the seventeenth and eighteenth century coffee houses, came into being as a result of transatlantic chattel slavery and the unfreedom of the enslaved and indentured labor that produced the coffee and the sugar in plantations violently extracted from Indigenous lands in the Caribbean and Latin America.

So, our discussions would be much richer if we engaged the large reserve of historically informed political theory and critical legal studies that has shown how racial liberalism of the ideals of a public sphere, was sustained at least partially through the violently extractive powers of colonial capital and the despotism of the colonial state, whether in the Americas or Asia or Africa.³⁷ If we were to bring into our analytic frame, the conditions of expropriation and violence in the colonies that allowed for the privilege of rational public deliberation in the salons of France and coffee shops of England and Germany, our foundational theories of media and democracy would have to change. This requires both going back to writings and theories long-forgotten by the critical voices who have been politically and intellectually marginalized in our fields, like Claudia Jones, Jose Carlos Mariategui, Frantz Fanon, Grace Lee Boggs, A. Sivanandan to name a few of many. It also means substantively engaging with critical theoretical interventions that arise in the postcolonial, neo-colonial and settler-colonial present that do more than substantiate already established theories.

Addressing colonial/racial legacies therefore is not simply analytically important as a historical corrective, but crucial in our assessment of contemporary concerns, whether platform capitalism, immigration, police and military violence, climate change, and much more. We do see some shifts in our field, and we might expect more publications and discussions where we draw parallels between nineteenth century histories of illiberal European colonialism in relation to twenty-first century imperial Russia’s propaganda campaigns in the Ukraine, or current day China’s expansionist, imperial technological footprint in Africa. But we should be just as attune to tracing the liberal imperial continuities between what Nikhil Pal Singh calls “racecraft and Warcraft.”³⁸ This would allow us to understand not only the connections between wars abroad and surveillance and “disinformation” in the U.S., but it would help us contend with colonialism, including settler colonialism as an on-going project. We could then consider opposition to technological violence and apartheid by the Israeli state in Palestine, or vis-à-vis India’s increasingly assertive settler colonial occupation of Kashmir.³⁹ The point is that incorporating a critique of the modern colonial-racial framework allows us to think through a critical global prism as much about the world out there as it does about ourselves here at home.

AT: Yeah, I think we're a field that is very much concerned with a limited understanding of the international. On the one hand, it's the Cold Warriors international, meaning, “we have to go out and prevent these people from becoming communists.” On the other hand, it's the largely white Marxist understanding of the international, which looks to Europe first. But there's a whole history of the Global South and its approach to questions of the international, looking at Cuba and the Tricontinental. These are things that I think, really need to be thought about in our field in ways that I think we generally do not.

PC: Yes, absolutely in the mainstay of English-language communication, especially the North American variety, there is little engagement with the range of complex debates across what you call the Global South Left, which would include Third World Feminism and many different formations of Global South internationalism that are once again relevant today. While largely missing in the U.S., you see these discussions in a journal like Race and Class that was edited by A. Sivanandan from the 1970s through the 1990s.⁴⁰

As someone who studied global communication in the U.S. when the triumphalist U.S.-led liberal globalization reigned supreme, it became clear to many of us who were students in the 1990s that even within the more critical pockets of media studies that one could easily get stuck between a knee-jerk “anti-identity politics” political economy critique on the one side, versus a multiculturalist celebration of global flows and “hybridity” on the other. If your readers are interested, they can go back to the journals and monographs from this period on “cultural imperialism” and read for themselves the politically moribund debates that took place when commercial satellite and cable television suddenly expands into the U.S.S.R, China, Africa, and Asia in the eary-1990s.

Again, I think it is helpful to go back in history in order to go forward in terms of questions about “decolonial futures,” because there is so little memory, so little discussion, especially in the U.S. and Western communication and media studies in general, of core anti-colonial thinkers, activists, policy-makers who struggled for what I would insist was an interdependent self-reliance and libertory infrastructures of communication to combat colonial racial propaganda. These were attempts to imagine and build transnational circuits of communication in the service of the non-capitalist futures. Did many of these attempts fail? Were many of these efforts ultimately taken over in the name of patriarchal nationalism, authoritarianism, or towards anti-democratic ends? Most definitely. But there is a tendency to naturalize and pathologize the failures of what came prior to the globalization of media and the “digital revolution” and over-emphasize the technological transformation by virtue of our field of study. In my current work, I am going back to the Bandung Conference, held in 1955 in Indonesia, attended by representatives of 29 African and Asian national leaders as well and launched the “Third World” as an aspirational political project,⁴¹ and I feel remains largely unknown to scholars of media and information technology. Yet, the vision of a new transnational “information order” that would emerge in the U.N. in the following decades was premised on reversing the violence of colonial media infrastructures designed to extract land and labor, surveil, discipline, and humiliate colonized subjects. How was this reversal and redress imagined and carried out even for a short moment in history seems worth consideration? So, I would say that we can definitely do a lot more to recover these anti-colonial world-making attempts to overcome the racial and gendered hierarchies in the twentieth century—while considering the local and geopolitical context of their failures. We have models for this historically grounded work; I think of Jane Rhodes’ Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon and Taj Frazier’s, The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination. Both offer us new ways to think about the limits and possibilities of mediated anti-colonial, race-conscious solidarity.

AT: I also think about that Amilcar Cabral speech from the first Tricontinental, “The Weapon of Theory.”⁴² To me it can transform what we can do if we just really engage with it and really rethink what the international means from a different perspective.

PC: Yes, I very much agree. And I think increasingly, at least based on what I encounter in the classroom and beyond, a younger generation of students and scholars like yourself, in the U.S. and globally are interested in recovering these histories and voices, which is a sign of hope in otherwise seemingly dark times.

AT: This is what I hope for the journal: that we can start some of these conversations. Ok, in your article, “Accumulation, Dispossession and Debt,” co-authored with Denise Ferreira da Silva, you both deal with the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. But at the end of the article you call for an alternative ethics, what you call “the logic of solidarities for forged of differences.”⁴³ And this seems to, in my reading, reject both the logic of speaking for subprime borrowers, and the idea that there's no commonality between non-subprime borrowers and subprime borrowers. So could you speak to what you think maybe a more progressive, anti-capitalist politics and ethics may mean for our understandings of race in communication today?

PC: What we meant by solidarities forged out of difference was recognizing that there is no universal working class or for that matter, global subaltern class, that needs to be mobilized by those who know more, “against the one percent.” That was the basis of our argument and our sympathetic critique of theories of accumulation and debt by David Harvey and David Graeber in that piece. In her new book, Unpayable Debt, Denise offers I think a quite persuasive critique of the limits of historical materialism that refuses to engage colonial-racial difference (what we might think of as the conservative Marxist perspective, re Zizek and others we might think of) and understands the racial only as ideology.⁴⁴

I would say if we think about the post-pandemic world, new solidarities were forged through the differences that became suddenly and starkly visible through our Zoom screens, in terms of who had to keep working, which communities were more likely to get sick and die, who could shelter in place, who had the luxury of shelter, healthcare and paid work at home. In the aftermath, much of the planet faces a new unprecedented sovereign debt crises thanks to unrestrained lending by private wealth funds in places like Sri Lanka, Ghana, Lebanon, El Salvador, and elsewhere that hardly elicits global media attention. So what solidarity would require are a common sets of goals agreed on by the debtors themselves, by asylum seekers, and by those who have been disproportionately affected by austerity measures. Here, I think we can see in practice what anti-capitalist politics means through difference. Two political examples, that come to mind from different parts of the world: the first is the political mobilization by the Sri Lankan Feminist Media Collective that organized around a widely impactful statement in the face of the country’s unprecedented debt crisis earlier this summer, demanding debt cancellation by multilateral institutions and pointing out the disproportionate debt burden faced by women, who additionally faced gender-based violence in the country.⁴⁵ And second, in August of 2022, we saw Colombia elect its first democratically elected socialist government featuring the first rural Afro-Colombian Vice President, Francia Márquez. Vice President Márquez campaigned around a political manifesto where she claimed to represent “the nobodies,” who have been dispossessed, and “violated by a military classist and racist state.”⁴⁶

On a different scale, I would say questions of solidarity and difference are playing out today in growing calls for reparations locally and transnationally. This is an area that I think we can do more work on in our field, if we consider the terms of the material manifestation of media and technological colonial-racial violence and what reparations are owed that will build and enhance radical democratic possibilities. What would reparative justice mean, say for Google or Apple, whose products based on lithium batteries dispossess and impoverish communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo? What do reparations mean for Meta—characterized by activists as an “absentee landlord” in Myanmar, where Rohingya refuges hold Facebook accountable for genocide against their community in 2014? We might think about how our research might aid in holding the role of Big Tech and its massive carbon footprint accountable by having to pay taxes for the kinds of reparative justice to the Global South as proposed in the Bridgetown Initiative for climate justice, laid out by Barbadian Prime Minister, Mia Motley, for example.⁴⁷

Finally, I think this idea of solidarity forged out of difference has become intuitive at some level to a younger generation of activists participating in digitally mediated social movements in the last decade. This seems apparent for the global Movement for Black Lives, for the #MeToo Movement, for the Anti-Citizenship Amendment Act movement in India that I was lucky enough to witness in 2020 in Kolkata, movements for migrant justice and sanctuary in New York, for the decolonization of institutions the world over (universities, museums, the media, corporations, etc.). We also see this attentiveness to difference when we look at the wide-scale anti-capitalist feminist movements calling for feminist strikes in Latin America,⁴⁸ transnational environmental movements led by indigenous communities claiming sovereignty over their ancestral lands.⁴⁹And in Iran as we speak, grassroots movements led by young women from the Kurdish minority, and we could go on. We also see this even in the newly invigorated labor movement in the U.S., where we can think of workers mobilizing in Amazon warehouses or Uber drivers, nurses, and teachers, or our own graduate students and fellow adjunct faculty—all mobilizing through difference, not by bracketing their differences, they are directly challenging and in many cases bypassing traditional labor unions.

So overall, I think as scholars in our field, we have a lot to learn from the social movements themselves, as well as from a new generation of political activists and leaders, artists and activists, policy-makers, and anti-capitalist technologists, who are thinking much more expansively than in the “post-racial” neoliberal straight-jacket about the landscape of the political in a brutally unequal planet. And to that point, we have to continually ask ourselves as scholars if there is an ethic of reciprocity, generosity, and care when we “study” alongside these subaltern movements and communities in our research and writing?

AT: I want to end by asking a question about the form of the writing that you've been involved in. One of the things that I've always found very important about your work is the spirit of collaboration that you engage in, very often with junior scholars. I think that this is important given the complexity of the topics that you addressed in terms of race, capitalism, colonialism. Could you just say a little bit about what you believe is important when it comes to collaboration on topics like race, capitalism, and colonialism.

PC: On the question of collaboration, I think of it almost as a methodology of critical, and ideally ethical, research, writing and pedagogy. As academics, we are evaluated and rewarded and punished based on our accomplishments usually measured through proprietary publications as individuals. And while that is one model of scholarship, it’s not the only one. My intellectual formation has been shaped and is continually reshaped by feminist friendships, collective thinking, and collective action spanning the universities, places and communities I have worked and lived in. At Madison, Wisconsin, where I was a Ph.D. student in the 1990s, much of what I learned outside of the classroom with my peers came through my work with our graduate student union, the TAA, the first graduate student union formed in the U.S., as well as through community-building kinds of work including participating in a long-running radio show called “Third World View” and being part of a group that started a new program called Chingari about politics and culture in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora on the local community radio station (WORT). So in graduate training I was immersed in debates and mobilizing around a variety of issues from attacks on reproductive rights in Wisconsin, to mobilizing for international students and around racial justice and labor rights through the TAA, to learning about the challenges of connecting local to transnational solidarity efforts in the face of growing Hindu nationalism and neoliberalism (what we then called the anti-globalization movement). I was lucky to work with Professor Hemant Shah who sparked my interest in thinking about global media history and race, and I was part of a novel interdisciplinary Global Studies Initiative started by one of the founders of critical legal studies, Professor David Trubek, who brought together students working in and across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. In this environment, where we were studying and living through the early post-Cold War optimistic era of happy globalization and much talk of a “digital revolution,” it was this collaborative work both in and outside the classroom that helped me think critically about what was really at stake in what I hoped to study and teach.

The transition from the collective ethos of graduate student life to the professionalism of the neoliberal academy has always been a challenge for me—even to this day. At UCSD, which was my first job, I was lucky to land in a place that had critical feminist media scholars like Zeinabu Irene Davis, Ellen Seiter and Yuezhi Zhao. UCSD also had a vibrant Ethnic Studies Department and community with colleagues like Lisa Lowe, Jane Rhodes, and Denise Ferreira da Silva whose scholarship helped me foreground my thinking about race in a global context, and as we see with the unhinged backlash against Critical Race Theory (CRT), its importance is what makes it so threatening. In the last 20 some years, at both UMass Amherst and here at NYU, I have had the good fortune of meaningful collaborations come my way with too many generous colleagues and inspiring students to name individually.

Overall, I would say that research that is attentive to local conditions and movements which also seeks to understand the histories and structures that are inherently global needs to be collaborative in spirit—otherwise especially sitting here in the heart of American empire, you invariably reproduce colonial/racial and patriarchal norms of knowledge production even when your intentions might be the very opposite. The last thing I will say about collaboration is that the goal for me has not always been to prioritize publishing—it could also be an effort to build community or solidarity, support a student, community or worker campaign or independent media effort, hold the very institutions we work for accountable, and figure out meaningful ways to learn from each other. Given our profession, a substantial portion of our research of course is publication driven. But my experience has been that building trust and community within the feudal-neoliberal hybrid that is the university and more importantly, outside the university, takes effort, care and time, and is ultimately pretty fragile. This is even more so the case when we puseu non-extractive collaborations between the university, especially the private university situated here in the Global North, and wider communities, whether those are in New York or New Delhi, or well beyond.

AT: Thank you. This has been great. I really appreciate you taking the time to have this conversation with me. As I said, you know your work is extremely influential on my own thinking, and this conversation has just been great.

PC: I very much appreciate the opportunity Armond, it means a lot. And I look forward to continuing the conversation and have high hopes for the journal!

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

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