Introduction
0.6. Key conceptual and methodological issues
13
excluded from scholarship. This reaffirms the argument that black people have never been part of the conversations in the media and in the academy since from the start they have been closed out.
When they join the conversations, language closes them outside. There is a serious lack of the search for a South African theoretical idiom and methodology.
14
Americas in 1452 was met with resistance. In a sense, they argue that colonialism generated its own resistance which is decoloniality. Decoloniality is challenge to the western-centric version of knowledge and history as it aims to “push for the shifting of geography of reason from the West as the epistemic locale” of knowledge about the world to the ex-colonised epistemic sites as equally valid locales of knowledge (Ndlovu, Gatsheni, 2013; Maldonaldo-Torres, 2007).
Maldonaldo- Torres (2007) posits that decoloniality as a school of thought is not one thing but a family of theoretical positions that challenge coloniality seen as a contemporary problem. The thesis, partly wants to decolonise media studies by putting a constructivist concept of representation at the centre of the question of what the media does. This section discusses coloniality/decoloniality, the postcolonial, the colonial present, representation and subjectivity and decolonising methodologies as the key concepts around which this thesis is anchored.
0.6.1. Coloniality/decoloniality, the postcolonial and the colonial present
This dissertation has been conceptualised around the ideas of postcoloniality, colonial presence and decoloniality. Hall’s (1996) conceptualisation of ‘the postcolonial’ refuses to describe this time that comes at the end of colonialism in teleological terms but designates it in terms of its quality. He defines the postcolonial as the conjectural moment “in which both the crisis of the uncompleted struggle for ‘decolonisation’ and the crisis of the ‘post-independence’ state are deeply inscribed” (Hall, 1996: 224). In precise terms, Gregory gestures us to the “colonial presence” which refers to “the performative force of colonial modernity” (Gregory 2004: 4). In the
‘colonial present,’ the concept of postcolonialism is evoked as that time when the focus shifts from
“present futures to present pasts” (Huyssen, 2001: 57). Gregory notes that postcolonialism’s
“commitment to a future free of colonial power and disposition is sustained in part by a critique of the continuities between the colonial past and the colonial present” (2004: 7). Gregory, further, points out that, “while they may be displaced, distorted, and (most often) denied, the capacities that inhere within the colonial past are routinely reaffirmed and reactivated in the colonial present”
(Gregory, 2004: 7). It is the re-activation of violence and the identity politics in the postcolonial moment that brought back brought back and reaffirmed the evils that “inhere within the colonial past” (Gregory, 2004: 7). Maldonaldo-Torres defines coloniality as “long standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labour, intersubjective
15
relations, and knowledge production” (Maldonaldo-Torres 2007: 243). Ndlovu-Gatsheni refers to coloniality as “the invisible vampirism of technologies of imperialism and colonial matrices of power that continue to exist in the minds, lives, languages, dreams, imaginations, and epistemologies of modern subjects in Africa and the entire global South” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013:11). These theoretical concepts – postcolonial, ‘the colonial present’ and coloniality - are related in that the way Hall and Gregory thinks about the endurance of colonialism in the postcolonial moment is not different from the emphasis that Maldonaldo-Torres and Ndlovu- Gatsheni make about coloniality as born out of colonialism and modernity.
0.6.2. Representation and black African subjectivity
Representation is not only about how we understand the world around us, make sense of it, but also how we understand ourselves. It is linked to subjectivity. Representation is seen as a modern concept emerging out of the modernity epoch (Colebrook, 2000). This marked the move from resemblance to representation as a “move from a system of meaning-making based on similitude to one based on difference” (Webb, 2009: 25). Significant to representation as a political issue are the questions of “who is performing the representation; what does it mean; and what effects does it have?” (Webb, 2009: 2). Hall notes that, representation is located in culture and culture is “about
‘shared meanings.’ […] Meanings can only be shared through our common access to language”
(1997: 1). Since the ‘cultural turn’ meaning has been thought to be “produced – constructed - rather than simply ‘found’” (Hall, 1997: 5). In this constructionist approach “things don’t mean: we construct meaning, using representational systems - concepts and signs” (Hall, 1997: 25). Arguing a case for a constructionist approach to representation, Webb notes that “the processes of representation do not simply make connections, relationships and identities visible: they actually make those connections, relationships and identities” (2009: 10). Here, representation is not just about the substitution of the thing for a symbol, but the constitution of the thing making real “both the world and our ways of being in the world” (Webb, 2009: 10). Extending Colebrook’s observation that representation arises out of modernity, Lloyd (2019) argues for a case of the ‘racial regime’ of representation and its coloniality. He points to how representation emerges in humanities as “the realm in which the notion of the subject of freedom was thought alongside the subordination of unfree subjects” (Lloyd, 2019: viii). Part of the task of this thesis is to question the media as part of cultural institutions of modernity and what has been and is its role in “the
16
formation of the racial and political structures of the present” (Lloyd, 2019: viii). According to Lloyd (2019), questions of subjectivity and ‘the human’ are central to representation and modernity. The idea of the subject comes into human history at the dawn of Enlightenment and modernity. Webb notes that “the idea of the subject … is to say people: me, you, and everyone else in the world” (2009: 63). While modernity came with the idea of a unified and centred subject, there have been moves towards a decentred subject (Baker, 2012; Webb, 2009: 64). Butler notes that the role of representation is to give us ‘this lack’ and then fill it to stabilise our identities (1990:
43).
0.6.3. Decolonising methodologies
The proposed research is qualitative in that it seeks to provide “a detailed description and analysis of the quality, or the substance, of the human experience” (Marvasti, 2004: 7). The thesis considers how Black African Subjectivity is “produced and enacted in historically specific situations”
(Denzin and Lincoln, 2000:14). The historically specific situation here is townships in a post- apartheid South Africa. The proposed research starts is premised on the idea that qualitative research is endlessly “creative and interpretive” (Denzin and Lincoln, 2005: 14). It is designed following Maxwell’s (2008) “interactive model” that places the research question at the centre to mediate between research goals, research methods, trustworthiness (validity) and the conceptual framework (Maxwell, 2008:216). The research is 50 percent a study of textual content produced by the media between 1994 and 2017, and 50 percent an ethnographic study of communities in townships and other spaces where local black South Africans live alongside black African nationals. The data gathering process is divided into two stages: collecting journalism texts and an ethnographic design that includes keeping a diary and in-depth interviews, among other methods.