The coloniality of representation and black African subjectivity
3.2. Positioning journalism and media studies in Cultural Studies
Black African subjectivity in the postcolonial moment emerges in the intersection of the media, migration and the urban, among other such spaces. In Cultural Studies this link between the media, migration and the urban can be termed an articulation. According to Hall, articulation refers to
“the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time”
(1996: 115, see Baker, 2012: 496). It is under the conditions of the ‘colonial presence’ that the media, migration and the urban ‘link’ to construct black African subjectivity in the postapartheid moment. Hall further notes it is important that the “mechanisms” and conditions that make this articulation possible “be shown - since no ‘necessary correspondence’ or expressive homology can be assumed as given” (Hall, 1996: 115). It is the broader aim of this dissertation to unmask the conditions and mechanisms of coloniality that underlie the construction of black African subjectivity in the postapartheid moment. It is important to define and contextualise Cultural Studies. Barker notes that Cultural Studies “is, and has always been, a multi- or post-disciplinary field of enquiry which blurs the boundaries between itself and other ‘subjects’” (2005: 5). Hall takes Cultural Studies to be a discursive formation “a cluster (or formation) of ideas, images and
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practices, which provide ways of talking about, forms of knowledge and conduct associated with, a particular topic, social activity or institutional site in society” (1997a: 6). Both Barker and Hall insist that Cultural Studies is an open and ever-evolving intellectual project.
Zelizer has reflected on the “uneasy coexistence of journalism and cultural studies” and called for the need to re-think “ways in which journalism and its inquiry might be made a more integral part of cultural studies” (2004: 100). The challenge is seen as lying in journalism’s originary claims to
“facts, truth, and reality” as “God-terms” and cultural studies’ originary premise of relativity and subjectivity (Zelizer, 2004: 100). Studying the work of the journalists through a Cultural Studies frame became a huge issue in Australia in the late 90s to the early 2000s, sucking in South African academics (Windschuttle, 1997; Windschuttle, 1998, Meadows, 1999, Strelitz and Steenveld, 1998; Tomaselli and Shepperson, 1998). It is precisely the observation by Zelizer (2004) that since journalism had a sense that it is a science, and journalists hold firm belief in Truth as attainable, while Cultural Studies scholar insist on the impossibility of Truth, the two had an uneasy relationship. Studying journalism from a Cultural Studies perspective means considering its
“meanings, symbols and symbolic systems, ideologies, rituals, and conventions by which journalists maintain their cultural authority as spokespeople for events in the public domain”
(Zelizer, 2004: 101). This means drawing on other disciplines such as work on the sociology of culture, debates around constructivism in philosophy, analysis of symbols and symbolic forms in anthropology and ethnography in linguistics (Zelizer, 2004: 101). Importantly, and specifically for this research, studying the media and journalism in Cultural Studies would provide space to locate it in debates in postcolonial and decolonial approaches.
Studying journalism in a postcolonial and decolonial approach is to take up Willems’ (2014: 416) imagined task of not only challenging Western epistemology in media studies by de-westernizing or globalising but going further to question the hegemony of Western theory in the field. For example, in critical media studies, there is a robust critique of the foundations of journalism as objective or professional. The limits of approaches such as ‘internationalisation’ and ‘de- westernisation’ is that these approaches focus on extending Eurocentric approaches to countries seen as excluded from the Western canon rather than “questioning the centrality of Western theory” (Willems, 2014: 416). Following Marx’s injunction in thesis eleven, the point is to change
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this epistemic status quo by questioning and displacing Western theory from the centre. The first step is to shift from the media systems to a media cultures approach which Willems argues can
“contribute to an approach that practises media and communication studies from the Global South, grounded in the everyday life experiences of ordinary people but always situated against the background of crucial processes such as neoliberalisation” (2014b: 7). It has been argued that practices around professional journalism and the ideology of objectivity have ensured the exclusion of ordinary citizens and hence should be the target of decolonisation (Chiumbu, 2016).
Schudson has argued that, “the belief in objectivity is a faith in ‘facts,’ a distrust in ‘values,’ and a commitment to their segregation” (2001: 150). However, in the history of the professionalization of journalism, claiming objectivity has been journalism’s way of staking out an institutional role as a “Fourth Estate” and therefore separate from both the government and society’s other interests groups (Schudson, 1978). Objective journalism is seen as anchored on three pillars of truthfulness, neutrality, and detachment (Calcutt and Hammond, 2011). However, these critiques assume universality yet, in its blindness to race, Western critical theory is inadequate in addressing the exclusions of subjects of colour in colonised spaces. This study, therefore extends this debate by critiquing the Euro-American critique of objective journalism from both a postcolonial and decolonial frame. This is important because of the representation role that journalism plays in South Africa and the world.
Firmly locating representation in Cultural Studies, Hall conceptualises it as the production of meaning linking thoughts with language to refer to the ‘real’ or imagined world of objects, people or events (1997:3). He proffers three approaches to representation: the reflective, intentional and the constructionist. In the reflective approach meaning lies in the object, person, idea or event in the real world, and language functions like a mirror reflecting the true meaning that already exists in the world (Hall, 1997:10). In his discussion of the role of the media in society, McQuail (2005) proffers seven metaphors that include the gatekeeper, a window, a signpost, a forum, a disseminator, an interlocutor, and importantly a mirror. However, about the metaphor of the media as a mirror, he notes how the media ‘mirrors’ events in society, but is susceptible to distortions and that is, its angle and direction as a mirror, is “decided by others, and we are less free to see what we want” (2005: 83). In the intentional approach to representation, Hall argues that, it is the speaker or author who ascribes his or her meaning to the world through language (1997:10). Media,
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as institutions, are spaces of power, and their products, especially journalism and advertising, are underwritten by power. Couldry defines media power as “the concentration of symbolic power in media institutions, particularly those of television, radio and the press (the common-sense definition of ‘the media’)” (2001: 155). There are two issues to highlight here. First, this power of the media is, however, contested as it is not all pervasive. Second, media are powerful as a result of combining this symbolic power with other forms of power, for example social or political power. It is Hall’s conceptualisation of representation from a constructivist approach that this thesis adopts. Here, Hall argues that neither the things themselves nor the author can fix meaning, but that “we construct meaning, using representational systems – concepts and signs” (Hall, 1997:11). He further posits that “the ‘machineries’ and regimes of representation in a culture do play a constitutive, and not merely a reflexive, after-the event, role” (Hall, 1996:443). The black African subjectivities that appear through the articulations of the media, migration and the urban – as “regimes of representation” in our modernity - are not apriori to these texts (such that they are just a reflection) but specific cultural constructs.
Taking Johannesburg as a diaspora city for most Africans, we can then tease out the links between
“history, citizenship, politics, the global, local, and communication come together in complex ways” in the construction of black African subjectivity in the postapartheid moment (Shome and Hedge, 2002: 262). A historicised study of the trajectory of the black subject in a South African urban space where his labour has been central in building cities from which he is “forbidden”
creating a situation of an absence-presence (Landau, 2005) ties the border, the urban space and the media as spaces for the representation (construction), and in Gqola (2001)’s word, “making” of Black African Subjectivity. In the post-apartheid era, this is mostly under neoliberal globalisation.
Most migration is to the city making the city, as a space, central to the question of subjectivity under migration conditions. The idea of the city gives the illusion of citizenship such that, for a moment, we can think of the black African subject in relation to the questions of the citizen. The citizen is the subject that arose out of Western modernity although this Western modernity was to evolve through processes of negating the subject of colour including the black African subject, through slavery and colonisation (Mbembe, 2017, Wynter, 2003). Boatca and Roth point out that,
“the institution of citizenship has developed in the West through the legal (and physical) exclusion of non-European, non-White and non-Western populations from civic, political, social and cultural
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rights; these exclusions, and thus citizenship as such, have historically been (en)gendered” (2016:
191). Citizenship is regarded as an “’institution’ mediating rights between the subjects of politics and the polity to which these subjects belong” (Isin and Nyers, 2014: 1). Magnette describes it as a “modern western idea” that grew out of the period between 1780 and 1830 paralleled by growth of “European orientalism” (2005: 105). Kamugisha has pointed to the “coloniality of citizenship”
as a “complex amalgam of elite domination, neoliberalism and the legacy of colonial authoritarianism” (2007: 20). We now turn to discuss journalism and the ideologies of professionalism and objectivity before tying them to the concept of the public sphere. This chapter will, in the last sections discuss, representation and subjectivity in depth as articulated to journalism under conditions of coloniality in the postapartheid moment.