Introduction
0.3. Research Problem, objectives and research questions
This coloniality of the media and representation, the urban space and migration labour is linked to the coloniality of knowledge production in South Africa. Compared to other parts of the continent, Southern Africa, in general, and South Africa, in particular are latecomers in the decolonial efforts to rehabilitate knowledge production. When making a case for the genealogy of decolonial African thought, Ndlovu-Gatsheni notes that the very beginning of the university in West Africa was marked by resistance against the European model of a university in the continent with people like
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Edward Wilmot Blyden of Liberia and James Africanus Beale Horton of Sierra Leone, and J.E.
Casely Hayford of Ghana agitating and fighting for a university “rooted in African cultural and intellectual soil and climate” against the “university in Africa” which would be “transplanted from Europe” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2017: 55, Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2020: 8). In South Africa under colonial and apartheid rule the university developed as segregated into white and black (African) (Belluigi and Thondhlana, 2019; Sennett, Finchilescu and Strauss, 2003). It was further segregated into Afrikaans and English. In the postapartheid moment, education academics have been seized with researching how black students are adapting in formerly white universities (Sennett, Finchilescu and Strauss, 2003). The possibility of such research in the postapartheid moment shows that nothing has changed. The universities are still white and black bodies have to adapt in these white institutions. Besides the transformational challenges around management and the general university culture, there are outstanding issues in terms of research and the actual knowledge production. The enduring methodological whiteness at South African universities, be they formerly black or white universities still remains largely unconfronted. According to Bhambra (2017), methodological whiteness is failure to acknowledge the role played by race in the structuring of the modern world and the ways in which knowledge is constructed and legitimated in this world. In methodological whiteness, the whiteness of the world and the academy becomes invisible because it is taken as the standard state of affairs (Bhambra, 2017). The white experience becomes a universal perspective where other perspectives are dismissed as identity politics.
0.3.1. Research problem
South Africa has a long heritage of western critical media and cultural studies (Salawu, 2013).
This scholarship has also grappled with transformation in the media and the crisis of representation in postapartheid South Africa, among other topics, from both critical western theories and feminist perspectives (Haupt, 2013; Steenveld, 2012; Steenveld, 2004). This debate on transformation in the media sector is linked to the broader debates on transformation in the whole country although media studies rarely make that link. Berger (1999) has argued that there are specific issues essential to a thorough analysis of media transformation in South Africa including the legal environment, media ownership, representativity, content and conceptions of media role, and audiences.
However, Boloka and Krabil argue that “transformation is not only about replacement of colours
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in mass media (although these matter)” (2000: 76). An intersectional transformation in the South African media would ensure that the texts it produces reflect broader society “not only in terms of race, but also socio-economic status, gender, religion, sexual orientation, region, language, etc”
(Boloka and Krabill, 2000: 76). They argue that there is a possibility that media transformation can be hijacked by the emerging black elite leaving out “grassroots communities of all colours”
(Boloka and Krabill, 2000: 76). What Boloka and Krabill (2000) bring our attention to is the problem of the sterility of western theory, including critical theory, in fully apprehending and comprehending the condition of media production in postapartheid South Africa. Without neglecting the value of western critical theory, especially the Marxist variant, this thesis seeks to address this challenge by taking the debate on transformation on a decolonial path (Moyo, 2020;
Chiumbu and Radebe, 2020; Chiumbu and Iqani, 2019; Mutsvairo, 2018; Moyo and Mutsvairo, 2018; Chasi and Rodny-Gumede, 2018; Chiumbu, 2016). The decolonial turn allows for the discussion of media transformation in the context of the calls for transformation in postapartheid South Africa.
Thinking in decolonial terms reveals how media and cultural studies, as part of the academy whose problematic history is discussed in the previous section, rarely reflects on itself. For all the good work it has done in critiquing media practice within the limits of western critical traditions, journalism, media and cultural studies disciplines still have to contend with their history. Simonson and Peters note that “the international history of communication and media studies has yet to be written. To this point, most histories have been national, with the bulk of attention devoted to North America and western Europe” (2008: 764). South Africa’s own history of communication and media studies is scant. What is available, part of it critical, can be regarded as the history of communication studies in South Africa rather than South African communication studies history.
This is because the disciplines developed as a debate between the settler English and settler Afrikaner variants of media studies (De Beer and Tomaselli, 2000). In terms of theory and conceptual frameworks, De Beer and Tomaselli identify five paradigms in South African journalism and mass communication scholarship between 1960 and 1990 that are the German and Netherlands traditions focusing on media law and ethics, the positivist approach, the functionalist approach, the interpretative approach and the Marxist approach (2009: 9). The problem is, therefore, the Eurocentricism of media theory in South Africa. Salawu (2013) notes that
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communication and media studies discipline in South Africa “allows for diversity– observable in the variety of labels, emphases and curricula” (2013: 87). This observable variety has excluded South Africa’s own black radical traditions in the intellectual work that coalesces around Black Consciousness. It continues to exclude African and Black studies approaches with their emphasis on taking seriously the black experience in a country traumatised by apartheid. In the past there have been moves to de-westernise and rethink the western-centric approaches from a postcolonial angle. However, overall, it can be argued that decolonial approaches still remain at their infancy and marginalized.
Besides the colonial and apartheid roots of the journalism, media and cultural studies disciplines, there is another problem that necessitates this research. Salawu further notes that, besides the size and capacity of the South African academy to proffer intellectual leadership in Africa, media and cultural studies in South Africa has the problem of being “withdrawn and too inward-looking” to the extent of ignoring the rest of the continent (2013: 87). This could be a result of years of apartheid isolation and the resultant South African exceptionalism. On this South African exceptionalism, Lazarus argues that at the height of apartheid “for most whites in South Africa, of course, South Africa was not really in Africa at all. It was a ‘’Western’ society that just happened, accidentally and inconsequentially, if irritatingly, to be situated at the foot of the dark continent”
(2004: 610). He further notes that this “dangerous and inexcusable ignorance about Africa” was also common within the anti-apartheid movement (Lazarus, 2004: 610). South African exceptionalism is not premised “on indifference but on categorical differentiation” (Lazarus, 2004:
610).
0.3.2. Research objectives
1. To decolonise media and communication research through shifting theoretical and methodological resources in the study of the representation of black African subjectivity in post-apartheid South Africa.
2. To trace the intersection of practices around the media, migration and urbanity in the discursive construction of black African subjectivity in post-apartheid South Africa.
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3. To challenge the hegemonic narrative of black-of-black violence as the single narrative around xenophobia and account for gaps between ‘officialised’ narratives and subaltern narratives of black African subjects in postcolonial Johannesburg.
0.3.3. Research questions
1. What would the study of media representations in postapartheid South Africa look like if conceptualised from Anti-colonial/decolonial theories?
2. How do practices around the media, migration and urbanity intersect in discursively constructing black African subjectivity in post-apartheid South Africa?
3. How do people in townships and other impoverished spaces of the city negotiate and understand their subjectivity and subjectivation in a postcolonial Johannesburg? What is the gap between their self-understanding and narratives of their subjectivity as
‘officialised’ in the media?