Decolonize Media:Tactics, Manifestos, Histories Nicholas Mirzoeff and Jack Halberstam Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Photo used by permission of the MTL Collective. Decolonize media! Inspired by Standing Rock, the Decolonize the Curriculum movement in South Africa, and long histories of resistance in the Americas, Palestine, and elsewhere, we propose that the next step for media activism as a whole is to place these spaces of opposition and refusal into extended engagement with current decolonial thought and practices. The "object" of study for this In Focus dossier is not the dominant (media) forms of racial capitalism, but rather decolonial action, thinking, and organizing. In short, putting your thinking body in space of all kinds—public, intellectual, academic—where it is not supposed to be and trying to [End Page 120] decolonize it. We witness the abuses of Harvey Weinstein's Hollywood and the insidious market uses of Mark Zuckerberg's social media, and we refuse to engage. In terms of media as such, we propose open-access publishing, open-source software, a return to independent filmmaking, and more strategic and informal uses of social media—all to resist the politics of the casting couch on the one hand and the market domination of all intimate and social relations on the other. We recognize the powerful interventions of hacktivists and the continued potential of web media and their copresence with organizers in reclaiming spaces of all kinds. In South Africa, media studies is committed to decolonizing, including decolonizing the curriculum. In similar fashion, we propose moving "media activism" from critical and political engagements with specific media and regulatory bodies, such as the Federal Communications Commission, to understanding activism in all its forms as media and mediation. Media is such a dominant, powerful, and daunting set of representational apparatuses that we cannot simply overturn them all. So we must hijack the spaces they colonize and decolonize the sites that they have infiltrated. Decolonizing is not a metaphor. It requires beginning with the dispossession of the Indigenous. This work is long term and short term. Aníbal Quijano proposes that coloniality is modernity.1 Coloniality, as we know, is not only territorial; it is a way of thinking, a mode of desiring, a set of relations. Perhaps for this reason, decolonization in the twentieth century did not end coloniality. The Americas are still settler colonies, and modern democracies produce neocolonial understandings of freedom and enclosure. If Palestine remains the paradigm of "classic" colonialism, there is now the new colonization of Africa, especially by China; the neo-colonization of finance capital; and the long legacies of colonial rule, epitomized by the recolonization of Puerto Rico post–Hurricane Maria as a "plantation future."2 Indeed, the current regime in the United States forces activists to update their thinking about decolonizing North America, now a site of multiple settler colonial forms, including the prison, the free market, the banking system, and social media. In this moment of revived white supremacy, with Nazi flags in the streets and right-wing "free speech" exploding online, we remember Frantz Fanon's observation that fascism is colonization in the metropole. It's St. Louis police chanting "Whose streets? Our streets!" not just as a rebuttal to Black Lives Matter protestors but in echo of the fascists at Charlottesville, who also used that chant. But fascism now is not the fascism of the twentieth century. Certainly, it resides in the racial logic of our current crisis and in the incorporative mechanisms of neoliberalism, but fascism is also visible in new economic consolidations of power. In the past, a fascist regime might come to power through a coup or a declared state of exception. Now, a fascist regime rides in on a tax bill. If early pronouncements about Facebook and Twitter located social media platforms right in the heart of decolonizing movements in Tunisia, Egypt, and the Arab Spring, we now find that all social media has been permanently and thoroughly (re)colonized and infiltrated. Certainly new media allows us to, in the words of the [End Page 121] Invisible Committee, "find each other," but it also allows them to find us! It is unclear whether new multitudes...
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Jan 1, 2019
Mahmudul Islam + 2
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