When Postcolonial Studies Interrupts Media Studies†

Abstract

This article utilizes a postcolonial theoretical framework to challenge and unsettle the ways in which media has been historicized in media studies where the time of the North Atlantic West is taken to be an unspoken normative assumption through which we chart media’s development. Further, this article attempts to move us to the Global South by calling attention to media objects and the mediated lives that function through those objects, that have not received any place in media history. Nor are they recognized as a media object. The basic questions that this article raises are: (a) what happens to our understanding of media’s development when we complicate the temporality (North Atlantic Western) through which we narrate the history of media, and (b) What happens to our understanding of what media is when 24/7 electrification is not taken as a norm in our recognition of a media or technology object. What other media objects and mediated lives might then become visible?