Television and the Afghan Culture Wars: Brought to You by Foreigners, Warlords, and Activists by Wazhmah Osman (review)

Reviewed by: Television and the Afghan Culture Wars: Brought to You by Foreigners, Warlords, and Activists by Wazhmah Osman Bahareh Badiei (bio) Television and the Afghan Culture Wars: Brought to You by Foreigners, Warlords, and Activists by Wazhmah Osman University of Illinois Press. 2020. 288 pages. $110.00 hardcover; $28.00 paper; also available in e-book. In the last few decades, anti-imperialist approaches to Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia (MENASA) studies have primarily been concerned with the launch of the global war on terror; the targeting of Afghan women as the more recent objects of the saviorhood industrial complex; and how women's plight has contributed to the entanglement of feminism, Orientalism, and global imperialism. Wazhmah Osman's essential book, Television and the Afghan Culture Wars: Brought to You by Foreigners, Warlords, and Activists, however, sets out to address the underexplored question of how Afghans themselves make sense of their lives, futures, and the media in the aftermath of years of violence and conflict. Osman generatively intervenes in critical media studies through an exploration of the mechanisms and dynamics of cultural production in a geopolitical context changed by war and violence. Her book presents a nuanced and multilayered analysis of the various actors involved in shaping the television landscape in Afghanistan. From foreign media conglomerates and warlords to feminist activists and religious conservatives, the book examines how each group has used television as a tool to [End Page 176] promote their respective agendas. Thus, by shifting her focus to television as the most dominant, widely accessed, and popular media form in Afghanistan, Osman aims "to redirect the global dialogue about Afghanistan to local Afghans themselves."1 Inspired by Lila Abu-Lughod's book Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt, Osman's thoroughly researched book draws on ethnographic observations, more than one hundred interviews, and archival analysis.2 Building on this multidimensional methodology, Osman offers compelling insights on local and transnational television in Afghanistan, its emergence within the complex and multilayered discourses of imperialism and nationalism, the political economy of its production, and its controversial reception in the country. She acknowledges her positionality and fluid social location as a researcher who leans on both American- and Afghanness, uses her family ties, and reflects on her mixed ethnic makeup—crucial aspects of her feminist anti-imperialist ethnographic lens. Osman's book places televisual exposures at the center of imperialist militarism, globalization, and the Afghan nation-building project. In doing so, it examines how televisual productions constitute and frame dialogues around gender, sexuality, democracy, ethnic identity, religion, and human rights while also analyzing how these framings are received, negotiated, and contested by the larger public. Afghan television networks—the country's most prominent and popular media outlets—can be both a major stumbling block and catalyst for change. As a result of their dynamic relationship with forces of imperialism and religious nationalism in Afghanistan, local television networks have become a source of complex potentials; through televisual forms, Afghans can develop agency and new subjectivities, as well as spaces for critique, democracy, and collective healing. A recurring theme through the book, and a significant part of its theorization of media in Afghanistan, is the concept of the gaze, presented here in nuanced form. Osman productively uses the interwoven conceptual frames of "development gaze" and "imperial gaze," with the former referring to the flawed and limited local developmental projects and movements "concerned with the betterment and development of Afghanistan and its people" and the latter implying the market-oriented and imperialist projects that expand the neocolonial interests of global powers.3 In chapter 4, Osman discusses these two categories of gaze as an extension of Abu-Lughod's concept of "developmental realism" and shows that the cultural productions of Afghan TV stations mostly follow the development gaze. However, we also learn that international television productions in Afghanistan have made genuine efforts to represent ethnic minorities and encourage unity among Afghans, despite their historic focus on women and ethnic Pashtuns as the ultimate objects in need of liberation. Thus, the relationship between imperial and development gazes in Afghan television has created a contested media environment. It is the tension...