As communication research preoccupies itself with the problem of hegemony, homogeneity, and the role of media in the distribution of power and influence in societies, turning away from the same issues within the field itself is no longer justifiable.Georgette Wang (2011, p. 2)
Today, new voices and novel ideas in the discipline are ushering in what can be called the multicultural turn in communication theory. In the waves of globalization and localization, Western theories of communication are increasingly questioned by non-Western experiences and widely tested in non-Western contexts.Yoshitaka Miike (2007, p. 272)
Introduction
In recent years, the humanities and social sciences have been under an introspective and retrospective mood about their directions and indirections in the face of global, systemic, epistemic, and ecological crises that require new thinking and new ideas. In most academic disciplines, theory has reached a dead end in terms of its explanatory and transformative power. Indeed, the wellsprings of critical theory such as structuralism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism in the West are drying up and face the possibility of epistemic closure. The need for new critical imagination for new explanatory paradigms and new ways of knowing has compelled the Global North to look to the Global South for alternatives (Rehbein 2015; Santos 2018; Comaroff and Comaroff 2016). In universities, academic disciplines are going through a deep reflective process of rethinking or even unthinking Euro-American paradigms that are increasingly seen as advancing a hidden colonial and imperial agenda.
Media and communication studies have not been an exception in this soul-searching journey. The central and enduring problem for the interdiscipline has been how to transform the field from the grip of Eurocentric, Western-centric, and monocultural universalism to a more progressive cultural politics of a multicultural, inclusive, emancipatory theory and pedagogy. Indeed, there is a growing consensus within the field from both the Global North and the Global South that such an intervention is a necessary moral and political project in order to re-animate and decentre the act of theory building from the West and create a possibility for a new trans-epistemic knowledge paradigm born out of the dialogue between Southern and Northern epistemologies in the field. What is interesting about this North-South consensus is that it resonates with the call for a just World Information and Communication Order by the McBride Commission 40 years ago. The McBride Report argued that communication was indispensable to both culture and knowledge for all societies across space and time. Communication disseminated âculture for the purpose of preserving the heritage of the pastâ just as it also provided âa common fund of knowledge which enables people to live and operate as effective members of the society in which they liveâ (1980, p. 14). Its analysis of the potential of the emerging and nascent globalism on culture and education in the 1980s indirectly gestured towards the need for a multicultural media and communication studies with which media intellectuals are consumed today (pp. 25â31).
Notwithstanding the apologetic view that posits that the field of media and communication studies is relatively young and therefore in some ways still formative, the interdiscipline is now grown and over the years has matured in ways that require honest reflections about its epistemic and cultural relevance in a fast globalizing, but culturally diverse world. Since their emergence in the twentieth century from the Western world, media and communication studies have not only developed an intellectual canon of theory and method, but have also created several spaces for debate and conversation by way of regional and international conferences. The International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), for example, is now truly global in terms of its geo-political and cultural appeal. For instance, as of February 2020, its website indicated that the Associationâs membership comprised individuals and institutions from more than 100 countries across the North-South divide. In principle, the IAMCRâs global reach gestures towards a powerful wave of transnational cultural diversity that has created the much needed cultural ferment in the field. In addition to the several international journals, this signals the best of the times for an intellectual dialogue that seeks to preserve as much as it invents and translate as much as it transforms the critical traditions of the field.
Consequently, it should not come as a surprise that Georgette Wang has usefully reminded us that ignoring the question of hegemony, homogeneity, and geo-political and cultural power imbalances within the field was no longer acceptable. Indeed, the continued dominance of Western universalism as a locus of enunciation for the entire interdiscipline against the backdrop of a very globalizing field is an anathema. Western universalism amounts to the death of the dialogue between cultures. In many ways, Wangâs observation echoed the concerns of many scholars within the field from both the Global North and the Global South: concerns that have sometimes, but not always traversed gender, race, culture, and geography (Curran and Park 2000; Downing 2003; Miike 2007; Asante 2011; Thussu 2009; Bâ and Higbee 2012; Willems 2014). Again, in many ways, her views resonate with a conversation that is sometimes considered to be already underway. However, as she rightly observes, while the conversation might be global in scope, it is not multicultural in character. Indeed, as she perceptively put it: âOne may talk about media and communication studies around the world, yet the discussion is essentially an intellectual monologue with the mainstream West- with itselfâ (Wang 2011, p. 2). Over the last two decades, media and communication studies have witnessed the emergence of what can be loosely characterized as an intellectual movement that has been preoccupied with the need for a multicultural approach to theory in the interdiscipline, necessitated in part, by the cultural visibility of the âOtherâ through the technologies of globalization. The tropes of this broad-based movement have ranged from Africanization, Asianization, to internationalization, de-internationalization, and de-Westernization (Thussu 2009; Waisbord and Mellado 2014; Moyo and Mutsvairo 2018; DeWit 2013). However, the meaning of these concepts has largely remained kaleidoscopic just as their content and praxis have also been fuzzy. For example, on the one hand, the discourse of internationalization has mostly been abstract where liberal/colonial/imperial/capitalist internationalism is tacitly privileged as a normative position over the counterhegemonic internationalisms such the âSocialist/Pan-African/black/decolonial internationalismsâ (JeroĚnimo and Monteiro 2018). Yet as Jerenimo and Monteiro observe, the vocabularies and practices of internationalism as political and epistemic projects have not only been multiple, but also polycentric thus creating room for numerous possibilities for a variegated praxis in how we internationalize media education. On the other hand, as discursive formations that also aim to transform media and communication studies, Africanization and Asianization have been accused of advocating primordial blood and soil cultural essentialism. However, in reality, they are about the reaffirmation of African and Asian cultures and values as constitutive centres for media and communication knowledges and practices. As Nyamnjoh and Shoro (2011) lucidly explain, âfar from promising a single identity, [they are] about offering a mental space for disparate identities to co-exist in freedom and dignityâ (p. 35). The position of scholars like Francis Nyamjoh, Molefi Asante, Ngugi Wa Thiongâo, Yoshitaka Miike and others cannot be reduced to African or Asian ethnophilosophies of yesteryear that were sufficiently denounced and discredited by Paulin Hountondji (1996, 1997). In Endogenous Knowledge: Research Trails, Hountondji advocated for African indigenous knowledges that are refle...