Paula Chakravartty

Lecture Abstract:

As the initial optimism about the promise of decolonization was beginning to fade in 1963, Franz Fanon wrote  that the “ruling species” or the colonial “outsider from elsewhere”  governs through violence. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon allows us to think conceptually about how neo-colonial violence ought to shape our theories of the political, that undergird debates about media and democracy confronting the ascendence of 21st century fascism. The extant scholarship on media and democracy recognizes a substantive gap between media freedom and autonomy when it comes to foreign versus domestic media coverage, but tends to see this wide gap as cursory to its larger theoretical claims and stakes. Beyond the limitations of methodological nationalism in studying media and technology infrastructures that are by design global, we have to recognize that theories of “free” commercial media and “neutral/objective journalism” were themselves forged in the mid-twentieth century in the context of the “three-sided conflict of the Cold War” (Tully, 2021: 24). This includes the most under-theorized of the three sites for media studies scholars today: the site of decolonization and self-determination in what was then known as the “Third World”. In foregrounding the era of decolonization, we stretch our analysis to trace the colonial capitalist and racial continuities of media infrastructures as superstructures, as Fanon recognized, recalibrating our discussions of the scourge of disinformation today as simply a right-wing aberration to our shared “enlightenment values’ (Benkler, et. al.2018, Bennett and Livingston, 2018; Habermas, 2023). This talk focuses on a series of three transformative US political interventions beginning with Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s, and culminating in what is now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in the1960s. I argue that recognizing the truncated role of US commercial “free” media infrastructures and its formative and contradictory power in maintaining the global color line through the Cold War and its aftermath, is vital to how we theorize the limits of corporate liberal media and the “democratic delusions” (Fenton, 2024) of the present.  My attempt to find a common thread across these three geographically dispersed sites of U.S. colonial intervention against democratic anti-colonial economic self-determination, is meant to provoke analyses that might recognize that disinformation is in fact constitutive of the logic of “free” commercial media infrastructures designed and deployed by the “ruling species” as the most powerful “racial arsenal” against the democratic aspirations of subaltern populations (Ferreira da Silva, 2007).  

Workshop Abstract:

The workshop will provide a brief overview of an on-going collaboration between academic researchers based in New York and Toronto and and a collectively run feminist media organization:   Khabar Lahariya (Chambal Media) a “woman-run, ethical independent news platform” covering micro-politics from rural North India.  Our research, based in the state of Uttar Pradesh, focused on the “upayable debt” of migrant workers to recruiters and middle-men that often traps workers across the gendered, caste and class hierarchy of construction labor in a cycles of poverty and unfreedom, despite and often through their mobility across local and transnational borders (Buckley & Chakravartty, forthcoming; Buckley, Chakravartty & Gill, 2022). Drawing on theories of the racial logic of  “unplayable debt” and predatory lending as racial subjugation (Chakravartty & Ferreira da Silva, 2012; Ferreira da Silva, 2022), I turn to the question of the ethics of internationally funded research and what we (as scholars) owe, based on what we learn from the debtors themselves? To do this, I will share notes on the making of a documentary (co-directed by Megha Acharya and Geeta Devi),  that has grown out of our collective research, where we attempt (with no guarantees) to represent “unpayable debt”  from the perspective of oppressed caste women brick kiln workers themselves. The workshop will feature a screening of Meelon Dur/Miles Away, followed by discussion of the film, specifically focusing on ethical research methods and collaboration across patriarchal authoritarian polities. 

Biography:

More information please check out Chakravartty’s website.