In “Postcolonial Approaches to
Communication: Charting the Terrain, Engaging the Intersections,” Raka Shome
and Radha Hegde outline the role scholars and students have in their study of
postcolonialism and communication. The two argue that we must responsibly “question and map” the
intertwined relationship between the histories, contexts, and geographies of
people and nations. This is an interventionist point of view advocating for
informed contextualization and action.
In their overview of the relationship that exists between communication studies and postcolonial studies, they warn colleagues to beware of how “the discrete positioning of cultures without any sense of their interconnected histories reproduces the violence of colonial modernities and fixes difference in a spectacle of otherness” (263). In other words, one must be conscientious and careful of arming oneself with the knowledge of many contexts, including historical, geopolitical, racial, and cultural context of one’s subject area. In acknowledging the specific context(s) of a topic, for example Vietnamese immigration to the United States between 1975 and 1995, one is less likely to make the mistake of falling into the essential binary traps that have long reduced the world to divisions between the global North/South, East/West.
The authors warn how “institutionalized knowledge is always subject to the forces of colonialism, nation, geopolitics, and history” (251). Therefore, we must question the phenomena, effects, and affects of postcolonialism. How do our observations relate to the communication of ideas, identity, or nationalism?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the author of Half of a Yellow Sun, raises these types of questions in her writing. In her remarks for a TED talk, she points out the “danger of a single story” narrative. She emphasizes “how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story” and recounts her own experience growing up in eastern Nigeria reading British and American storybooks. Until she encountered Chinua Achebe and other African writers (who “saved” her), she did not know that girls like herself—with skin the color of chocolate and “kinky hair that cannot fit into pony tails” could actually “exist in literature.”
In the process of reading the Shome and Hegde article, I’ve become aware of what Homi Bhabha meant when he postulated how the “western metropole must [now] confront its postcolonial history, told by its influx of post-war migrants and refugees, as an indigenous or native narrative internal to its national identity” (254). Adichie’s excellent talk below builds on this struggle.
