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The Global South: Recalibrating Our Geo-Cultural and Epistemic Agency

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The Decolonial Turn in Media Studies in Africa and the Global South

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Abstract

This chapter explores the complexity of the concept of the Global South in media and communication studies. Apart from its traditional view as a geographic concept, the chapter recasts the Global South as a non-geographic concept that is necessary as a springboard for the epistemic and cultural resistance against global coloniality. While the Global South is largely predicated on colonial difference, its explanatory power as a non-geographic concept is in that it reconceptualizes the old centre-periphery models once characteristic of the cultural imperialism debates of the 1970s and 1980s. Again, as a non-spatial category it has not only galvanized a resistance imaginary of intellectuals and social movements from both the geographic North and geographic South, but is also significant for unmasking the invisible workings of power and domination from the new deterritorialized empire and its knowledge power structure. The chapter argues that while social location and epistemic location remain important in the projects of theorizing the media, it is also important to see them as entangled. In other words, the South and the North as a locus of enunciation in media analysis defy simply binaristic geographical characterizations.

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  1. Department of Communication and Multimedia Design, American University of Nigeria, Yola, Nigeria

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Moyo, L. (2020). The Global South: Recalibrating Our Geo-Cultural and Epistemic Agency. In: The Decolonial Turn in Media Studies in Africa and the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52832-4_3

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