Postcolonial Studies Meets Media Studies

... with Kai Merten

1. Why a book on this subject?

A rapprochement of Postcolonial Studies and Media Studies is important and timely. Both fields can clearly challenge and enrich each other, and what we need is a volume that surveys the points of contact between Postcolonial Studies and Media Studies both thematically and conceptually. The book is exactly that: a range of articles discussing overlapping concerns by scholars from both sides and a collection of key terms and sample studies of Postcolonial Media Cultures, pertinent for scholars and students alike.

2. What relevance does this subject have in the current research debates?

Postcolonial Studies is currently reviewing both its objects of knowledge and its methodologies in order to negotiate its future relevance in a world that changes rapidly both technically and geopolitically. Scholars from the field have taken issue with what they see as the literature-centeredness of Postcolonial Studies and have called for analyses of digital media texts. Media Studies, on the other hand, while it has recently made a turn to the ›global‹, is often criticized, internally and externally, for its lack of political and ideological awareness. Therefore, both Postcolonial Studies and Media Studies will profit enormously from the encounter with the other side.

3. What new perspectives does your book open up?

It shows us how negotiations of identity and questions of power pervade contemporary media currents. It also shows us the importance of the media revolutions of the 20th and the 21st centuries for an understanding of the postcolonial developments and neocolonial backlashes in the world today.

4. Who would you preferably like to discuss your book with?

With Edward Said, to show him how his work lives on and can be carried into fields outside literature and music, and with Friedrich Kittler, to tell him there are media and media histories outside Europe ...

5. Your book in only one sentence:

In our book, Postcolonial Studies and Media Studies meet in order to help us understand the contemporary world, both technically and geopolitically, both as experts and as students, and both as travellers and as sojourners.