Postcolonial Communication

Those who believe that contemporary 21st-century societies are still influenced by lingering colonial or imperial grammars, laws, customs, politics, or social practices are said to be united by their interest in what communication scholars call postcolonial methods, or postcolonial perspectives. Sometimes postcolonial critics who come from more humanistic backgrounds use social constructivist or deconstructivist ways of decoding these tests, whereas those who adopt more social-scientific approaches to postcolonialism use qualitative or quantitative approaches as they decode these lingering structures.

What the reader needs to keep in mind is that the “post” in postcolonial methods does not refer to the idea that colonial legacies are over but rather the opposite.[Page 1292] For example, it was no coincidence that when Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone were faced the threat of a spreading Ebola virus disease (EVD) epidemic in West Africa in 2014, the help that came their way often flowed from the lands of former colonizers of those beleaguered nations. In other words, the decolonization of Africa, that took place beginning in the 1960s, severed some, but not all material and symbolic ties between some of the former colonizers and the colonized. When it came time for needed humanitarian interventionism, talk of potential neocolonialism did not stand in the way of needed emergency containment help.

When scholars talk about using postcolonial methods, they usually use discourses that explanation the political, social, or cultural relationships that exist between the nations of “the North” (in the northern hemispheres) and the poorer nations usually said to be part of the global “South” (in the southern hemispheres). It was no coincidence that France, which used to rule Guinea, was expected to send doctors, gloves, medical supplies, mobile preparedness units and experts in infectious disease to the region, while the British, who once patrolled the shores of Sierra Leone looking for slave traders, were also expected to contribute their fair share to the people of Guinea. U.S. President Barack Obama, during the fall of 2014, sent more than 2,700 military personnel to Liberia because of the “special” relationship that the United States has had with Liberia since the time when James Monroe was president.

Those who use postcolonial methods often say that they are interested not only in abstract theories about racial, cultural, or gendered injustice, but about the practices of particular communities and state who may discriminate in particular ways. For example, Marwan M. Kraidy, using some of his original research that was conducted in places including Lebanon and Mexico, was interested in trying to show the continued relevance of older colonial ideas at the same time that he studied the contemporary and unequal power relationships that circulated in those countries.

Raka Shome, in her 2014 study of cultural remembrances of Princess Diana in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, used humanistic approaches as she unpacked the ways that White feminists interacted with people of color in many concrete situations. What intrigued Shome were the outpouring and emotions of those who seemed to identify with someone that they never met, this heterosexual, White, upper-class British woman who seemed to be an idealized vision of how so many were supposed to act. As far as Shome was concerned, Princess Diana became a condensation symbol for so many nationalistic, gendered, class, and ethnic junctions.

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