Postcolonial Media Studies

The work of Stuart Hall, cultural theorist and sociologist, has been central to my own intellectual development in postcolonial media studies, as it has been for others engaged with questions about culture and difference, political economy and popular culture, postcolonialism and Marxism. I first encountered Hall, a postcolonial subject himself, racialized in Great Britain, on the shelves of a bookcase in the least-visited section of the British Council Library (BCL) in Mumbai, India. The BCL, that vestige and sign of colonialism and an embodiment of postcoloniality, for a teenager for whom the British raj was a story in a history textbook, was a site to access “high culture.” Indeed, this is precisely how the BCL constituted and narrated itself. Sutured to that narrative, the BCL was where I could access and read Austen, the Brontë sisters, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Dickens, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Byron, in short where I could access...