The Media Decolonial Theory: Re-theorising and Rupturing Euro-American Canons for South African Media

Abstract

The hegemony of Euro-American canonical approaches and theories in the study of media and communications has been epistemically criticised from both the Global North and Global South locations. In the last two decades there has been a media studies de-Westernisation movement consisting of a self-critique by scholars based in the West, that have moved towards exogenous calls to decolonise theory. The decolonial turn has epistemically begun in many Global South countries such as South Africa where it was ushered in by the “fallist” student protests in 2015 that highlighted the need for decolonising education and knowledge. The vantage point of this article is that in order for the decolonial project to be meaningful, decolonisation is a process that must continuously develop after the fact of symbolic movements and events. This article makes the case that for the global imbalances of knowledge production in the Global North and Global South to be addressed in media studies, re-theorisation with indigenous knowledge is central to the decolonisation process. In this regard, I propose a new theory for South Africa, the media decolonial theory, and highlight colonial legacies still present in the post-apartheid media.

Keywords:

• African communications theory
• decolonising
• decolonising knowledge
• de-Westernising
• Global South
• media studies theory
• South Africa