Mediating cultural diversity in a globalised public
space
Isabelle Rigoni, Eugénie Saitta
1
Acknowledgements
Most of the chapters of this book have been presented as papers at the international
conference An alternative self-representation? Ethnic minority media, between hegemony and
resistances, organised by the EU excellence team MINORITYMEDIA and the CNRS research
center MIGRINTER, at the MSHS (Poitiers, France), 18-19 March 2010. The conference has
been supported by:
University of Poitiers
Maison des sciences de l’homme et de la société (MSHS), Poitiers
Research center Migrations internationales, espaces et sociétés (MIGRINTER), Poitiers
Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS)
Région Poitou-Charentes
European Commission, Marie Curie Actions (6th PCRDT), excellence team MINORITYMEDIA
European regional development fund (ERDF)
Open Society Institute
The French national agency for social cohesion and equal opportunities (ACSE)
The book has received the support of the Center of research on political action in Europe
(CRAPE), Rennes.
2
Contents
Foreword
Notes on the Contributors
Chapter 1 – Democratising the public space? Ethnic minority media in a glocal context.
Isabelle Rigoni, Eugénie Saitta
Part I – Internet as a space of super-diversity?
Chapter 2 – Diasporas in online spaces: practices of self-representation and belonging.
Olga Guedes Bailey
Chapter 3 – ‘Netizenship’ and migrants’ online mobilisation: transnational participation and
collective action in the digital era.
Mihaela Nedelcu
Part II – Towards a new public communicative space?
Chapter 4 – In the discourse laboratory: migrant media and the politics of migration.
Gavan Titley
Chapter 5 – Migrant minority media: towards a democratisation of the Western mediascape?
Liliana Suárez Navaz, Alicia Ferrández Ferrer
Chapter 6 – Diasporic media as the ‘focus’ of communicative networking among migrants.
Cigdem Bozdag, Andreas Hepp, Laura Suna
Part III – Limits and contradictions of counter-hegemonic resistances
Chapter 7 – Cultural practices and media production: the case of Bollywood.
Daya Kishan Thussu
Chapter 8 – Giving voice to voiceless or giving peace to the establishment? The ambivalent
institutionalisation of ‘minorities’’alternative media in Mexico and Israel.
Benjamin Ferron
Chapter 9 – Sourcing and representation routines at the Black African press in the UnitedKingdom.
Ola Ogunyemi
3
Foreword
While this book was coming to life, the world was in turmoil. A global financial crisis has
been threatening the current world order. The Arab Spring reshuffled the political map in the
Middle East. In Europe, political and economic concerns about the future of the EU brought
into the European public spheres some big political, even existentialist, questions: What and
who does Europe actually represent? Who is running it? How much are people in control of
the apparatus of power in the EU? In trying to manage some of the public’s concerns,
European leadership developed multi-targeted ideological campaigns: multiculturalism found
itself under fierce attack as being part of the problem. The powerful leadership of the EU also
targeted the work ethos at the European periphery as other to real Europe. New and old
Others became, yet again, ever-present within and around European boundaries, ‘threatening’
what Europe and the west are supposed to represent. Powerful discourses of We-ness and of
Other-ness have made great advances in mainstream political debates and the media.
Germans Vs Greeks; illegal migrants Vs skilled screened migrants; asylum Vs border control
are only some of the oppositions that regularly frame debates in the public sphere.
Yet, and while decisions made at the centres of economic and political power exposed global
subjects to major global risks, the street has responded in different ways. Public space
became, at least momentarily, redefined in the street. The Arab world experienced revolutions
rarely seen in our times, especially in such intensity and extent. A new movement, Occupy,
claimed that it spoke on behalf of the 99% of the world’s people as it protested against
capitalism and greed. And the riots in burning streets of British cities might have lacked a
clear message but they shouted out despair and marginalisation.
Who speaks for whom and where? Are acts of despair or of political protest in the street
forming new alternatives or do they just reflect the fragmentation of the public sphere? Are
4
the mainstream public spheres now settled into reproducing hegemonic voices that further
marginalise minorities? Are there spaces that bring together ‘the street’ and decision-making
power, and where minorities find a voice and a presence?
Sassen has been writing about ‘presence’ as politics, especially for marginalized groups who
find little space to be heard and seen in the mainstream. For her, it is the city that provides
marginalised groups with spaces to see themselves and to articulate their claims.
Intensification of urbanisation and of mediation has brought significant opportunities for
political presence; it has also brought forward the need to rethink conceptualisations of the
public sphere and its containment. As Sassen continues: ‘The loss of power at the national
level produces the possibility for new forms of power and politics at the subnational level.
The national as container of social process and power is cracked’ (2005: 86). If the nation is
indeed cracked, what happens on local and transnational level, on physical streets and virtual
ones has consequences on the ways in which we see ourselves, we hear others, and form
communities and polities.
The urban street, which Sassen talks about, is a physical space. But the ‘visualness’ (ibid.)
that it brings to minorities and marginalised groups invites us to think of the urban street both
as a physical space and as a mediated space, where ‘visualness’ and representation (political
and mediated) beyond restrictive spaces can come to life. Ethnic, diasporic, minority media
often come to life in the city, where intense juxtapositions of difference are realised and
where diversity emerges as we literally rub into each others’ difference. Such media represent
one of those systems of communication and expression that challenge understandings of the
public sphere as singular and of the nation as a taken-for-granted framework for identity and
citizenship. Ethnic and diasporic media are media of local, national and transnational reach;
they are media characterised by paradoxical contradictions: claiming to represent
communities; aiming to make profit; torn by amateurism; promoting long-distant nationalism;
5
celebrating cosmopolitanism or flying the flag of communitarianism. More than anything, in
their rich, even contradictory roles, these media demonstrate something very important: the
public spheres they are part of, or the public sphericules as often now called, are not only
Other to the mainstream. Diasporic and ethnic media are not the marginal and poor relative of
the mainstream media. These media reflect a world in itself: rich, powerful, contested and
torn by power struggles within and with the hegemonic system of media power. As all media,
these also make advances in mediating political and cultural life; they inform people and give
space for voicing claims and self-representations; they link the urban street with the virtual
and mediated street and they are part of public life. Bauman (2005) argues that publicness,
especially as associated with urban life, makes it possible to live together in difference. It is
this publicness of contradictory and co-existing discourses of identity and politics that
normalises living with difference. As Bauman puts it: ‘It is the exposure to difference that in
time becomes the major factor in happy cohabitation by causing the urban roots of fear to wilt
and fade’ (2005: 78). And ethnic and diasporic media contribute to this publicness.
It is in this context that the media this book debates and analyses need to be studied and
understood. As systems of representation that are complex and rich, they destabilise the
dualities of a homogenous We against a homogenous Other. As they expand across local,
national and transnational spaces, they challenge notions of the public sphere as singular and
of the public space as physically contained. And as they provide opportunities for selfrepresentation to groups that often find themselves at the margins of society, they open up the
urban and mediated street to be a space for presence, possibly and hopefully a space for
democratic participation.
Myria Georgiou
London, April 2012
6
References
Bauman Z. (2005) Liquid Life (Cambridge: Polity Press).
Sassen S. (2005) ‘The repositioning of citizenship and alienage: emergent subjects and spaces
for politics’, Globalizations, 2(1), 79-94.
7
Notes on the Contributors
Cigdem BOZDAG, M.A., is research assistant at the ZeMKI (Centre for Media,
Communication and Information Research), University of Bremen, Germany, and worked
there in the research project ‘Communicative connectivity of ethnic minorities: The
integrative and segregative potential of digital media for diasporas’ (2008-2010). Currently,
she is working on a dissertation on diasporic cultures and the appropriation of diasporic Web
pages in the Moroccan and Turkish Diasporas in Germany.
cbozdag@uni-bremen.de
Alicia FERRÁNDEZ FERRER is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Social
Anthropology, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain). She has a B.A. in anthropology
(2004), and an M.A. in Migration and Intercultural Relations (2006). Her research deals with
the role of minority media in the acquisition of citizenship rights by migrant minorities. She
has carried out fieldwork in Spain and England.
alicia.ferrandez@uam.es
Benjamin FERRON is a researcher in political science at the Center for Research on
Political Action in Europe (CRAPE-CNRS, Rennes, France). Specialised in sociology of
social movements, media studies and political globalisation, he defended a Ph.D. dissertation
in 2012 on The Media Repertoires of Alterglobalisation Mobilisations in Palestine and
Chiapas (1994-2006). Contribution to a Constructivist Analysis of the Transnational Society.
benjamin.ferron@univ-rennes1.fr
http://www.crape.univ-rennes1.fr/membres/ferron_benjamin.htm
Olga GUEDES BAILEY is the director of the M.A. Media and Globalisation at Nottingham
Trent University, U.K. She is the chair of the section Diaspora, Migration and Media of the
the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA). She has
published essays on global audiences, environmentalism, journalistic practice, alternative
media, race and representation, the politics of communication of ethnic minorities and
diasporas in western societies, digital cultures, journalism and history, and online citizen
journalism. Her latest books include a co-authored book entitled Understanding Alternative
Media (UK, Open University, 2008) and an edited collection Transnational Lives and the
Media: re-imagining diasporas (UK, Palgrave, 2007).
olga.bailey@ntu.ac.uk
Andreas HEPP is professor of media and communications at the ZeMKI (Centre for Media,
Communication and Information Research), University of Bremen, Germany. He is author
and co-author of eight books as well as co-editor of a number of further books, including
Connectivity, network and flow: Conceptualising contemporary communications (2008, with
Friedrich Krotz, Shaun Moors and Carsten Winter) and Media events in a global age (2009,
with Nick Couldry and Friedrich Krotz). At the moment he is working on the book Cultures
of mediatization that will appear in 2012. One of his main research areas is media, migration
and diasporas.
Andreas.hepp@uni-bremen.de
Mihaela NEDELCU holds a Ph.D. in sociology and is an associate professor at the
Sociology Institute of the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland. She is the author of the
book Le migrant online. Nouveaux modèles migratoires à l’ère du numérique (Paris,
8
L’Harmattan, collection ‘Questions sociologiques’, 2009) and of the edited volume La
mobilité internationale des compétences. Situations récentes, approches nouvelles (Paris,
L’Harmattan, collection ‘Questions sociologiques’, 2004). Her main research areas are
transnationalism, globalisation and cosmopolitanism, skilled migrations and the ICTs impact
on migratory processes and dynamics.
mihaela.nedelcu@unine.ch
Olatunji OGUNYEMI is a principal lecturer in journalism at the Lincoln School of
Journalism, University of Lincoln, UK. He is the convener of Media of Diaspora Research
Group. He regularly publishes in academic journals including the Journal of Black Studies,
Journalism Studies and presents research papers at national and international conferences. His
research involves an ethnographic approach in comprehending the diversity of the media of
African diasporas and the global diaspora connectivity.
oogunyemi@lincoln.ac.uk
Isabelle RIGONI is a sociologist affiliated at MIGRINTER-CNRS (Poitiers) and MICACNRS (Bordeaux). From 2006 to 2010, she has been the team leader of the EU Marie Curie
Excellence Team MINORITYMEDIA (6th PCRDT) on ethnic minority media in 8 European
countries. She holds a PhD from the University Paris 8 (France, 2000), and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations (University of Warwick, 20012003) and at the Centre Marc Bloch (Berlin, 2004-2005). She has been teaching at the
universities Paris 8, Evry, Bordeaux 3, Poitiers, and she is currently teaching at INSEEC. She
is working and has published extensively on ethnic media, migrations, transnational
mobilities and gender.
isabelle.rigoni@club-internet.fr
http://irigoni.blogspot.com/
Eugénie SAITTA is senior lecturer at the University Rennes 1 and is affiliated to the Centre
for political research in Europe (CRAPE, Rennes). She was a post-doctoral fellow in the EU
excellence team MINORITYMEDIA (Minority, Media and Representation Across Europe). She is
the co-editor of Le journalisme au féminin (with B. Damian-Gaillard and C. Frisque, PUR,
2010). She is working on ethnic media, political journalism, and gender.
eugeniesaitta@yahoo.fr
Liliana SUAREZ-NAVAZ (Ph.D. Stanford 1998) lives and works in Spain, where she does
research about migration, ethnic relations, citizenship and media in transnational social
fields. She is professor of anthropology, director of the Graduate Program for Migration and
Interethnic Studies and the Graduate Program of Public Anthropology, both at the Autónoma
University at Madrid (UAM). She is author of the books Rebordering of the Mediterranean:
Boundaries and Citizenship in Southern Europe (Berghahn Books 2004), The fight of the
‘Sans Papiers’ and the Extension of Citizenship. Critical Perspectives from the UE and USA
(Traficantes de Sueños 2007) and Postcolonial Feminisms: Theory and Practice from the
Margins” (Cátedra 2008), Feminisms in Anthropology. New Critical Issues (Ankulegi
Antropologia Elkatea 2008). She has carried fieldwork in America (California, Mexico, Chile,
Ecuador), Southern Europe (Spain, Romania) and Western Africa (Senegal).
liliana.suarez@uam.es
Laura SUNA, M.A., is research assistant at the ZeMKI (Centre for Media, Communication
and Information Research), University of Bremen, Germany, and worked there in the research
project ‘Communicative connectivity of ethnic minorities: The integrative and segregative
9
potential of digital media for diasporas’ (2008-2010). She studied Sociology at the University
of Latvia in Riga and worked as a research assistant at the Advanced Social and Political
Research Institute in Riga. The topic of her dissertation project is media identities, popular
media cultures and the potential of transcultural mediation between Latvian- and Russianspeaking youth in Latvia.
Lauras@uni-bremen.de
Daya Kishan THUSSU is professor of international communication and the co-director of
the India Media Centre at the University of Westminster in London. Among his key
publications are: Media and Terrorism: Global Perspectives (Sage, 2012); Internationalizing
Media Studies (Routledge, 2009); News as Entertainment: The Rise of Global Infotainment
(Sage, 2007); Media on the Move: Global Flow and Contra-Flow (Routledge, 2007);
International Communication - Continuity and Change, third edition (Bloomsbury Academic,
forthcoming); and Electronic Empires - Global Media and Local Resistance (Arnold, 1998).
He is the founder and Managing Editor of the Sage journal Global Media and
Communication.
D.K.Thussu@westminster.ac.uk
http://www.westminster.ac.uk/schools/media/camri/research-staff/thussu,-daya
Gavan TITLEY is lecturer in media studies in the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.
He is the author, with Alana Lentin, of The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a
Neoliberal Age (Zed Books, 2011). His research has been published in a range of
international journals, including Ethnic and Racial Studies, European Journal of Cultural
Studies, and Journalism: Theory, Criticism, Practice.
gavan.titley@nuim.ie
10
Chapter 1
Democratising the public space? Ethnic minority media in a glocal context.1
Isabelle Rigoni, Eugénie Saitta
The communication practices of ethnic minority groups can only be properly understood if we
situate them in the context of globalised exchanges and the widespread democratisation of
access to technological tools. Our aim in this introduction is therefore to set up a number of
ways forward in thinking about how we understand contemporary phenomena of mobility,
new conceptions of space, and the transformation in information and communication
technologies (ICTs), which together contribute to the reshaping of the relationships within
and between ethnic groups, as well as interrogating the notion of public space.
ICTs, MEDIA AND MIGRATIONS
A series of questions and research around ICTs, media, and migrations first developed in the
1980s, becoming more pronounced from the 1990s when the internet took off. The available
literature approaches this theme from a variety of angles and at the intersection of several
disciplines (for a review of the literature, see Mattelart, 2007, 2009). One line of questioning
falls within the sociology of inter-ethnic relations and the issue of migration and mobility, and
relates to the role of ICTs in processes of identification and belonging, and how migrants
maintain links with their families and their networks in their countries of origin. A second line
1
This chapter has been translated from French by Vicki Whittaker.
11
of questioning arises within the sociology of journalism and media, and concerns the
struggles over representation in relation to immigration – between mainstream and minority
media production within the host country, as well as over how these are perceived by
migrants. A third line of questioning comes from the sociology of social movements, and
focuses on the emergence of a collective migrant voice in public space as a result of ICTs, and
more generally on new methods of political participation, collective mobilisation and civic
engagement.
At the heart of this book lies a focus on ethnic minority media. We thus take seriously
Husband’s proposal (1994, p.14) that we should analyse ‘the situation of ethnic minorities as
active agents in media production.’ We should clarify that the concept of media that we use
here goes beyond a legitimist definition which is concerned only with mainstream media and
thus recreates the ‘indigenous’ hierarchies within journalism, to take account of other less
conventional forms of media, such as posters, blogs, and online music or video platforms, etc.
Although this book falls squarely within the tradition of works on ICTs, media, and
migrations, it also tries to learn something from them so as to avoid a number of pitfalls. Our
first critical position is that we are not celebrating the new per se. Three arguments serve to
question the notion of a ‘technological tipping point’ at the turn of the 1990s. The first is the
long tradition of migrant use of ICTs to keep in touch with their country of origin – Dahan
and Scheffer (2001) cite letters sent by post horses as well as by sea, or even by telegraph.
The second is the idea that, rather than replacing previous methods of communication, the
new technologies complement them and merge with them, thus constituting a range of
possibilities. Looking at the ways in which migrants organise collective mobilisation, Bimber
(2000) demonstrates the extent to which the distinctions between ‘traditional civic
engagement’ and ‘technology related civic engagement’ are blurred, and practices are
intertwined, such that it seems artificial to separate them. The third argument encourages us to
12
consider the transformations at work in the ways in which migrants make use of ICTs:
although it may not be the case that ‘new’ technologies replace ‘older’ ones, nonetheless over
time we can observe a change in usage. This celebration of the new is inseparable from a
further implicit assumption, that of the primacy of the internet, which we challenge here: this
is our second critical position.
In extolling the virtues of ‘computerised communication’, ‘electronic intervention’ and ‘rapid
communication’ as leading automatically to democratisation, some writers have been unable
to escape a certain technological determinism (Appadurai, 2008). Two arguments lead us to
take stock of the limits of the internet, and of its effects. The first relates to the question of
access to the internet. It is useful here to recall the ‘digital divide’ between countries, regions,
and urban and rural areas; and similarly to emphasise how much this access depends on an
actor’s socio-economic and cultural resources, which also dictate power relations within and
between social groups (Kosnick, 2007). Access further depends on sociographic
characteristics – such as gender – as Casula (2011) demonstrates when she notes how difficult
it has been for Italian women to become part of the information society. The second argument
regarding the limits of the internet aims to resituate analysis within the context in which the
interaction under scrutiny is taking place. This context constitutes a framework of constraints
– and ultimately of opportunities – which requires analysis at several scales, starting with the
national, state scale. At the end of a discussion of how the Chinese state controls the means of
communication ‘to shape a sense of national community in a society opening to external
influences’ (1999, p.63), Ong advocates examining the ‘national, transnational, and politicaleconomic structures that enable, channel, and control the flows of people, things, and ideas’
(1999, p.11). To our analysis of external constraints, we must also add the constraints which
exist within the media. This book thus adopts a third critical position: that of not promoting an
uncritical vision of ethnic minority media.
13
To forearm ourselves against a lack of critical distance, we need to dispel three preconceived
ideas; the first of which is a view of ethnic minority media as a uniform and homogeneous
whole. Several writers have demonstrated the very great range of positions occupied by these
media in the journalistic field. In this present work, Ferrández Ferrer et Suárez Navaz (chapter
5) thus distinguish three strategies (instrumental, clientelist and organic) used by Latin
American journalists in Spain. The second preconception is to assume that these media and
those working within them are intrinsically subversive by the very fact of their ethnic identity.
This is in effect to forget both the conditions of production within which these media operate
(for example, some are driven by the demands of the business; see Ben Amor-Mathieu, 2000 ;
Naficy, 1993) and the conflicts of identity (professional, ethnic, etc.) which journalists from
ethnic minority backgrounds may experience (Husband, 2005); or the question of the ‘burden
of representation’, a term first used to describe the situation of black film-makers who felt
under an obligation to take advantage of every opportunity to represent the interests and
viewpoints of the Afro-Caribbean community (Cottle 1998, p.306). The third preconception
would be to assume a hard distinction between ethnic minority media and mainstream media
based on a binary conception of media space. This would be to deny the complexity of
journalism and the relationships which exist between different types of media. Thus, just as it
seems not useful to treat all ethnic minority media as a uniform whole, it’s also important not
to overstate the internal homogeneity of communities, diasporas, migrants, or ethnic
minorities. Our fourth and final critical position is thus not to promote an essentialised or
reified vision of the social groups we analyse.
To avoid projecting a unified vision of a social group which neglects the issues and struggles
over representation at work within it, the researcher who approaches ICTs as a means of
crystallising a collective voice defending ethnic minority interests must include an analysis of
the social group in question. One must take account of the conflict (in terms of political,
14
social, religious and linguistic confrontations) and competition within these groups to attain
control of the movement’s leadership (Cossée, 2010). Beyond these struggles, it’s also the
objective qualities of individual actors which form the basis of inequalities in access to the
position of spokesperson. Social groups are in effect structured by unequal power
relationships. Although generational differences have been well documented in a series of
works (Gillespie, 1995), sociographical differences, and differences associated with actors’
economic, social and cultural capital and resources, remain largely absent from the available
literature. Moreover, we should not overstate the capacity of ICTs to bring together
populations scattered across the globe. Although they may constitute additional means of
bringing people together physically (such as in demonstrations) (Moua, 2010), it must also be
acknowledged that ICTs often contribute to reinforcing pre-existing social relationships,
rather than creating new ones.
Our objective is thus to take stock of both continuity and change in the rapid development of
ICTs since the 1980s–90s, and of how they have been appropriated by ethnic minorities.
OLD AND NEW COMMUNICATION PATTERNS AMONG ETHNIC GROUPS:
TOWARDS A PARADIGM OF MOBILITY
Changes in communication practices amongst ethnic minorities – for example through the use
of digital technologies – have led to new theoretical frameworks. Globalisation and global
mobility are creating multicultural and multi-ethnic societies; new communication patterns
are triggering the development of a ‘network society’ (Castells, 1996). Recent studies have
highlighted exchanges and patterns that tend to disregard contemporary borders and occur
regionally in and between metropolitan centres, their catchment areas, and the traffic and
15
dissemination corridors linking them (Georgiou, 2006). This leads us to question the
relevance of migration studies in relation to cultural communication. At the very least we
should consider moving towards a sociology which is not exclusively linked to migration but
also, more widely, to mobility.
In fact, although no-one can accuse migration studies as an area of having got it completely
wrong, nonetheless it no longer offers the right tools to analyse the complexity of inter-ethnic
social relationships (Bertheleu, 2007; Glaser, Moynihan, 1975; Guillaumin, 1972; Juteau,
1999; Martiniello, 2005; Simon, 2006) or the ways in which identity is being reconstituted in
contemporary societies, which is in part linked to the accelerated development of ICTs since
the 1980s/1990s. Admittedly, international migration has not slowed down, and ethnic
minority media are continually being reshaped as the next big wave of migrants arrive
(Rigoni, 2010a, b). However migration is no longer the sole factor which binds together
producers and audiences of ethnic minority media. The long history of migration, including in
countries new to immigration like Spain or Italy who first opened their doors to immigrants
only forty or so years ago, has meant that there is more than one generation with multiple
cultural identities. What is yet more striking since the widespread democratisation of access to
ICTs, is that cultural and informational exchanges between people across territories have
become commonplace. An increasing proportion of these virtual exchanges are carried out not
(solely) by migrants, but by a multiplicity of citizens with different cultural backgrounds
(such as the descendants of immigrants), or by those who are influenced by other cultures or
religions (like the Muslim converts, whose role is significant in the creation and presentation
of Muslim media such as Emel in the United Kingdom, Die Islamische Zeitung in Germany,
webislam.com and radio Inforislam in Spain).
In this rapidly changing context, the essential paradigm which allows us to think through
these transformations is mobility. Mobility is increasingly understood as the forging of links
16
rather than the crossing of distance. As a result of ICTs individuals no longer have to cross
borders in order to create and maintain links with others across the globe. Cultural exchanges
no longer only take place face-to-face. Ethnic minority media, particularly via the internet,
provide an excellent illustration of this social reality. The virtue of the mobility paradigm lies
in our rediscovery of the value of relationships, which have evolved as a result of the internet
and ICTs2. Increasingly, mobility is to be approached as a socio-spatial fact. We should
therefore think about it on several spatial and temporal scales, and consider how these scales
overlap (Sassen, 2009), as well as the connections between mobility and socio-economic
conditions. In this sense, the discourse and representation of cultural and religious identity are
part of the processes of mobility, and can no longer be said to be dependent on migration but
rather on ‘back and forth communication’ (Marthoz, 2001).
We should therefore consider the mobility paradigm not just in terms of material flows, but
also by measuring the dynamics of the immaterial flows constituted by ideas and cultures.
What we are witnessing is the creation of a culture of mobility, at the same time as the
establishment of other networks and the implementation of types of mobility – economic,
cultural – which cannot be reduced to spatial mobility. In thinking afresh about these
processes as they happen we can start to consider mobility as a potential specific to each
individual, and, from there, analyse methods of organisation and collective representation in
situations of co-presence (Berthomière, Hily, 2006) in non-fixed spaces of social interaction.
The rapid development of ICTs in the 1980s and 1990s, followed by exponential growth in
the ‘social internet’ (blogs, wikis, social networking sites) in the 2000s invites us to rethink
2
The debate surrounding mobility is key within information and communication sciences. For
Françoise Paquienséguy (2006), mobility is to be interpreted as ‘the structuring paradigm in
the context of ICTs today’.
17
the space–time relationship at the same time as we consider the emergence of a renewal of
social and community practices. Beyond the present–absent opposition which characterised
previous migrations (Sayad, 1999), now ever more granular distinctions are being made
which encourage us to rethink both distant relationships and those in the here and now.
Modern communication tools allow us to establish co-presence beyond spatial borders
(Rigoni, forthcoming). With new communication technologies, circulation is no longer just
about physical displacement within space; without being geographically mobile, without even
being a migrant in the strictest sense, an individual can nonetheless be part of a ‘culture of
mobility’. The idea of ‘not here, not there, but here and there at the same time’ can be used to
describe those who belong to – or who feel affinity with – several geographical and social
spaces rather than being situated ‘in-between’. It is in this sense that we are using the notion
of ‘co-presence’, modifying its original sociological meaning. Co-presence may equally
describe the fact of being ‘here and there at the same time’, of ‘living together at a distance’
(Proulx, 2008). With the internet being almost free to access, and with closeness made
possible by digital tools (video transmitted over the internet, applications such as Skype and
so on), co-presence becomes easy not only between scattered members of the same family,
but also between migrants and non-migrants over one or several geographical areas, and even
between non-migrants who are geographically dispersed but physically sedentary. The
emergence of these new ways of living together, detailed in transnational studies, is
confirmed by the study of the practices of ethnic minority media production, and of the ways
in which it is received.
However, to state that co-presence has become more common does not mean that longdistance contact has replaced relationships in situ. The social groups which most frequently
make use of communication technologies are often those whose social networks are densest.
Similarly, those who design and host ethnic community media often have a background in
18
community associations and are involved in various local initiatives. Even if we use the
internet and digital technologies, the virtual will not replace the physical. The ‘disembodied
migrations’ (Weissberg, 1999) which ICTs enable are themselves ways of forging social links
and new forms of social connection. These are all questions which require us to think again
about the concept of public space.
SEGMENTARISATION AND TRANSNATIONALISATION OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE
Theories of public space have a long history and are common to a number of disciplines in the
social sciences (Neveu, 1995). Nonetheless, the concept of public space has undergone a
renewal of interest over the last fifteen years, in particular because of socio-technological
changes in communication and their consequences in terms of socio-political engagement
(Castells, 2008). The functioning of the media remains central to our perception of public
space and the possibilities it represents in contemporary societies.
In his work on the basis of notions of public space, Bernard Miège (2010) underlines how
contemporary communication practices (the influence of mass media, followed by the growth
in ICTs) have transformed it to the point where it no longer has any relationship with the
conditions which led to its modern embodiment in seventeenth and eighteenth century
European societies. The result of the profound changes we are currently experiencing, which
are linked to the speeding up of globalised exchanges and technologies, has been to enlarge,
diversify and fragment public space. Influenced by the rational and normative model
proposed by Jürgen Habermas but critical of his purely theoretical stance, Bernard Miège
points to a number of characteristics which define contemporary public space: its asymmetry
(subject-citizens are only able to interact partially, and the spectre of domination or even
19
exclusion makes exchange illusory, or in any case problematic); the emergence of new
models of social interaction (visual messages replacing public argument); its breaking up into
smaller spaces; the inequality of participation in public space (reinforced by the rise of ICTs,
a domain where appropriation and access remain unequally distributed); the relative overlap
between work life and personal life (which calls into question the distinction between private
and public spheres); and the trend towards the individualisation of communication,
information and cultural practices (contributing to the breaking up of spaces for dialogue)
(Miège, 2010, p.55-57). This approach resonates with those interpretations which see the
ways in which ethnic minority media and culture is produced and consumed as contributing to
the fragmentation of public space, thus invalidating the conception and representation of a
unified public space (Gripsrud et al., 2010).
Far from losing its energy, the ethnic media scene builds on and combines ‘old’ and ‘new’
ICTs which allows it to operate across media, accelerating the circulation of information,
making exchanges more reactive, and providing more opportunities for everyday utterances to
confront one another. As in the dominant mainstream media (Miège, 2007), ICTs have
facilitated a wider range of media products, and access to a larger volume of information has
changed the nature of the exchange. Different social groups have appropriated particular
communication devices (in particular web 2.0), allowing them to enlarge the stage on which
they are visible to the public. Taking control of communication devices also allows them to
expand both where and when they are able to intervene – in other words, how they mobilise –
beyond the sphere of the local community organisations to which they were previously often
confined. In this way ICTs favour the emergence of ‘new transnational public spheres’
(Nedelcu, 2010, 2009) within which migrant and non-migrant populations can meet, share
common interests and values, and mobilise together to defend causes in new spaces of
collective action (Mitra, Watts, 2002). The rise in the circulation of interpersonal exchanges
20
beyond state borders, in addition to traditional forms of communication, thus leads to ‘the
emergence of a plurality of alternative spaces’ according to Peter Dahlgren (1994), which
other writers term ‘mosaic’ public spaces (François, Neveu, 1999), or ‘partial’ public spaces
(Miège, 2010).
Having established this, we now need to turn our attention to how these fragmented spaces
relate to the common public space. Do they work in parallel, together, or in competition? This
is a question which is rarely asked in the social sciences. To provide at least a partial answer,
we need to turn to theoretical work which, for the last few decades, has been interested in how
individuals in socially subaltern positions have created fragmented public space. These
theoretical responses take as their starting point that, in order to think through and assign
meaning to the resistance and forms of self-organisation which emerge as part of a social
movement in opposition to ‘bourgeois public space’, we must recognise the emergence of one
or several ‘oppositional public space(s)’. Work by Oskar Negt (2007) in Germany and Nancy
Fraser (1992) in the United States throws some light on how debates are structured and
alternative media established, which constitute, according to them, partial spaces which can
be described as public counter-spaces (if we accept that all partial spaces are more or less
oppositional), but their difference from the common public space is dependent above all on
the themes and strategies that are developed within them.
This book intends to demonstrate that ethnic minority media, insofar as they constitute partial
public spaces, do not always in fact succeed in appearing as tools of counter-hegemony,
despite their frequently stated desire to be seen as alternative media. Moreover, the objective
of the actors who take part in and manage these partial public spaces is not necessarily to gain
access to the shared political public space, but, in the end, to directly influence what happens
on the public stage, as Isabelle Rigoni demonstrated in her fieldwork on the local political
engagement of the weekly Turkish-language paper Londra Gazete in London (Rigoni, 2007)
21
and on the lobbying by certain British Muslim media at regional and national level
(Rigoni, 2010c, 2004).
Public space does not therefore constitute a once-and-for-all fact; constantly subjected to a
variety of interventions by actors and social groups, it is the object of perpetual collective
reconstruction. By offering new possibilities for intervening in public discussion to
individuals who up until then were more spectator (the consuming public) than actor (the
communicating public), the new communication patterns ushered in by ICTs – ‘powerful
catalysts of social change’ (Miège, 1997) – can legitimately be placed at the centre of our
thinking about changes in the public space. Several questions then need to be raised. On the
one hand, one might wonder whether, through their potential for expression, technical tools
(just like digital tools) could be used to reconfigure democracy (Latour, 2006). On the other,
in the vein of research on the ‘feel’ of citizenship (Couldry, 2006) versus normative
citizenship, we should investigate how and when people experience concern, or the feeling of
sharing a common interest in public space. Finally, the socio-economic range of actors and
groups who are now involved in the flow of communication has widened; their interventions
are multiple and sometimes compartmentalised. How can we think through these processes,
which appear to contribute to the breaking up of public space and to be causing the emergence
of a number of partial spaces?
RESISTANCE AND ADHERENCE TO THE HEGEMONIC IDEOLOGY
Finally, this book aims to show both the various forms of resistance but also the adherence of
ethnic minority media to hegemonic ideology. As Husband puts it, ‘the celebration of
people’s capacity for resistance can too easily contribute to a willing avoidance of engaging
22
with the specific realities of their contemporary subordination. An empathic admiration for
people’s struggle can obscure one’s continued participation in their exploitation’ (2000, p.13).
However, even though we want to avoid a naive approach to research, it also seems
dangerous to fall into the opposite extreme, the adoption of a cynical posture. This book is
therefore interested in the forms of rupture and continuity with the hegemonic discourses and
representations which circulate in the media space, in the political field, and, more generally,
in public space, situating ethnic minority media and its ambivalences, limits and
contradictions at the heart of our analysis, but also focusing on the transformative elements
which they introduce. Our aim is neither to celebrate a new form of space for free expression,
nor to discredit those media which have failed to make a definitive break with dominant
media models.
Framing the issue in this way is characteristic of the book’s approach. It allows us to open up
for discussion the idea of a democratisation of multicultural societies, focusing particularly on
the central question of the representation of ethnic minorities in public space. We approach
the notion of representation from three main angles. The first concerns questions of identity.
We need to understand how an ethnic minority establishes the boundaries of the group and
decides the rules for inclusion and exclusion. How far do ethnic minority media contribute to
the construction of collective identities and resist ethnic labelling, in which structural
constraints (social, economic, and political) play a key role? The second is about political
participation, and understanding how ethnic minorities achieve collective mobilisation in
order to undertake civic and political actions. How far do minority media allow minority
social groups to express their demands and structure their interests in the public space, or to
invent alternative spaces of expression? The third angle concerns media discourse and
representation, about understanding how ethnic minorities access and participate in the
journalistic sphere. To what extent do ethnic minority media produce a view of the world
23
which is at odds with that produced by mainstream media, and how does this come about? We
will answer these questions by attempting to go beyond both naive notions of access for all to
ICTs and the most pessimistic visions of the atomisation/communitarisation of public space.
The constituent parts of this book therefore interrogate the contribution of a diasporic media
space (Faza, Tsagarousianou, 2002) to the processes of media democratisation, and, more
widely, of public space and ‘multicultural societies’ (Husband, 1996). They aim to contribute
to more general theories about the transformation of public space in a global context of
material and immaterial flows.
The first part of the book consists of two chapters which discuss the idea that the ways in
which ethnic minorities are represented and participate in public space is undergoing a
renewal as a result of the internet. Olga Guedes-Bailey focuses on the way in which the
internet creates new forms of solidarity which can turn into, or reinforce, offline mobilisation.
She interrogates the notion that use of the web facilitates forms of political activism on the
one hand, and, on the other, creates a sense of belonging for minority groups. The analysis
she proposes maintains that ‘how these groups represent themselves in online territories is an
important aspect in understanding their sense of belonging and social inclusion in the off-line
world’.
Through a double case study, Mihaela Nedelcu examines how the internet gives ‘voice to
minority migrant groups’, and enables a collective voice to be heard on the public stage based
on collective mobilisation and action: one case study shows how the Romanian diaspora was
able to mobilise itself for a major political election in Romania such that they changed the
final result; the other focuses on protest over an anti-Romanian campaign in Switzerland. The
author asks the question: ‘to what extent is the internet changing patterns of political activism
of migrant populations’? She demonstrates that the internet ‘encourages the development of
common points of view and dominant trends of public opinion, creating a public visibility of
24
the migrant community’. Although she concludes by proposing a new concept – that of
netizenship, which designates a renewed form of citizen participation – she nonetheless
underlines its limitations, pointing out that in most cases actions do not extend beyond the
period of mobilisation. Such actions are often part of a series of other types of mobilisation,
and are undertaken at the instigation of those who possess relatively high levels of economic,
social or cultural capital. A further interesting aspect of this chapter lies in the fact that the
mobilisations in question target both the host country and the country of origin, thus widening
the scope of the analysis.
The second part of the book consists of three chapters which discuss the idea that ethnic
minority media is participating in a renewal of media practices and discourses. Gavan Titley
focuses on public views on diversity – and more generally on immigration policy – in Ireland,
and how ethnic minority media do (or don’t) appropriate this discourse. He also examines the
cultural climate in which ethnic minority media is evolving in Ireland, drawing on two
particular examples, that of Polish media and African media.
The following chapters highlight the tensions which exist between several rationales, in
particular those of citizenship and business, in relation to the production of migrant minority
media on the one hand, and its reception on the other.
Liliana Suárez Navaz and Alicia Ferrández Ferrer focus on Latin American journalists
working in Spain, taking into account their specific symbolic capital, the contradictory class
position they occupy in the Spanish job market, and their split identity ‘between their
commitment to a professional identity and status, and the negotiation of their own ethnic
identity’. They attempt to answer the following questions: ‘[T]o what extent do migrant
minority media offer new avenues for incorporating deep diversity into the public sphere? To
what extent do these media ultimately produce uniformity, censorship, and even
conservatism? What are the resources for contestation and production of critical knowledge
25
able to question some of the tacit presuppositions that shape our perception of the social
world?’ The authors challenge the assumption that because they belong to a particular ethnic
group these Latin American journalists will necessarily produce alternative representations of
immigration in migrant minority media. They conclude that there exist ‘three main ideal types
of migrant minority journalism among Latin Americans in Spain’: ‘instrumental strategy’,
‘clientelist strategy’ et ‘organic strategy’, with the first being the most widespread; and that
there is a ‘deep polarization in the subfield of migrant minority media in Spain: on the one
hand, those which could be defined as “mainstream minority media”, on the other hand, those
that could be categorized as “alternative minority media.”’ In sum, the authors demonstrate
how the sub-field of ethnic minority media is in no way homogenous, that it is criss-crossed
by the same forces which shape journalism as a whole, and that here too there is strong
tension between intellectual and business interests.
Cigdem Bozdag, Andreas Hepp and Laura Suna focus on the complexity of diasporic media
spaces which emerges from their study of how audiences have appropriated diasporic media,
the definition of which is not limited to traditional media, but also includes other items in the
‘media repertoire’ such as music and video platforms. They highlight several areas in which
audiences have appropriated media – in information, entertainment, engagement/political
commitment, business, faith – underlining ‘the everyday variety of diasporic media’, and
emphasising the notion that these media ‘do not provide homogenous representations and
their content are as diverse as the diasporic communities themselves.’ The authors’
conclusions lead us to challenge the idea that diasporic media constitute an alternative public
space. In fact, only the practices of appropriation, such as ‘publicising, mobilising,
organising, producing’ can be linked to a form of engagement in public space, which is not
the case for the many other methods of interaction identified by the authors. Nonetheless, the
authors do not deny the exceptional utility of these interactions in migrant lives ‘as they open
26
the space for self-ruled acting in the diaspora.’ At the end of their analysis the authors point to
the need for adopting an academic stance: ‘we must be very careful about formulating general
statements on diasporic media and their appropriation in everyday life.’
The third part of the book comprises three chapters whose starting point is to interrogate the
limits and contradictions of ethnic minority media, as well as the constraints which weigh
upon it – and upon cultural production more generally. These three chapters proceed to
wrong-foot those decontextualised analyses which frequently establish a naive vision of
mediated cultural productions. Each chapter adopts a different scale of analysis; and if this
section makes no claims to reviewing all possible cases, because of its multi-scale perspective
it nonetheless permits us to understand the importance of research which takes seriously, and
at different levels, the question of the context, conditions and constraints of media production.
At a macro level, that of South–South and South–North cultural flows, Daya Thussu focuses
on the ways in which these flows ‘are challenging US cultural hegemony’. Initially he
concentrates on the global landscape of cultural flows. Although he confirms the existence of
an imbalance in cultural trade between the North and the South, with US hegemony in the
circulation of cultural products, he also shows that not only are there significant South–South
flows, but also ‘a small but significant flow in the other direction’ from China, South Korea,
Brazil and India. In order to demonstrate how this situation has developed, Thussu then
proposes an analysis of the film industry in India, at the end of which he describes Bollywood
as a ‘global media contra-flow’. From the point of view of the importance of Bollywood’s
film output, we can certainly say that it ‘is largely confined to the Indian subcontinent and
among the South Asian Diaspora’, but since the 1990s, Bollywood ‘has (also) expanded to
target lucrative Northern markets’. The author continues his analysis to underline that, on the
one hand, there are synergies between Hollywood and Bollywood, and on the other that ‘as a
27
mass phenomenon, [Bollywood] produces its own version of hegemony’. This approach thus
demonstrates that we should not essentialise the cultural offer from the country of origin.
At a meso level of analysis, at state and national level, Benjamin Ferron analyses how
‘alternative media’ produced by ethnic or political minorities becomes institutionalised, and
examines strategies of legitimisation and politicisation of the ‘alternative media’ cause,
drawing on a comparative analysis of the NeoZapatista movement in Mexico and the antioccupation movement in Israel-Palestine. Through his analysis the author attempts to answer
the following questions: ‘How does the State contribute to the construction of the categories
of minorities and majorities, and how do social movements both criticise and interiorise these
categories, including when producing their own media ? What are the effects of these
struggles between the State and social movements on the genesis, structure, and production of
‘ethnic minority’ media?’ He demonstrates how the recognition of certain ethnic minority
media, through the act of labelling by the authorities, also leads to the institutionalisation of
part of the alternative media movement, thus somehow neutralising its power to protest, and
accentuating internal divisions. He thus highlights the issues which exist around struggles
over naming, and the role played by institutional actors in this.
At the micro-level, in his analysis of press and media businesses, Ola Ogunyemi concentrates
on the ‘sourcing and representation routines’ of the British black minority press. He seeks to
understand whether these media ‘prioritise elite sources over ordinary sources’ or, in other
words, whether they ‘replicate or subvert the sourcing routines at the mainstream media’ and
‘what are the impacts of sourcing routines on the representation of immigration discourse?’
His conclusions present a nuanced picture of the situation. He concludes that the British black
minority press does indeed ‘replicate the sourcing routines of its mainstream counterparts by
monitoring the same official channels’, but explains the reasons for this conformity to
dominant practices whilst highlighting the ‘small ruptures’ (Cottle, 2000, p.74) which are
28
nonetheless at work. Thus he explains that referring to official sources confers ‘legitimacy,
professionalism and credibility’ on the newspaper, and that it is also as a result of very
difficult economic circumstances; at the same time he underlines that the representations of
black and minority ethnic groups which appear in the black minority press seek to counteract
‘the lack of diverse perspectives’ in the mainstream media ‘through an eclectic selection of
quotations from elite sources which reflects black perspectives’. This chapter lends weight to
the conditions in which information is produced; or, at Mattelart’s (2007) behest, to ‘the
political economy’ of ethnic minority media. Up until now, little research on ethnic minority
media has sought to include this element in their analyses.
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Sayad A. (1999) La double absence. Des illusions de l’émigré aux souffrances de l’immigré
(Paris: Seuil, Liber series).
Schlesinger P. and Tumber H. (1994) Reporting Crime. The Media Politics of Criminal
Justice (New York: Oxford University Press).
Simon P.-J. (2006) Pour une sociologie des relations interethniques et des minorités (Rennes:
PUR).
Weissberg J.-L. (1999) Présences à distance. Déplacement virtuel et réseaux numériques:
pourquoi nous ne croyons plus la télévision (Paris: L’Harmattan).
35
36
Part I
Internet as a space of super-diversity?
37
38
Chapter 2
Diasporas in online spaces: practices of self-representation3 and belonging4
Olga Guedes Bailey
The web has become a focal point for many diasporic and ethnic groups5 to potentially create
forms of solidarity that might generate or follow actions developed in the off-line world. The
presence of ethnic minorities as active social actors in the online world can be perhaps
associated with Mark Poster (1996) suggestion that the change from a ‘mode of production to
a mode of information’ has consequences beyond the political and economic realms and into
the everyday life of ordinary people. He argues that communication and information
technology has potential to reconstitute the subject, a fundamental revision of identity and
social relations. Without subscribing to this revolutionary character of ‘the long dream of a
new culture’ this discussion takes the view that the representational practices of diasporic and
3
Representation means the production of symbolic meaning through language presented in
different types of texts (Hall, 1997).
4
A simplified version of this discussion appears in M. Christensen, A. Jansson and C.
Christensen (eds.) Online territories: Mediated Practice and Social Space. New York: Peter
Lang, 2011. A French version has been published: O. Guedes Bailey, ‘Les pratiques en ligne
des diasporas: représentations de soi et résistance?’, Migrations société, special issue
‘Migrants, minorités ethniques et internet’ (I. Rigoni ed.), 22(132), p.47-61.
5
The terms diaspora and ethnic group refer to people with different realities and intersected
by historical and political differences. Identity is understood as a process whereby the
individual or group engage in struggles over meanings, constantly negotiated and contested
(Siriphant, 1998).
39
ethnic groups in the web might support the creation of spaces of inclusion, participation,
political activism, and produce sense of belonging6 for many minority groups. This chapter
will address the issue of how ethnic and diasporic groups are using the online space for the
self-representation of their multiple identities and to reconfigure established notions of home.
As the online world becomes a political space for many social groups, this chapter suggests
that an analysis of how these groups represent themselves in online territories is an important
aspect in understanding their sense of belonging and social inclusion in the off-line world. In
other words, belonging is lived through practices and experiences of social inclusion in the
online and off-line worlds. The online sphere becomes a space conceptualized as continuous
with society ‘in that while the internet has been appropriated by social practice, in all its
diversity’, simultaneously ‘this appropriation does have specific effects on social practice
itself’ (Castells, 2001, p.118) as the ‘virtual reality has grown to resemble the real world’
seeing that ‘there is an extensive political life on the Net’ (Margolis and Resnick, 2000, p.14)
which is mostly an extension of the political practices lived in everyday-life off-line.
ETHNIC AND DIASPORIC IDENTITIES
The ethnic and diasporic online spaces present the cultural and political expressions of groups
whose multiple identities challenge traditional notions of a fixed identity and, refreshingly,
suggests a ‘transnational and potentially transethnic cultural formations and identities’
(Anthias, 2002, p.25). Diasporic identities are mostly negotiated in the convergence of
6
Belonging has a number of dimensions as it refers, among others, to cultural identity, to the
material conditions in terms of ‘preconditions for quality of life’ and to an affective
dimension related to social ties (Anthias, 2007, p.21).
40
different cultural influences and constrained by different power structures. Diasporic
subjects’ experiences are lived ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ a ‘diaspora space’, which is constructed
by several axes of differentiation and inequality – nationality, class, gender, and ethnicity
(Brah, 1996). They face discrimination, antagonism, celebration, as well as ‘internal-group’
pressures to resist or/and comply with a defined ‘cultural identity’. They network with others
in permanent or temporary alliances in a changeable and liminal zone that becomes ‘home’; a
space where cultural affinities and differences are constantly negotiated (Tastsoglou, 2006,
p.202).
Research developed elsewhere indicates that multiple and overlapping spatial and symbolic
attachments of various degrees of complexity are the rule among for example, asylum seekers
and refugees women living in the United Kingdom (Bailey, 2007) and immigrant women
living in Canada (Tastsoglou, 2006). Some groups of these women demonstrate multidimensional geographies of belonging, involvement in political and cultural practices, at the
local, national and transnational levels. The specificities of migratory experiences cannot be
universalised but the experiences mentioned above highlights that migrant women can be
active agents of their lives even when living under difficult circumstances. In this respect,
online spaces offer the possibility for migrant women to develop their autonomy
concomitantly both online and off-line.
This, in turn, leads to a recognition of the online alternative public spheres of minorities
groups as spaces connected to the ‘real’ world from where people articulate their online
practices. It could also be argued that these online spaces may well be perceived as
rhizomatic (smooth spaces) in different moments of the networking process. That is, online
spaces that might be characterized by the elusiveness and contingency’ of the rizhome which
allow them to ‘cut across borders and build linkage between pre-existing groups’ (Bailey et
al, 2008, p.7-8). This would also allow ethnic spaces to possibly become polyvocal spaces in
41
a constant process of engagement and disengagement with striated (mainstream). What is
relevant for this discussion then, is the possibility of a continuing movement of connections
and disconnections rather than the position of the online space social formation – mainstream
or alternative (Moulthrop, 1994, p.33).
ONLINE SPACES OF ETHNIC AND DIASPORIC GROUPS: A RHIZOMATIC
APPROACH
The metaphor of the rhizome is based on the juxtaposition of rhizomatic and arbolic thinking.
The arbolic is a structure (striated space) which is linear, hierarchic and inactive , and could
be represented as ‘the tree-like structure of genealogy, branches that continue to subdivide
into smaller and lesser categories’ (Wray, 1998). Socially, it manifests itself in hierarchical
and rule-intensive cultures such as the state and military. The ‘occupants of striates space are
the champions of order, purpose, and control – defenders of the law’ (Moulthrop, 1994, p.33).
The rhizomatic (smooth space), by contrast, is non-linear, anarchic and nomadic, thus
‘defined dynamically, in terms of transformation instead of essence.
In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari (1987) enumerate a series of characteristics of
the rhizome - the principles of connection and heterogeneity, multiplicity, assignifying
rupture, cartography and decalcomania. Connection and heterogeneity imply that any point of
the network can be connected to any other point, despite the different characteristics of the
components. The concept of multiplicity constructs the rhizome not on the basis of elements
where each operates within fixed sets of rules, but as an entity whose rules is constantly in
motion because new elements are constantly included. The principle of the assignifying
42
rupture means that ‘a rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up
again on one of its old lines, or on new lines’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004, p.303).
The internet might be an important Deleuzian cultural smooth space (rhizomatic) for ethnic
and diasporic groups to develop their sense of autonomy and belonging. In this process these
groups might create and extend their networking beyond the ‘sisterhood’ to potentially also
engage with ‘mainstream’ public spheres and vice-versa such as non-governmental
organizations and local authorities. For Deleuze and Guatari the ‘two spaces [alternative and
mainstream] in fact only exist in a mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated and
transversed into striated space, striated space is constantly being reversed, returned into
smooth space’ (p.524). This argument relates in part to Fraser’s ‘subaltern sphere’ that in the
online world could function as support for ‘agitational’ activities directed towards wider
publics’ (Fraser, 1990) so as to eventually interact with mainstream public spheres. To stay
away from dichotomies, she emphasises that the boundaries between subaltern and
mainstream public spheres are defined by a ‘porousness, outdirectedness and open
endedness’ which facilitates rather than prevents ‘communication across lines of cultural
difference’. According to Ruiz (2010) this framework suggests, ‘the boundaries between
subaltern and mainstream online (and off-line) spaces can be grasped as connecting as well as
separating the political margins to the mainstream… [thus] facilitating one to move away
from a striated binary model of the online mainstream sphere and towards one which explores
the smooth and varied relationship between multiple spheres’ (p.220). Broadly speaking, the
online space becomes a network in which ideas and discourses travel through a complex
system of connections, which both link and disconnect the alternative and mainstream. The
move away from dichotomies also permits ethnic and diasporic groups to contest other
binaries such as home/homeland, offline/online, marginal/central, and belonging/nonbelonging that might then be reconfigured online. In fact, it could be argued that in the
43
hyperlinked structure of the internet binary oppositions such as marginal and central are
difficult to situate. In this manner, the relationship of the alternative ethnic online space with
the mainstream becomes rather complex as the alternative becomes ‘an integrated utopia’…
part and parcel of the mainstream: ‘its unutilised or under-utilised component’ (Walch, 1999,
quoted in Ruiz, 2010, p.143) . ‘These spaces of difference have vast political potential’ as
these utopias are a way of linking ‘that which is near and far, here and there, actual and
utopian, possible and impossible’ (Lefebvre, 1991, p.143).
As a result, and in tune with the rhizomatic ethos, the notion of movement or ‘passage’
between different structures and spaces is fundamental to this chapter`s argument. It is the
possibilities of communication expressing consensus and confrontation between these two
spaces, the interface of these two different cultures that might become potentially a place
‘where polemics predicted on this apparent dialectic necessarily breakdown’ (Lefebvre, 1991
quoted in Ruiz, 2010, p.143). It is in this dialectical space that one may perhaps position the
ethnic and diasporic online spaces. This positioning is based on a realistic approach which
recognises the unequal relations of power existing in the online work and acknowledges
Massey’s argument that the geometries of communication and mobility might reproduce
power geometries, where the control of flows and connectivities are held by those possessing
economic and cultural capital (Massey, 1991). Nevertheless, the internet as a new form of
‘mass self communication’ (Castells, 2007) has created many possibilities for social actors to
counter-power, challenge and eventually change the power relations institutionalised in
society.
ONLINE SELF-REPRESENTATION OF AFRICAN WOMEN IN EUROPE WEBSITE –
A.W.E.: A RHIZOMATIC SPACE?
44
Mitra (2008) argues that the internet is not just a technological innovation but a discursive
formation that has taken on a global scale. This is relevant because of its recognition that the
internet is constructed from discourses which reflect the voices of those willing to participate
in a global conversation. Sequentially, the interconnection of discourses can produce a
‘sense’ of place and create a virtual space where people interact and have experiences of
crossing cultural and imaginary borders, creating perhaps a sense of belonging; the
psychological dimension of citizenship (Tastsoglou, 2006) or ‘emotional citizenship’ (Bernal,
2006).
The issue of symbolic representation on the internet is important in the struggle of some of
these groups to assert their voices in public spheres in order to perhaps alter the established
values and interests in society. As Mitra (2001) points out, the structure of the internet –
openness and decentralization - [at the moment still] provides space to anyone to use it as
there is ‘no single entity that can uniquely control the voices of the internet’ (p. 39). More
precisely, because power relations are reproduced in the realm of socialized online
communication, many ethnic and diasporic groups get involved in these communicative
spaces to problematize their issues and converge them into a specific discourse of the Other,
thus also participating in ‘the battle over minds’, that is, over meaning construction (Castells,
2007, p.247). In the process, the groups build their autonomy and potentially confront the
status quo of society or/and develop alliances and strategies of negotiation to participate in
society.
However, the engagement with online space does not preclude the existence of minorities
groups’ struggles at the local level in face-to-face interaction, such as discrimination and
racism. It could be argued that their place based political practices appear to have avoided
isolation in the local by reaching the global space of flows, building ‘networks of meaning’ or
45
‘discursive spaces’ where they exercise discursive power7 and connect many voices – local,
national and transnational. In fact for Bernal (2006, p.163), these networks are not borderless
as they are ‘reconfiguring and remapping boundaries, so that, for example, what might once
have been outside the margins [of the nation] is now more effectively included with a larger
framework of imagined community.’
Online self-representation of ethnic and diasporic groups differs among ethnic and diasporic
groups,
from
entertainment
to
communication
with
families
and
friends,
to
commercialization, to political purposes. Self-representation online might be seen as a form
of gaining autonomy over their ethnic identity and opposing normalization because the online
space is one where diasporic groups work on themselves in a process of becoming a
collective identity. The self-representation of diasporic groups online is produced by a
combination of narratives that problematize issues that exemplify a particular time and
history of the group or individual. According to Bernal (2006) these self-representations
might be useful in understanding the dynamics of transnational communication as well as in
charting the instabilities of identities and the elusive construction of home and community in
the postmodern age.
The online space should not be perceived as predominantly liberating for minorities groups or
for its potential to stop racism. It potentially reproduces racism and prejudice that co-exist in
the everyday of both online and offline spaces. This discussion looks at how selfrepresentation is expressed and articulated through notions of identity, home, and belonging
and whether we can talk of a rhizomatic smooth space regarding ethnic/diasporic online
spaces. A brief assessment of the A.W.E. provides an empirical basis for this discussion. The
7
Mitra and Watts (2008, p.486) define cyberspace as a ‘discursive space produced by the
creative work of people whose spatial locations are ambiguous and provisional’.
46
example is used because of its distinctive articulation of self-representations of diasporic
women.
The Website and social network A.W.E.8 is a private website created in 2008 for African
women living, working or in business in Europe and it is managed by members. It is
independent, although it offers advertising space to anyone with business interests related to
Africa. A.W.E. as a social network is positioned at the intersection of an increasingly
multicultural Europe, which is constituted by new forms of online and offline alliances and
interethnic politics. It could be suggested that A.W.E. is an example of a ‘postcolonial
grassroots politics’ (Merrill 2006, p.156) that represents numerous differences – ethnicity,
class, nationalities, gender, and ideologies. The site’s policy is one of restricted access,
although it is easy to register, and the content is primarily of interest to the African women in
Europe. The reason the site was created was, according to Sandra Rafaela, co-founder,
because: ‘At the end of 2005 I discovered that there were almost no websites for black
women created by black European women. And if there were any, than it was only for
professionals and was only for business. Important was and still is the visibility of black
women on the internet.’ (A.W.E. website, 2010)
Their mission is ‘to create a relaxed atmosphere where African women can support,
encourage and financially empower each other’ aiming ‘to empower African women; to give
financial advice; to positively reflect the image of an African women; to offer a manageable
networking platform; to support upcoming and existing entrepreneurs; to form friendship
among members; and to learn and advice each other’ The website platform thus, became a
space of empowerment as well as the online African ‘home’ where women can, according to
the website, ‘help members to exchange ideas and share experiences using the discussion
board, private/public messages, photos, videos and blogs’. The website features black female
47
authors/ business owners/ artists/ musicians and provides news about or for black women’. In
that way, a sense of belonging to the social network is generated which reinforces the
women’s determination to reinvent and redefine themselves in order to offer a legitimate
group identity before society.
The portal has a blog radio ‘that will be a place to motivate, to learn, to get advice and to
encourage each other. We will be inviting already existing members of A.W.E. and any other
guest interested to share with us their knowledge, passion, activities and market their
business’ (AWE, 2010) So far the programmes available are mostly on business, with reports
on their annual conferences – two so far - where they meet in different places in Europe. A
number of networks are created based on interests such as partnership projects, African
women’s business, mothers and children support group and on Stop Violence against women
created by the European Policy Action Centre on Violence against Women, an NGO working
to achieve equality between women and men through the elimination of all forms of male
violence against women. In these groups women discuss, among other things, the possibilities
of developing business opportunities and new skills and knowledge, and developing
marketing and communication skills. The content of the ‘network’ groups is mainly based on
banal topics of the everyday life; such as information on places to purchase African food,
location of African restaurants, African fashion, and so on. A couple of these groups had a
more ‘political’ agenda such as to discuss the integration of migrant women and children;
health care and sexual reproductive rights; education and employment; violence against
migrant women.
48
However, in analysing most of the available content on the blog9, the issues discussed varied
from food recipes to ‘how to get what you want’ (in life) to someone asking for sponsorship
for ‘Race for Life’, a cancer charity, to the birthday of Nelson Mandela. The site seems to
suggest it seems that the main function of the online conversation among the women
members is to create a community of interests based on ethnicity and diasporic status. The
blog also contains a couple of slightly more political posts dealing with issues such as the
Charity European Women’s Lobby on ‘know your rights: equal rights, equal voices – migrant
women in the European Union.
The portal as media has a hybrid identity (Bailey et al, 2008) in the sense that it is part
commercial and part social network. That is, it offers commercial products from business
companies (travel agencies, African restaurants and shops) aligned with the idea of bringing
home to those who are away and creating an online home.
The women do not provide their social profiles on the site and this is perfectly understandable
considering the issue of security on the internet. What can be mentioned is that they have
different backgrounds, mostly of middle-class, with some form of school qualification, a
range of ages, and of African origins. The self representation of these women seems to be
closely related to certain categories of identification which normalize their gender (good
woman) and ethnicity (African origin), and acts in a regulatory way of what is permissible in
society and to be ‘visible’ in the site. In another words, these identity categories regulate the
women subjected to them by defining the limits of what is normal behaviour. Moreover, their
9
The study used qualitative textual analysis facilitated by the use of broad categories such as
home, belonging, politics, migration, entertainment, business, aspirations, social problems,
racism and discrimination. The site was visited with regularity during July 2010.
49
identification seems to be based on a stable subject, which implies an essentialist position10
(Lee, 2001, p.106) suggesting that there is something authentic by relying on their gender,
ethnicity, and culture.
The site could be potentially a rhizomatic smooth space and is used by the women for a
‘banal’ form of exercising their autonomy while negotiating their hybrid identities and
creating a sense of belonging. The ability to gain a voice in this imaginable smooth space, as
a discursive space, is valued by the women as it reinforces their sense of becoming part of a
new landscape – off and online - as an ethnic and gendered group. In this manner, the site has
potentially a double dialectical nature; first, of blurring cultural differences by using
‘passages or movement’ (Dekleuze and Gattari, 2004) in different public online spheres; and
second, of being a virtual and comfort home where commonalities rather than differences can
be reinforced and celebrated. However, the online ‘comfort zone’ might empower some
women as it silences others. It empowers in such a way that women perceive themselves as
the same as others in the group and thus feel comfortable with expressing themselves. It
silences by determining boundaries between those who have the same experiences and those
without, for example in terms of migration, work, and motherhood and thus excluding
women members from the dialogue.
This could be explained in part by the intrinsic internal tensions of rhizomatic spaces –where
non-hierarchical formations -‘comfortable zones’ of dialogue and actions- co-exist with and
sometimes connect with striated structures – of hierarchical positions - which are a reflection
of the dynamics of ‘real’ life. The relevant point to highlight is that it might be unproductive,
10
Related to Lee (2001, p.106) discussion of Locke’s’ nominal essence’ operating as a weak
essentialism which ‘enables us to name and sort things by way of attributing an ‘artificial
constitution to objects’.
50
to define online spaces as one or the other as it would go against the ethos of the concept of
the rhizomatic. The metaphor of the rhizomatic is significant to acknowledge the binaries
and boundaries co-existenting in the online and off-line worlds, which in themselves become
an in-between productive space in which diasporic groups exercise their self-representation
and sense of autonomy. In this way, it is possible to understand the dynamics of selfrepresentation and articulation of identity of these groups.
RE-ARTICULATION OF ‘HOME’: THE LOCAL, THE GLOBAL AND THE
TRANSNATIONAL?
Regarding the notion of home enunciated in A.W.E., what can be observed is a triple
meaning in terms of a communal home; the local and regional home for members living in
Europe, an African home where women become Africans (a heterogeneous and plural group)
rather than the foreigner, and an opening up of opportunities to appreciate home, as one
women member puts it:
‘I miss home. It is amazing the amount of talent we have at home. I am so glad that
we have finally began to appreciate it more instead of continuing to ape the western
world’ (A.W.E., woman member 1)
‘I am from Kenya, born and bred in Nairobi, but now settled in Kiserian (maasai
land). I left home in August 2000 for career purposes. I moved to live and work in
New York and after 3 years I came to Vienna, Austria on transfer. I now know that
East or West, home is best. Since leaving home, I have come to appreciate it more.
We may not have much, but we care for each other. I long for home all the time, all its
51
pros and cons combined, because I have come to learn that nothing and no one is
perfect’ (A.W.E, woman member 2).
The site is also the global home which can be reached by women at the ‘African home’ and
for those living in Europe to connect to the Africa homeland and beyond it. It could be
suggested that these different experiences of home might help to shape the women members’
hybrid identities facilitated through contact with each other online-and-off-line, in
relationships of accommodation and/or opposition. This hybrid identity is outside of the
discourse of the national identity as they are self-represented using the African continent as
the homeland. This means that their positions of identification might not be as fixed as
suggested by the site but in a state of becoming, i.e. subject positions or identities as
contingent (Lloyd, 2005).
Networking is an important function of the site which seems to provide a source of security
and stability to the women involved and in many ways is a form of recreating an idea and
practice of traditional communities – and home - of the past. Ideas of community can
essentialize a group and generate conflict with other groups because it deals primarily with
expectations and aspirations. According to Day (2006, p.229) digital networks facilitate
lobbies, exchange information, developing business, and offer comfort and advice. Online
social networks and sites such as A.W.E. may constitute a link to a wider community –
Africans living in Europe – and provide a sense of a virtual community but cannot ‘match the
complex interaction of private and public life’. What critics of the online space groups might
forget is that maybe many of these spaces are articulating notions of ‘community’ in the
continuum of the online-off-line existence where the interactions indeed take place.
Largely the site functions as an in-between rhizomatic space to facilitate a conversation
among people with similar interests. Its political function is perhaps to represent the best of
the African-European women’s group living in Europe, empowering them with information
52
and opportunities of self-development (courses, business opportunities and networking) while
offering a way of potentially participating and being part of the new home. The A.W.E.
online space also suggests a dynamic interconnectivity between homeland (African
continent), European home and the transnational home. In other words, the online home
becomes ‘local’, demarcated by a multiplicity of African diasporic and ethnic identities.
CONCLUSION
The African Women in Europe’s online practices – on the website - points to what might be a
significant phenomenon on how ethnic and diasporic groups are mobilizing at different
levels; local, national and transnational. This mobilization process articulates a real and new
space marked by ethnicity used as a basis for networking, developing strategies of group
empowerment, and organizing and challenging various forms of exclusion.
The self-representation of diasporic African women in the online space is articulated by the
women’s voices where they speak for themselves. The different voices present narratives of
identifications with their own ideological and personal tone which connect with other
women’s voices that comes together in a ‘network of voices’ (Mitra, 2008) and generates
perhaps a sense of place and belonging to become a lived/live community rather than just an
imagined one.
A.W.E. is not representative of diaspora and ethnic groups’ practices in the online world.
However it might suggest diasporas’ attempt to move away from dichotomies toward
contesting established notions of home /homeland, offline/online, centre/periphery, and
belonging/non-belonging that might then be reconfigured online, compatible with the
rhizomatic model.
53
Moreover, the rhizomatic possibilities of the internet enables the creation of ‘speaking
spaces’ for diasporic and ethnic groups that potentially strengthen groups through their selfrepresentation, interconnected stories, and create alternative public spheres that might interact
with mainstream spheres to enable them to sustain the articulation of cultural difference. This
follows the rhizomatic ethos and its notion of movement between different structures and
spaces. It is in this dialectical space between different cultures that there is a possibility of
suggesting a model of communicative practices that allow for new identities and autonomous
diasporic subjects to emerge and a new form of public sphere that moves towards
empowering rather than denying or excluding a ‘multiplicity of resistance’ (Sonja and Hoper,
1993, p.187).
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Activists’, Gender technology and Development, (2), p.97-111.
Soja E. and Hooper B. (1993) ‘The space that difference makes: some notes on the
geographical margins of the new cultural politics’ in M. Keith and S. Pile (eds) Place and the
Politics of Identity (London: Routledge).
Tastsoglou E. (2006) ‘Gender, Migration and Citizenship: Immigrant women and the politics
of belonging in the Canadian Maritimes’ in E. Tastsoglou and A. Dobrowolsky (eds) Women,
Migration and Citizenship (Hampshire, England: Ashgate), p.200-30.
Tastsoglou E. and Dobrowolsky A. (eds) (2006) Women, Migration and Citizenship.
(Hampshire, England: Ashgate).
Walch J. (1999) In The Net: An Internet guide for activists (London: Zed Books).
Wray
S.
(1998)
‘Rhizomes,
Nomads,
and
Resistant
http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/RhizNom/html (accessed July 2010).
56
Internet
Use’,
Chapter 3
‘Netizenship’ and migrants’ online mobilisation: transnational participation and
collective action in the digital era11
Mihaela Nedelcu
For the last two decades, the information and communication technologies (ICTs) shape new
spaces for transnational interaction between migrant and non-migrant populations, enabling
ubiquitous ‘ways of being’ (Nedelcu, 2009a, 2010a). Moreover, ICTs allow the migrants to
multiply their belongings, to mobilize and defend particularistic values and to claim a
particular belonging while living the world and developing transnational habitus (Nedelcu,
2010b). Facilitating the co-presence of mobile actors in multiple locations, Internet provides
space of collective action for dispersed population. This chapter explores the potential of
Internet as a new transnational public sphere in migratory context. First we discuss national
belonging, (political) participation and (flexible) citizenship in a transnational perspective.
Then we analyze two case studies of online mobilization of Romanian migrants. One
concerns a community website of Romanians in Switzerland and it is based on a content
analysis of webographic data and few comprehensive interviews. In February 2009, the Swiss
11
A previous version of this chapter was published in French as Nedelcu M. (2010)
‘Cybercitoyenneté et mobilisation online des migrants. Nouvelles formes de participation
transnationale et d’action collective à l’ère du numérique’, Migrations Société, 22(132),
p.139-153.
57
people took a referendum voting for the extension of the free movement agreements within
the EU to Romania and Bulgaria. The opponents to this extension promoted in mainstream
media a denigrating campaign which emphasized the risk of a ‘Romanian invasion’, mostly
by Rom’s minority. The website www.casa-romanilor.ch played a key-role for the
mobilization of Romanian immigrants into an online campaign aiming at a better image of the
Romanian community in Switzerland. The other case-study emphasizes the role of Internet
and online networking for transnational political mobilization of Romanian migrants towards
their country of origin. Based on a netnographic analysis of few online campaigns of electoral
mobilization, it shows that ICTs enhance web-based forms of citizenship and participation
beyond borders and contribute to social and political change in the origin country.
In conclusion, this chapter underlines the impact of the ICTs on the civic and political
mobilization of the (trans)migrants. It points out that on the one hand, Internet offers space for
democratic expression of migrant minorities. In particular, it allows the emergence of a
collective ‘voice’ able to defend the interests of migrant populations both in host and origin
societies. On the other hand, Internet and its communication platforms create basic conditions
for collective transnational agency and generate participatory patterns articulating local and
global resources and dynamics.
MIGRANTS’ TRANSNATIONAL PARTICIPATION AND FLEXIBLE CITIZENSHIP AT
THE DIGITAL ERA: A THEORETICAL OVERVIEW
58
Transnational studies extensively diversified and transnationalism became a major paradigm
in migration studies during the past twenty years (Glick-Schiller et al., 1992; Portes et al.,
1999; Vertovec, 2009). Although many migration scholars acknowledge transnational
dynamics as not being a feature of modernity (Schnapper, 2001; Vertovec, 1999; Portes et al.,
1999), the transnationalism is entering a new qualitative phase within the digital era (Nedelcu,
2009a; Vertovec, 2009), characterized by ‘the scale of intensity and simultaneity of current
long-distance, cross-border activities’ (Vertovec, 1999), the emergence of transnational
habitus and a deep transformation of the national nature of the social structures (Vertovec,
2004; Nedelcu, 2009a, 2010a, 2010b). The time-space compression enhanced by the ICTs
dramatically intensifies the networking of various spaces, geographically distant but culturally
synchronized. The migrants function as key agents of these connections, generating various
transnational exchanges (economic, social, cultural,…) which span borders, according to their
own networks. Furthermore, the online migrant – quintessence of homo mobilis and homo
numericus – reflects the social mutations generated by two main driving forces behind our
day’s social worlds: mobility and technology (Nedelcu, 2009a). Able to build new bridges
between the local and the global, he invents new ways of being and belonging, as well as new
patterns of long-distance participation. Thus, he creates new geographies of the social and the
politic, masters transnational social fields and reshapes power distribution within the States12.
12
These observations are not meant to deny limits of ICTs effects. In spite of an undeniable
democratization during the last couple of decades, numerous access inequalities (in terms of
region, country, gender, generation, and so on) still persist (Dewan & al., 2005). Moreover,
ICTs impact migration in dialogical way (Nedelcu, 2009a) and the functional differences and
59
MIGRANT TRANSNATIONALISM AND TRANSNATIONAL PROJECTION OF THE
NATION-STATE
Both host and origin countries’ governments are increasingly concerned by the double or
multiple belongings and loyalties that the migrants deploy through banal everyday
transnational practices. Politically, the transmigrants are exposed to various regimes of
citizenship and participation; thus they are dealing with different policies and ideologies
shaping their sense of belonging and responsibility within the Nation-state(s) (Levitt and
Glick-Schiller, 2003). Many transnational studies have revealed the complex situations of
double political allegiances when the migrants are identifying themselves to more than one
Nation-State, irrespective of their legal status and recognition. Often the transnational
orientations develop a dual frame of cultural and political references and reinforce democratic
values. However, the migrants’ transnationalism is rather national-oriented (Fitzgerald, 2002)
and the mobilization for the country of origin is considered as an explicit expression of long
distance nationalism (Glick-Schiller and Fouron, 2001).
The host states persistently perceive the migrants’ transnational orientations as a threat for
their economic and political stability as well as their cultural homogeneity. Sceptical in front
of the dialogic effects of migrant transnationalism, they are failing to positively take into
the rapid ‘integration of technologies’ (Bimber, 2000) increase fragmentation of civic
engagement and political participation.
60
account the complexity of the plural identities of the transmigrants (Glick-Schiller and al.,
1995) as well as the richness of their transnational ties. The policies of integration and
migration
are
still
based
on
an
unquestioned
opposition
between
integration/assimilationist/multicultural patterns and transnationalism (Vertovec, 2004;
Portes, 2001). Although some host states are gradually opening towards a multiculturalist
vision recognizing basic rights to cultural difference, this reality calls for discussion of their
integration patterns and expectations, by pointing out contradictory situations and ambivalent
arrangements. For instance, on the one hand, most of the host nation-states strengthen
migration control within their territory and continue to reinforce integration and cultural
assimilatory processes. On the other hand, as sending states, sometimes the same nation-states
are adapting to the transnational fact by reinventing their cohesive role outside their territorial
frontiers (Levitt and Glick Schiller, 2003); in this case they are enabling double citizenship
regimes, social security reforms and incentives to attract nationals from abroad (Guarnizo and
Smith, 1998). By valuating the positive consequences of emigrants’ participation – mainly for
economic health and development – the governments of the sending countries are increasingly
encouraging remittances, entrepreneurship, lobby and political representation abroad. The
policies developed within this inclusive logic are qualified as ‘globalization of domestic
politics’, ‘globalization of grassroots politics’ or ‘deterritorialized nations politics’ (GlickSchiller and Fouron, 2001; Vertovec, 2001; Smith, 1994; Castells, 2008).
The nation-state is thus reformulating its prerogatives as ‘it assumes new functions, abdicates
responsibilities for others, and redefines who its members are’ (Levitt and Glick-Schiller,
2003, p.16). This reformulation appears at various levels, varying in intensity. First, legally an
increasing number of states are admitting dual citizenship, allowing partial or full political
61
rights to their nationals abroad. But dual citizenship regimes do not automatically enhance
equal treatment within the both states. They have to come along with social rights’ adaptation
(inheritance rights, social security and pensions, military service, taxation, access to
education, equal access on the labour market, and so on). Then, new public policies target the
nationals abroad; they translate into consular and ministerial reforms, fiscal incentives
directed to attract migrant remittances, new public services and state protection for their
nationals abroad, new regimes of symbolic rights’ and so on (Levitt and Glick-Schiller, 2003).
Finally, on a rhetoric level, the nation-states are transforming themselves in promoters of a
‘long distance nationalism’ (Glick-Schiller and Fouron, 2001), by redefining their sphere of
influence outside the national territory, in order to include the nationals living abroad.
This state’s trend to enter the logic of ‘global nations' policies’ is far from reflecting a dilution
of the nation-state power. While expanding its prerogatives beyond national borders, the state
‘subvert its own regulatory mechanisms in order to compete more effectively in the global
economy’ (Ong, 1999, p.130) and reframes the traditional understanding of sovereignty,
nationality and citizenship (Levitt and Dehesa, 2003). By defining new ‘graduated
sovereignty zones’ (Ong, 1999), it reinvents its role within the complex process of politic
governance and government in a world made by multiple local-global interconnections.
UNDERSTANDING CITIZENSHIP IN THE DIGITAL ERA: COMBINING A STATERELATED STATUS WITH A WEB-BASED PRACTICE
62
Whereas the nation can overcome the dispersion of its nationals through a nationalism
spreading beyond the state, and nationality goes beyond national borders becoming
transnationality, what become citizenship in a globalizing world shaped by complex processes
of ‘denationalization’ (Sassen, 2003), ‘internal globalization’ (Beck, 2006), ‘glocalization’
(Robertson, 1994) or ‘cosmopolitanization’ (Beck, 2006)?
At a first sight, this question could be quickly answered as ‘political citizenship is typically
circumscribed, bounded and regulated within national borders, even though in its juridicallegal sense it can be dual or multiple’ (Labelle et Midy, 1999, p.221). The states remain
constrained in the exercise of their authority by the territorial limits of their political power,
even when they are aware of – and sensitive to – transnational challenges.
However, different arguments could be easily raised by taking a look at the migrants’ citizen
mobilization and participation. The national belonging can express apart from the political
regulation mechanisms, as ‘persons living within transnational social fields make claims to
states as legal or substantive citizens’ (Levitt et Glick-Schiller, 2003, p.24). As Roger
Brubaker stated, what constitutes citizenship ‘the array of rights or the pattern of participation
– is not necessarily tied to formal state-membership. Formal citizenship is neither a sufficient
nor a necessary condition for substantive citizenship’ (Brubaker, 1993, p.36). Moreover,
‘transnational migrants often live in a country in which they do not claim citizenship and
claim citizenship in a country in which they do not live […] Alternatively, they may claim
membership in multiple polities in which they may be residents, part-time residents, or
absentees’ (Fitzgerald, 2000, p.10). Thereby, non-citizen migrants can engage in various
activities of lobbying, public demonstrations, information and organization aiming at exerting
63
pressure on host or origin country’s governments and state institutions (Levitt and GlickSchiller, 2003).
Through these processes, the boundaries of national citizenship are becoming blurred and
‘citizenship institutions seems to be today in a somewhat dilemmatic situation’ (Gerdes and
Faist, 2010, p.23). Yet, the argument that citizenship transcends the national concept is not
easy to make. Although the citizenship’s practices are increasingly diversifying and
disembedding from a nation-state territory, its institutional dimensions remain close-related to
the nation-state(s).
These considerations bring to light that the analysis of the ‘transnational transformations of
citizenship’ (Gerdes and Faist, 2010) need to move a step forward, ‘beyond the idea of
citizenship as a protected status in a nation-state, and as a condition opposed to the condition
of statelessness’ (Ong, 2006, p.499).
When looking at citizenship not as a status but as a practice, i.e. as an expression of activism
by citizens, the field of ICTs can be use to bring in the perspective of a web-based citizenship.
In the digital age, the relation between legal/substantive citizens and states is reshaped by the
emergence of new deterritorialized agora. The question is to what extent Internet is changing
patterns of political activism of migrant populations? Two different perspectives can be
adopted when answering this question. First, some authors suggest that ICTs reinforce the
exercise at a distance of traditional political engagements and activities. Within this approach,
online forms of political participation are rather complementary to, then substitutive of,
traditional political meetings, demonstrations, roundtables, and so on. As ‘immigrants can
cost-effectively and easily contact one another to advocate their interests regarding their
country of residence or their country of origin’ (Kissau and Hunger, 2008, p.6), the practices
64
of dual citizenship can thus become more effective and more people feel encouraged to
express openly their political rights, skills and interests over the borders. Second, ICTs
enhance new transnational public spheres in which dispersed, migrant and not-migrant
populations share interests and values and mobilize around common public issues in new
spaces of collective action. Although Internet could be a ‘space of government surveillance’
(Ong, 2006), it creates also a space of (pro-)democratic expression. It can become ‘the site for
the articulation of overweening ethnic power that exceeds the nation-state’, as well as the
main tool ‘to construct a web-based ‘global citizenship’’ (Ong, 2006, p.503). This perspective
gives prominence to the potential of ICTs in general, and Internet particularly, to enable new
forms of political mobilization characterized by quick transnational/global spread.
In both cases, Internet appears – at different levels – as an environment conducive to the
crystallization of various points of view in a collective voice defending the interests of
(migrant) minority groups (Mitra, 2005). This way, Internet stimulates migrant mobilization
and ‘might enable migrant voices to be heard where political participation is otherwise scarce’
(Kissau and Hunger, 2008, p.6). As a ‘space where people come together as citizens and
articulate their autonomous views to influence the political institutions of society’ (Castells,
2008, p.78), Internet encourages the development of common points of view and dominant
trends of public opinion, creating a public visibility of the migrant community. The
emergence of an Internet-mediated transnational public sphere reflects a shift from a public
sphere ‘anchored around the national institutions of territorially bound societies to a public
sphere constituted around the media system’ (Castells, 2008, p.90), and which is often
strengthened by the migration of virtual social dynamics towards the public space. Networked
resources are then the key to enhance civic responsibility exercise and participation within a
65
‘network society’ (Castells, 1998) which ‘organizes its public sphere, more than any other
historical form of organization, on the basis of media communication networks’ (Castells,
2008, p.79). Thereby, Castells coins the notion of ‘new global public sphere’ to refer a
‘multimodal communication space’, built on Internet networks and communication systems.
Thus, come up a new ‘democracy of communication’ based on the emergence of a media of
the masses which is different in its essence from mass-media (de Rosnay, 2006) since it is
based on horizontal networks of communication. However, although horizontality allows
better opportunities for civic engagement and participation, it also generates ‘greater
fragmentation and pluralism in the structure of civic engagement’ (Bimber, 2000, p.332). In
fact, ICTs facilitates more targeted but punctual civic actions, as well as the emergence of
‘novel groups and organizations formed only for the duration of a single political effort or
civic event’ (Bimber, 2000, p.332).
Grounded on two different case-studies13, the next section analyzes these social
transformations and their impact on the mobilization of Romanian migrants within two
different migration contexts.
13
Both case-studies are based on netnographic observation of migrants’ online campaigns.
The www.casa-romanilor.ch was systematically observed during five months (from
November 2008 to March 2009) as part of a postdoc research (‘State logics and migrant
transnational practices. The Romanian migrants in Switzerland’) within the MOVE (Mobility
for excellence) program funded by the Swiss University Conference. The content analysis of a
corpus of online forum-based discussions, open letters and Swiss and Romanian newspapers
was completed by comprehensive interviews with 5 key-actors of the campaign (the owner of
66
NETIZENSHIP:
NEW
PATTERNS
FOR
MIGRANT
MOBILIZATION
AND
COLLECTIVE ACTION
www.casa-romanilor.ch: giving voice to a minority migrant group in Switzerland
Switzerland – which is not an EU member state – is not a traditional target destination for
Romanian migrants for different reasons. The Swiss migratory policy is based on a model of
‘two circles’, defining legal preference on the labour market for Swiss nationals and then
nationals of EU countries (1st circle) before other countries’ nationals (2nd circle). It
discouraged labour Romanian migration until recently, when a protocol regarding the
extension of the free movement of the persons within the EU to Romania and Bulgaria was
adopted at 1st of June 2009. Still, the Romanian migration is strictly regulated until 2016 by
‘contingent’ quotas for Romanian and Bulgarian workers within the Swiss labour market. In
the website, journalists and other community informal leaders). The second case study is
based on a long-term study of the Romanian migration to Canada and the impact of Internet
on transnational processes (Nedelcu, 2009b). It is informed by about twenty semi-structured
interviews with both key-actors and ordinary users of the campaigns’ websites, as well as
content analysis of webographic data.
67
absolute numbers, in 2008 the total Romanian permanent resident population in Switzerland14
limited to very few 4306 persons, while in 1989 it concerned 2213 people. One can notice an
ascendant trend, reinforced a bit more since 2000 (Table 1).
Table 1: The evolution of the Romanian permanent resident population in Switzerland since
1986 (based on data from the Federal Office of Statistics)
The Romanian permanent resident population in Switzerland from 1986 to 2008
5000
4000
3000
2000
1000
0
1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008
Effectif 2039 2087 2186 2213 2330 2 669 2 749 2 669 2 652 2 577 2 410 2 300 2 283 2 500 2 716 3 119 3 267 3 400 3 577 3 765 3 920 4 091 4 452
This evolution is rather singular within European countries which attracted ample flows of
Romanian regular and irregular migrants. In particular Italy and Spain witness a remarkable
increasing of Romanian immigration since 2002, respectively 2007 (Sandu, 2006).
In early 2000, Switzerland and the EU negotiated and signed a bilateral agreement including a
free circulation accord (among seven different issues). Validated by popular referendum, this
agreement ‘Bilatérales I’ has been in effect starting with 1st of June 2002 and included a
probationary clause of 7 years that allowed the possibility to be abrogated or indefinitely
prolonged. In 2009, Switzerland was expected to take position on this issue. As Romania and
Bulgaria accessed to the EU at 1st of January 2007, Switzerland had implicitly to consider the
14
This category includes three different types of residence permits (L – short work permit, B
– work permit for at least 1 year, C – permanent residence permit). It excepts Romanian
migrants naturalized Swiss.
68
extension of the negotiated rights of free movement of the labour force to the nationals of
these two new EU member states. The Swiss parliament regrouped the two issues (EU
bilateral agreements renewal and their extension to RO and BG) in a unique ‘federal decree’
aiming at equal treatment of all the 27 EU members.
Certain right-wing political milieus15, opposed to the renewal of the agreement but mostly to
its extension to Romania and Bulgaria, have decided to launch a referendum16 against the
decree. On February 8th 2009, the Swiss people took this referendum voting in the favour of
the renewal of the bilateral agreement and implicitly the extension of the free movement
agreements within the EU to Romania and Bulgaria.
Among the arguments vehemently defended by the initiators of the referendum, one can
notice: the syndrome of the ‘Polish plumber’, the fear of a ‘wage dumping’, the risks related
to an increasing criminality, and so on. The UDC party initiated then an offensive media
campaign and published a poster showing three black ravens voraciously consuming the
healthy resources of Switzerland. This poster dominated public spaces in big and small cities
all over the country, as well as publicity pages of mainstream newspapers (figure 1).
In parallel, the same party representatives launched in mainstream media a denigrating
campaign that emphasized the risk of a ‘Romanian invasion’, mostly by Rom’s minority. The
national and regional television broadcasting organized numerous and regular debates in
15
Mostly Lega dei Ticinesi, the young wing of Democratic Christian Union Party (UDC) and
the Swiss democrats.
16
According to the Swiss constitution, a question can be submitted to the popular vote by
referendum if at least 50,000 signatures are supporting such an initiative.
69
which very contradictory arguments were raised, with notable differences between the
linguistic regions of Switzerland. However, the public discourse was dominated by a
persistent amalgam between ‘Rom criminals’ and ‘Romanian workers’, and in the common
imaginary the ‘black ravens’ were indistinctively associated with future Romanian
immigrants (assimilated to Rom populations coming from Romania). The poster provoked a
scandal in Switzerland, and the debate largely spanned the Swiss territory. The Romanian
state used diplomatic channels to express its indignation, and the Swiss ambassador to
Bucharest was invited by the Romanian ministry of external affairs to give an explanation
about this campaign. In Bern, Romanian representatives silently worked to create favourable
opinion within the politic and economic Swiss milieus.
In reaction to this situation, many Romanian immigrants in Switzerland felt hurt. Some of
them have started self-consciously to take position within the debate. Although Romanians
lack solid territorial community-structures in Switzerland17, the website www.casaromanilor.ch18 assumed a key-role in creating a ‘community mobilization’ on the referendum
issue. The owner of the website used the networks created through this virtual agora to launch
17
With one exception among seven Romanian cultural associations spread in French and
German speaking cantons, all these groups are rather very young and yet unable to function in
network.
18
This website was created in 2003 by a young IT professional resident in Zurich with the
aim to offer a community-platform that could lately serve at the creation of a Romanian
association at national level. Its name ‘casa-romanilor.ch’ has a strong symbolic significance:
‘the Romanians’ house’ in Switzerland.
70
a contra-campaign aiming to better the image of the Romanian community in Switzerland and
give it a ‘voice’. In early December 2008, he posted on the main page of the website a call to
collective action and initiated an ‘image campaign’ entitled ‘Switzerland vote for us too’,
directed to all the Swiss voters. The initial idea was to send a clear message to Swiss people
that there is any reason to fear the Romanian immigrants. The senders of this message was
supposed to be prominent Romanian migrants in Switzerland, Swiss nationals involved in
economic, humanitarian or cultural activities in Romania, other Romanian personalities or
potential migrants from Romania. Furthermore, the campaign aimed at raising awareness and
stimulating participation to the vote among double nationals and Romanians naturalized
Swiss.
Although the Casa-Romanilor website hosted the campaign, various Internet channels were
targeted in order to promote it. The time was short to develop a strong strategy and implement
this campaign; however the initiative had a great echo within the Romanian community.
Some tens of people (both of Romanian and Swiss origin) took position publically and sent
messages to be published on the website, developing positive arguments such as: the
diversified profile of Romanian immigrants in Switzerland, their contribution to economic
growth and innovation, historic and cultural evidence of Swiss-Romanian friendship, concrete
projects of intercultural dialogue, objective facts about Romanian migratory flows within
Europe and Switzerland, more subjective and affective experiences of mutual solidarities, and
so on. An alternative poster was designed by a Romanian artist living in Zurich and was
adopted as official logo for the Romanian campaign (figure 2).
The forums of discussion related to the casa-romanilor website became a democratic arena in
which Romanian citizens living in Switzerland and Romania, but also Swiss citizens of
71
Romanian or other origin confronted their opinions and where pro and contra arguments were
addressed.
An ad-hoc ‘movement of action against the UDC defamatory poster’ resulted in an open letter
addressed to the Confederation Presidency and the Swiss government (figure 3).
This letter was ‘signed’ online by 512 persons19. While a majority were Romanians living in
Switzerland and Swiss pro-Europeans and Romania’s sympathizers, few tens were Romanians
living in France, Germany, Romania, United States, Italy, Spain… Very few Bulgarians
showed interest in the issue and signed the letter.
As what was as stake in the referendum vote was of crucial importance both for Swiss and
Romanian governments, Casa-Romanilor’s initiative was quickly noticed by political milieus
and the national media, both in Romania and Switzerland. On the one hand, the Romanian
public sphere showed great interest for the issue and Romanian media largely debated it,
taking up the arguments of the Casa-Romanilor campaign. Romanian newspapers of national
impact reproduced some of the articles published in the website pages. On the other hand,
Swiss media looked for objective facts and informed opinions about the Romanian
community in Switzerland. Thus the ‘virtual voice’ of Romanians penetrated into the public
space of the mainstream media20.
19
That means that about 10 per cent of the Romanian residents in Switzerland have
participated.
20
The mechanisms through which this debate gained such a great audience are related to the
swiss political system of direct democracy and the importance of the public debates where
civil sphere actors play a key role.
72
Some of the campaign participants – identified as opinion leaders – were approached by
Swiss radios and televisions and invited to give their opinion in public (televised) debates21.
In addition, few Romanian journalists living in Switzerland played a key-role as a turntable
relating Casa-Romanilor, Swiss and Romanian medias. Other people encouraged by the
snowball effect of the campaign and the feeling that their voice can be heard, took private
initiative and addressed regional newspapers and associations or acted as promoters of the
‘Romanian cause’ within their immediate social environment (colleagues, neighbours, and so
on).
While it is difficult to measure the real impact of this campaign and its influence on the final
result of the vote22, one can nevertheless notice the crucial role of the Casa-Romanilor website
21
Although the audience of the website was rather large and transnational, one should notice
that the promoters and key actors of the campaign are mostly highly skilled young middle
class Romanian migrants in Switzerland, arrived after 1990 as economic migrants.
Interestingly, older highly skilled refugees arrived during the communist period have rarely
taken publically position within the debate, and when they did they have rather criticized this
kind of mobilization who goes – according to them – against the principles of the direct
democracy. ‘Romanians don’t have enough exercise of democracy and don’t have to give
lessons of democracy to the Swiss people’ said one of them during an interview.
22
The national interest of the Swiss confederation was definitely in the favour of the EU
bilateral agreement renewal. Thus, it is supposed that this argument prevailed on the
agreement regarding its extension to Romania and Bulgaria which was much more
controversial within the Swiss electorate.
73
in bringing into balance a minority discourse and interests. Internet thus generated on the one
hand a horizontal participation and organization within the Romanian (transnational)
community. On the other hand, it enabled a bottom-up dynamic that get in the mainstream
debate and made a minority’s voice heard.
‘Mergi la vot !’: an online transnational mobilization of Romanian voters abroad
Dual citizenship23 allows Romanian migrants to participate in the political life of the country
of origin, mainly exercising their right to vote. According to the estimates of the Romanian
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, about 10 per cent of the Romanian voters are living abroad.
Internet affords migrants to inform their own political opinion as well as to debate, confront
and compare the political options they have, in relation with one or more nation-state’s
memberships. At the digital era, finding information, taking a stand and mobilizing to vote is
not difficult as communication and information channels are constantly extending. In the
same time, this population becomes a target for the Romanian political parties. Electoral
campaigns are also increasingly using ICTs, directing specific electoral messages towards
migrant populations. The candidates enhance dialogue with their potential (transnational)
voters via their blogs and mainstream media electoral debates are spread online.
23
According to the Romanian constitution and the law of citizenship 21/1991 adopted after
the fall of the communist regime, Romania accepts double citizenship.
74
Communication teams specialized in new media become today major players within the
complex election gears working towards the political success of parties and candidates24.
This subsection examines the role that Internet websites of Romanians abroad play in the
political mobilization of migrant populations. For instance, pioneering as a migratory
networks’ generator25 in the late nineties, the website www.thebans.com committed to
promote a vote for political change in Romania at two particular moments: first, the 2000
presidential and parliamentary elections; and second, in November 2003, at the time of a
24
In 2008, the Barack Obama electoral campaign represents the starting point of a new
pattern based on an efficient nesting of online and offline strategies, which increased feelings
of citizen efficacy in the political process (Kirk and Schill, 2011). The Barack Obama’s
supporters’ team set up a website and has used social networks to recruit new volunteers. The
Movement constitutes as ‘a task force on Internet and on the ground’. Cybernauts converted in
field volunteers. Obama online campaign met an unprecedented success. American students
have created groups of support in each university, mainly using Facebook and MySpace.
Thanks to these two networks Obama had succeeded in bringing together more than one
million ‘friends’, while Hilary Clinton only accounted 300,000 and John McCain 140,000.
Later on, the website My.barackobama.com known as ‘MyBo’ took over these social
networks. Source: www.politique.net, referred January 10th, 2009.
25
This website played a crucial role in providing Romanian newcomers to Canada, and
particularly to Toronto, with migratory and social capital. It functioned as a social and
community glue and generated an innovative migratory dynamic that was analyzed in detail in
the previous work of the author (see Nedelcu, 2002, 2009a).
75
referendum aiming at the modification of the Romanian constitution in order to grant
extended rights to double nationals. In 2000, the vote campaign triggered by Thebans.com
enabled numerous and virulent reactions within the discussion forums. Many migrant
cybernauts participated to the debate through a critical analysis of the economic and politic
milieus in Romania. Although divergent arguments polarized the discussion, a solid position
against the candidature of the ex-president Ion Iliescu26 clearly emerged. It is however
impossible to measure the impact of this first online campaign on the vote orientations of the
migrant online participants or passive observers of the debates. In 2003, what was at stake in
the referendum vote directly concerned the right of migrants to participate within the
Romanian institutions of public administration. More concretely, the referendum aimed at the
harmonization of the Romanian constitution to the European legislation, by introducing the
possibility for any person that owns the Romanian citizenship (regardless to the possession of
a second one) and lives in Romania to access to the public function. In Canada, two
community websites (www.thebans.com and www.arcweb.com) actively involved in a
26
Former member of the communist nomenklatura, Ion Iliescu was propelled as a
revolutionary leader in December 1989. President of the ‘National Salvation Front’, first
revolutionary government that transformed subsequently in the ‘Social Democrat Party’, he
cumulated three mandates as a president of the Romania (1990-92; 1992-96; 2000-04). He is a
highly controversial politician and opposition parties as well as the Romanian civil society
blame him for the backwardness of economic and politic reforms in Romania, as he tried to
implement a kind of Perestroika-style reform without a veritable shift to effective democracy
and capitalism during his (first) presidencies.
76
campaign addressing Romanian potential voters from Toronto. By providing complete
information about the vote object and procedure to vote from abroad they aimed at
stimulating the interest of their forums’ members in this referendum. The Romanian consulate
in Toronto showed high interest for this initiative and invited the webmaster and owner of
www.thebans.com website to sit as an observer of the vote process, besides the
representatives of traditional mainstream media.
These examples suggest that Internet could play a crucial role in the processes of transnational
political mobilization when key political issues are at the stake. However, the mobilization
often concerns short term aims and targeted events (Bimber, 2000). In 2004, at the time of the
new presidential elections and after a third mandate of Ion Iliescu as a president, a large-scale
coordinated online mobilization was set up by a network of migrant webmasters of Romanian
migrant websites. Initiated by the owner of the swiss www.casa-romanilor.ch website, this
campaign called on solidarity and civic responsibility within Romanian transnational
communities. While in 2000 this kind of initiative stayed punctual, the campaign ‘Go and
vote!’ / ‘Mergi la vot!’ had a broad transnational echo. 42 websites of Romanians abroad and
17 websites of traditional media (newspapers and television broadcasting) as well as number
of representatives from the Romanian civil society gathered together in order to encourage
people to take position and vote for change. They all made efforts to provide an up-to-date
information about electoral programs and political platforms of the candidates, disseminated
press releases and enabled online and offline forums, round tables and debates. Each website
informed migrant voters about vote centres in host countries, reported about the vote process,
results or potential incidents. In addition, ad-hoc virtual groups have multiplied and have
77
intensely encouraged Romanian citizens from abroad to take position in regard to the political
situation in the country.
This time, online initiatives were fruitful. The vote of Romanian citizens abroad was not only
particularly massive, but it has largely sanctioned the reform failure as well as the inertia of
the social democratic party and the president Iliescu. During the second round of election, the
‘diaspora vote’ was decisive to take direction for change and new democracy. With a large
majority for the political alliance D.A.27 between the National Liberal Party and the
Democratic Party, and its candidate for the Presidency, the Romanians abroad have been able
to propel Traian Basescu as a president. Thus, Basescu surprisingly surpassed Adrian Nastase,
his competitor and successor of the former president Ion Iliescu at the leadership of the Social
Democrat Party. Nastase has been taken a comfortable lead after the first round (41 per cent
of the votes, compared to 33 per cent for Basescu). However, final results have been very
tight (Basescu 51.23 per cent; Nastase, 48.77 per cent). More than 80 per cent of the
Romanians abroad expressed their preference for Traian Basescu (81.86 per cent in France;
95 per cent in Canada; 83 per cent in the United States). Furthermore, in his investiture
speech, the elected-President warmly acknowledged the ‘Romanians from diaspora’ for their
‘trust’ and ‘responsible vote’.
In April 2007, the online campaign ‘Mergi la vot !’ has been relaunched when the Parliament
has set in motion a referendum procedure for the suspension of the President. The website
www.voteaza.org was the main centralizing platform for information and communication
between diaspora websites and webmasters. The same pattern was developed as in 2004.
27
‘Dreptate & Adevar’ – ‘Justice & Truth’.
78
Again, within the 178 vote centres abroad, 93 per cent of the 75,027 votes were against the
President resignation. Punctually, few websites and diaspora associations went further by
initiating protest movements. For instance, the association of Romanian Canadians (ARC)
took position publically and launched through the www.romanianstoronto.ca website a
petition disagreeing with the Romanian parliament decision to suspend the President mandate.
Signed by 950 Romanians living in Canada, this petition has been sent to the presidents of the
two chambers of the Romanian Parliament before the referendum vote, expressing a deep
concern regarding the depreciation of the political environment and democracy in the country
of origin.
These various examples show that politically engaged webmasters can take civic leadership
and play a key role as transnational political activists. As engaged netizens, they creatively
combine technological skills, online social capital and activist orientations, thus generating
web-based transnational civic movements.
CONCLUSION: NETIZENSHIP AS A NEW FORM OF CITIZEN PARTICIPATION
This chapter underlines what ICTs bring in the discussion of the civic and political
mobilization of (trans)migrants. It points out that on the one hand, Internet offers space for
democratic expression of migrant minorities. In particular, it allows the emergence of a
collective ‘voice’ able to defend the interests of the minority migrant populations in host
societies. Moreover, it enables new forms of ‘public diplomacy’ or ‘diplomacy of the public’
(Castells, 2008), aiming to ‘harness the dialogue between different social collectives and their
79
cultures in the hope of sharing meaning and understanding’ (Castells, 2008, p.91). On the
other hand, Internet and its communication platforms create basic conditions for collective
agency gathering migrant and non-migrant populations over the borders. In particular, it can
be a catalyst for transnational political mobilization transforming migrant population into a
potentially significant actor of political change in origin countries. However, the mobilization
gains momentum with specific and focused aims and actions.
In conclusion, netizenship appears as a new horizontal form of participation and active
citizenship. Internet creates new mechanisms of (deterritorialized) interaction of migrant
minorities with the civil society and the state and generates a new equilibrium of power
relations within a transnational public sphere. It generates new participatory patterns
articulating local and global dimensions and dynamics.
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84
Part II
Towards a new public communicative space?
85
Chapter 4
In the discourse laboratory: migrant media and the politics of migration
Gavan Titley
Diversity may be a social fact in migration societies, but the evaluation of ‘diversity’, and of
its socio-cultural impact and importance, is bound up with its mediation. As such, its facticity
is not a settled form, as the fact of diversity is shaped by the ambivalence of mediation, and
the discourses that shape the interpretation and evaluation of differences. In contemporary
Europe and the west, this ambivalence is once again pronounced in stark political terms.
Putatively problematic ethnic, cultural and racial diversity is constructed as the primary fear
of what the political collective Cette France Là terms the ‘phobic democracy’ of the
neoliberal era (2009, p.418), and is seen as a threat to social cohesion and ‘shared values’.
Concomitantly, putatively valuable ethnic, cultural and racial diversity is celebrated as a value
in and of itself, and as a cosmopolitan good in globalised societies (Fleras, 2009). This
chapter examines how migrant and minority media navigate the ambivalent politics of
diversity, and how they are positioned, and position themselves, in a political landscape where
the cultural allegiances, social impact and personal values of migrants are almost continuously
under scrutiny.
In her study of Turkish migrant broadcasting in Berlin, Kira Kosnick (2004) examines a
prevalent division of media into ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’, according to their perceived
commitment to forms of broadcasting deemed congruent with the goals of celebratory
86
multiculturalism and local, social integration. While the transnational services developed by
local entrepreneurs provide an obvious ‘bad guy’ – held, erroneously, to hinder integration by
sealing migrants into an imaginative, communicative homeland – this dichotomy is also
applied to locally produced Turkish broadcasts, according to where they are placed on ‘…the
two axes that shape the space within which Turkish migrant life is situated in Berlin: the
politics of multiculturalism as a dominant paradigm of integration for ethnic minorities, and
the transnational, or trans-state dimensions of migrant life’ (2004, p.190).
Beyond its contextual specificity, what Kosnick’s study demonstrates is the formal and
informal power of widely-mediated institutional and public discourses to shape a framework
within which migrant actors, including migrant media, must in turn reflexively mediate
themselves. While these frameworks set out normative and imaginative aspirations for
national societies, these discursive constructs are also transnational; mobile and constantly
adapted, they are also produced within the ‘globalised public space’ that is the subject of this
book. These frameworks for managing national space and society are rarely coherent and
sometimes inchoate, but they are nevertheless powerful, ascribing value and legitimacy to
lives according to certain forms of recognition, and often hinting at teleological ideas of the
‘integrated’ and ‘diverse’ society. Thus while multiculturalism is, in Stuart Hall’s summation,
a ‘maddeningly spongy and imprecise discursive field’, this did little to stem what Will
Kymlicka terms the ‘global diffusion of a political discourse of multiculturalism’, in the late
twentieth century, through networks of intergovernmental organizations, state agencies,
NGOs, academia and media (2007, p.3-60).
Further, this spongy imprecision has done much to facilitate the more recent global diffusion
of the idea of multiculturalism as a ‘failed experiment’ and socio-political problem. While
87
empirical studies of the historical implementation of multicultural policy and governance
emphasize its minimalist, limited and uneven character and impact (Phillips and Saharso,
2008), multiculturalism has become profoundly implicated with a range of social ills and
conflicts held to stem from ‘unmanaged’ immigration and problematic cultural difference.
This restrictive set of associations has been forged in globalized public space; as Vertovec and
Wessendorf observe, ‘since the early 2000s across Europe, the rise, simultaneity and
convergence of arguments condemning multiculturalism has been striking’ (2009, p.7). As a
result, the similarly striking crafting of European ‘neo-assimilationist agendas’ (Kofman,
2004) has been informed by a convergent, transnational rejection of ‘multiculturalism’,
mediated through particular idioms conveying threatened and desired states of integration: a
resurgent laïcité in France, ‘community cohesion’ in the UK, ‘standards and values’ in the
Netherlands, and ‘Leitkultur’ in Germany (Fekete, 2009, p.62-3).
Migrant and ‘ethnic community’ media, as Bailey et al point out, ‘are not set points of
difference; their role and their significance to audiences and users are conditional and shaped
within wider societal and communication processes’ (2007, p.2). However they are, under the
conditions outlined, vulnerable to being perceived as set agents of difference (or ‘bad guys’),
or at least as having to situate themselves in relation to the dominant discourses and idioms
shaping the politics of migration and legitimate presence. As a pan-European report
conducted by the Institute for Race Relations (Fekete, 2008) argued, common to different
national contexts is a concern with achieving ‘national coherence’ through an institutional
delineation of which ‘aliens’ and ‘foreigners’ are accorded the right to integrate, and on what
terms. The circulation of international news in globalized public space is increasingly used to
frame domestic discussions and political agendas, creating expectations that minority, and
88
particularly Muslim, communities and community ‘representatives’ will respond, and respond
in ways circumscribed as acceptably ‘moderate’ or ‘integrated’ (Fekete, 2008, p.14-16).
Yet, given their conditional significance to their primary audiences, any reflexive positioning
may also have to take account of the audience’s political and affective attachments and
expectations. The form of ‘culture talk’ (Soysal, 2009) that minority actors and
representatives may be expected to mediate may be in tension with the work of attempting to
represent, mediate and reflect on the lives and experiences of their communities, and being a
‘good guy’ or a ‘bad guy’ a category adjudicated by multiple constituencies. Further, such
‘culture talk’ considerations are refracted in and through professional and media practices,
and commercial considerations and market strategies.
This chapter examines the positioning and reception of ‘diversity-oriented’ and migrant media
in relation to the politics of migration. It does so through a case study from Ireland, conducted
during a period of unprecedented inward migration and economic growth, and where the
social fact of diversity became entangled in mediations of the ‘new Ireland’ and the
consequences of rapid social change (Ging, Kirby and Cronin, 2009). Drawing on interviews
with media producers across sectors, it examines how various media actors have attempted to
position themselves in what is termed the ‘discourse laboratory’ of public life in Ireland
during this period. Complementing this with focus group interviews conducted with media
users from the Polish and Nigerian populations, it examines the interpretation of these
strategies, and discusses how target audience members negotiate everyday modes of media
engagement with reflections on the political connotations and implications of these media
positions.
89
BETWEEN COHESION AND COSMOPOLITANISM: STATE DISCOURSES OF
‘DIVERSITY MANAGEMENT’
Experiments in the discourse laboratory
As Mary Hickman has argued, ‘“talk of diversity” is predicated not on the acceptance of
plurality but on the notion of a host who is being subject to diversification’ (2007, p.12). What
Hickman identifies is a double movement in contemporary diversity discourses, towards, on
the one hand, a recognition or valuing of human diversity in certain ways and under certain
conditions, while at the same time emphasizing that its acceptance remains contingent, and on
‘it’ continuing to be recognized as a good (see also Hage, 1998). This ambivalence was
pronounced in the institutional discourses developed during what is loosely termed the ‘Celtic
Tiger’ period in Ireland from the late 1990s to 2007-08. Rapid – and unsustainable –
economic growth attracted many diasporic Irish into return migration, and substantial and
variegated migration from multiple sites; according to one estimate the flow of people into
Ireland between 2000-06 amounted to 750,000 people from over 200 countries. By 2006, two
years after the accession of ten new EU member states, 612,600, or 14.7 per cent of the total
population, were born outside of Ireland, and included, for example, an estimated 63,000
Polish people (CSO 2006, p.24).
While many migrants experienced popular and state racism (Lentin and McVeigh, 2006), the
mediation of a ‘progressive multicultural image’, crucial to a globalized, late capitalist
economy, scarcely acknowledged it (Kirby et al, 2002, p.197). While research on public
opinion on immigration during this period is as varied as the methodologies applied and the
90
questions asked (MacÉinrí 2009, p.40-43), a celebratory public discourse – reading the new
migratory ‘cosmopolitanism’ as a dimension of positive national transformation – rubbed
along with the discursive ordering of migrant populations along a conventional axis from
‘good’ to ‘bad’ (Haynes et al, 2009; Titley, 2008). Official state discourses reflected the same
ambivalence, displaying a ‘triumphalist postmodern simulacrum of diversity’ (MacÉinrí 2009,
p.50) woven into an over-riding ‘national interest’ discourse, as Boucher details:
…the content of Irish official discourses on managing migration is largely bounded
spatially to, and within, the territory of the Republic of Ireland. Second, official
discourses tend to be bound temporally to a current context of events related to
migration and integration issues to which policy-makers believe they need to respond,
often ex post facto or after the event. One exception to this temporal boundedness is
the perceived future threat of social exclusion, and a threat to social cohesion, from the
relative lack of integration of immigrants’ descendants into Irish society. Spatially this
temporal exception normally refers to older European countries of immigration with
the content expressed in terms of the need for pro-active policy-making in order to
avoid parallel societies and urban ghettoes[…] Third, the content of Irish official
discourses on managing migration is bounded structurally by invoking Ireland’s
national interest […] [which] refers to protecting Ireland’s territory, economy, and
labour market, welfare state, culture, identity and societal cohesion from potential
threats by immigrants and their future descendants (2011, p.126)
91
In this limited overview, what is of significance in Boucher’s summary is the political impact
of mediated anxieties, the impact, as the IRR report cited above noted, of international news
events and dominant idioms on the texture of domestic political agendas (see Finney and
Simpson, 2010; Vertovec and Wessendorf, 2009; for further discussion see Lentin and Titley,
2011). In a recent comparative study of multicultural governance in six countries, Augie
Fleras (2009) draws attention to the impact of international discourses in ‘hardening European
arteries’ towards multiculturalism and immigration (2009, p.194-202). The Irish state, while
championing diversity as a ‘resource’, themed their integration strategy as ‘a chance to get it
right’, a temporal emphasis that constructs Ireland as dealing with the ‘challenges’ of
migration during this moment of instructive, post-multiculturalist European crisis.
The 2008 Migration Nation policy, for example, looks to ‘experiences in other countries’ to
shape a determinist, modular analysis whereby ‘from Ireland’s point of view, we may be able
to position ourselves on a more advanced cycle rather than go through earlier cycles’ (OMI,
2008, pp.35-6). In practice, however, integration policy not only involved a concerted effort
to calibrate the ‘correct’ managerial discourse, it was heavily dependent, and ultimately
limited, to the domain of institutional discourse for effect. Policy was less a blueprint for
future investment than a switchboard for orienting signals, a mediation of a neoliberal
determination to cultivate ‘...self-sufficient and autonomous immigrants, who must work on
themselves in order to be independent, and committed to contributing to the Irish economy
and society, in order that they may be integrated’ (Gray 2006, p.130). The salient effect of this
activity was to create what could be termed a discourse laboratory, a context in which a range
of institutional (state and non-state) actors and networks sought to project and position
themselves in relation to a shifting repertoire of ‘diversity and integration and multiracialism
92
and multiculturalism and interculturalism’ (Lentin and McVeigh, 2006, p.165). As Ronit
Lentin and Robbie McVeigh analyzed, what these discursive frameworks shared was an
acceptance of the terms of ‘state anti-racism’:
Anti-racism has been backed into the paradigm of interculturalism. Thus the problem
is no longer racism but ‘managing diversity’ or championing ‘social cohesion’ or
promoting
‘good
relations’
[…]
increasingly
both
multiculturalism
and
interculturalism are abandoned as integration becomes the watchword for managing
racism in the 21st century. The problem of racism is both displaced and denied – now
the real problem is located within the qualities of those minorities that need to be
integrated. It is not the racism of the ‘host society’ but the cultural and political
incompatibility of the new communities of colour, immigrants, migrant workers,
refugees and asylum-seekers that is asserted as the cause of problems. Anyway, who
could argue against the principle of integration? Thus the notion of ‘integration’
seamlessly becomes a mechanism for cooption and subordination (2006, p.166).
The imperative of ‘integration’ has particular affinities with the institutional remit of public
service broadcasters in western Europe. Further, under political-economic conditions where
these institutions are consistently called into question, responding to the imperative of
integration has provided a ‘legitimation strategy’ of some value (Larsen, 2010).
Public service in the discourse laboratory
93
Most public service broadcasters in Europe have extended their historical remit of fostering
commonality and recognizing pluralism to include a responsibility to ethnic minority
audiences, and the relevant institutional policies and programme strategies have also
circulated and been exchanged within the European Broadcasting Union and other fora
(Horsti, 2009; Leurdijk, 2006). Radio Telefís Éireann (RTÉ) energetically adopted this
adapted remit during the period under discussion, developing an action plan for
interculturalism as a pillar of its corporate policy reporting:
RTÉ will be inclusive and respectful of the cultural difference and richness that exist
within the population of Ireland. It will provide the diversity of output necessary to
present an understanding of the cultural and ethnic backgrounds of the country’s
inhabitants, foster an understanding and appropriate valuing of different cultures and
create a sense of cultural cohesion within our society. RTÉ recognizes that its
workforce must reflect the diversity of Irish society and will promote the involvement
and employment of people from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. (RTÉ
2008, p.26)
While this kind of policy statement can be read as dutifully ‘ticking all the boxes’, it emerged
from a serious internal process aimed at particularizing a discourse that could blend an
attention to cultural diversity – within the context of broader, ‘postmodern’ diversity in the
digital age – and a reinvigoration of the national-integrative function of public service
broadcasting.
Thus in its commitment to ‘explain difference and promote greater
understanding between the communities that make up society’ (RTÉ 2006, p.14) RTÉ’s
94
guiding discourse shifted from ‘multiculturalism’ to ‘diversity’, with the supplementary
addition of an ‘intercultural’ commitment to underline the integrative function of national
broadcasting. In so doing, they registered the influence of the BBC’s shift towards a ‘social
capital’ understanding of diversity, where ‘the policy goal has been to increase the social
capital of individuals in Britain as a means to an end such as democratic renewal, social
cohesion, and economic productivity’ (O’Loughlin, 2006). Ultimately, these shifts in framing
vocabulary were guided less by the persuasive content of coherent philosophies than a
sensitivity to the negative ‘bad guy’ connotations of multiculturalism.
The accelerated nature of this discursive assemblage and policy development ensured that
RTÉ was quickly confronted with issues well-known to other public service broadcasters,
namely, how to develop programming of interest to its ‘new audience’, while ‘educating’
majority audiences and avoiding programming undermined by a politically correct ‘aura of
persuasion’ (Browne and Onyejelem, 2007), or as Andra Leurdijk summarises, programmes
that ‘explain blacks and Muslims to a white audience’ (2006, p.31). In relying on slot-based
multicultural programmes between 2004-07 on both radio and television, RTÉ clearly
foregrounded a mission of educating the majority, as one producer explained:
My thinking was never to make a programme for the multicultural audience. My
thinking was originally…to make a programme for the wider audience. In those years
we were really introducing the Irish audience to the idea that now you are a
multicultural society….I tried not to cover anything that was problematic, although
I’m sure that we did from time to time, because I never wanted the programme itself to
become a stereotype. (In Titley et al, 2010, p.127).
95
The determination to avoid ‘negative’ associations and to promote positive messages is a
widespread, initial interpretation of the public service mission in relation to the politics of
migration, and one embedded in the logic discussed by Hickman, of reassuring a ‘host’ being
subject to diversification. However, the pressures of this format – diminishing appeal for
‘majority audiences’ and a burgeoning distaste for the one-dimensionality among those being
‘explained’ – and the competitive, commercial pressures to develop formats capable of broad
cross-demographic appeal has resulted, across Europe, in a move away from slot-based
programming to a philosophy of ‘cross-content diversity’. In Leurdijk’s summary of the
European scene: ‘(the early programmes) functioned as a sort of compensation for the underrepresentation or mis-representation of minority perspectives in mainstream programming. In
trying to gain larger audiences, stressing the universality of human emotions and experiences
became the next important strand’ (2006, p.42).
This shift in Ireland has also been informed by an assumption widely circulated in globalized
public space concerning the particularizing and ‘ghettoizing’ potential of dedicated
multicultural programming, or programming featuring migrant-associated languages. In
interview, several producers spoke of their determination to avoid ‘ghettoising’ programmes,
and not only in the sense of concentrating multicultural issues in a single programme.
Particularized programming was held to have the potential to underline or aggravate the forms
of social segregation presumed, in the official state discourses, to be a dangerous product of
96
bad migration management.28 As against this, ‘cross-content diversity’ allowed a multicultural
dimension to be sutured to reality television formats, particularly observational documentary,
and health, family and ‘human interest’ shows of various kinds. As Jonathan Bignell (2006)
has pointed out, reality television is less a genre than a term for a wider shift in orientation
towards the role of television in societies of increased complexity, individualization, and
socio-cultural diversity. Reality/observational formats thrive through generic hybridity, and
therefore this approach was regarded as a mode of ‘normalization’, of inserting the
representation of ‘New Irish’ people into the comparative intimacies of home, family, health
and lifestyle.
Concomitantly, however, this approach to the integration of ‘diversity’ allows for the
continued avoidance of the ‘negative’ by leveling out differences in legal status and social
entitlement – all foreigners are potential ‘diversity’ – and by eliding the socio-political
restrictions and discrimination which may come with that status. Further, this mode of
‘inclusion’ on-screen can become a placebo for the difficulties and failures in finding
meaningful ways of integrating minority and migrant-background professionals into public
service media production. In our audience research, the few participants who had viewed
these programmes did not interpret the shift away from ‘first generation’ multicultural slots to
cross-content diversity as a form of thematic and political progress, but rather as a return to
28
For the persistent, and sociologically erroneous, association of urban areas characterized by
socio-cultural diversity with imaginaries of ‘ghettos’ and ‘parallel societies’ see Finney and
Simpson (2010). For a discussion of the translation of these idioms into communicative logics
in Nordic public service broadcasting, see Horsti (2009).
97
invisibility. In reference to Mono, RTÉ’s long-running multicultural television slot, several
Nigerian participants noted that while they didn’t really watch it, its presence was reassuring
as a form of recognition (an argument that encapsulates the tensions between public service
commitment and the competition for audience ‘share’). Moreover, several of the same
discussants questioned the concentration of migrant presence to lifestyle formats, pointing to
their broader relationship to the public service broadcaster: to quote one participant ‘I believe
there are immigrants who can present some of these news programmes on radio and
television, especially on RTÉ. We pay TV the license and we deserve better treatment from
them and better representation’.
Particularly given the somewhat transient and diffuse efforts of state institutions to propagate
visions of migration management, it is obvious that official discourses are not simply
superimposed or adopted by public service media. However, as Simon Cottle has observed,
‘political ideas of assimilation, integration, pluralism, multiculturalism and/or anti-racism can
all variously inform the regulatory frameworks and cultural climates in which mainstream and
minority productions can either flourish or founder’ (2000, p.17). The intensive search by
RTÉ for a defining discourse that could brand and accommodate their efforts to mediate the
diversification of the nation, while synchronizing – and re-legitimizing – the integrative
mission of public service media with the dominant discourse of ‘integration’ reflects the
perceived need for national institutions to be reactive to change in definitive terms.
MIGRANT MEDIA AND AUDIENCES
98
Returning to the point made by Cottle, the ‘cultural climate’ in which migrant media operate
is permeated by the idioms, assumptions and prerogatives of official discourse, but how, if at
all, this is reflexively engaged may vary widely. The following sub-sections examine the
positioning of Polish and African media in Ireland - as well as that of relevant programmes
produced within the remit of community radio - and examines the reflections of the target
audiences on this positioning.
The Polish media field: class, consumption and community
The accession of ten new states to the European Union in 2004 created what Adrian Favell
describes as ‘…a wider, transnational horizon that encourages temporary and circular
migration trends, and demands no long-term settlement or naturalisation in the country of
work’ (2008, p.706). As Ireland was incorporated into this horizon, Polish people29 developed
29
Post-accession circular migration should not elide the fact that Polish migration to Ireland
existed before this point, including highly specific political and economic forms over decades
(Grabowska, 2005, p.32). Nevertheless post-2004 Polish migrants quickly established
themselves as a significant population in Ireland. The population is largely young, with seven
out of ten people aged between 20 and 34 years, the majority is single and males outnumber
females by a 64:36 ratio. Almost 93 per cent of those who completed the census in 2006 gave
their religion as Roman Catholic and 95 per cent selected ‘Any other white background’ as
their ethnicity. A high proportion at this point were in employment (84 per cent) with the
numbers highest in construction and manufacturing followed by wholesale and retail services.
99
the most obvious circuitry of labour mobility and transnational socio-cultural networks, a fact
reflected in the intensive and rapid development of various media formats and services
(particularly between 2004-07). The experience of migration, and the formal and informal
restrictions placed on migrants socio-political participation has been held to shape innovative
forms of media production and practice (Karim, 2003). In this highly particular context, the
diversity of the Polish mediasphere was also shaped by the relative mass of potential readers,
listeners and viewers, and their socio-economic diversity, stimulating an acceleration and
blurring of what have been identified in other contexts as quasi-developmental stages of
migrant media production (Trandafoiu, 2006). As Mark Deuze has argued, it is helpful to
analytically unhook ‘ethnic’ from ‘media’ to examine the development of such media forms
in relation to the wider social trend towards multivalent forms of media participation, and not
only as an expression of ‘community’ (Deuze, 2006).
Thus the Polish media that began to develop after 2004 expanded rapidly from services aimed
at orienting a broad ‘community’ of new arrivals to a differentiated field of competitive,
niche-seeking forms, situating themselves in a dense field of transnational, cross-media
possibilities. In most cases, these forms negotiated a manifest tension between targeting
audiences with specific kinds of socio-economic capital and lifestyles while maintaining a –
shifting - symbolic relationship with the ‘Polish community’. Mediating an appropriate
multicultural strategy added a further dimension to this, and this reflexive mediation was in
turn shaped by the relational positions of different media actors. This is best exemplified in
For a further discussion of patterns of migration and sources on the impact of the economic
crisis, see Titley and Kerr 2011.
100
the relational development of print titles. The weekly Gazeta Polska was established in May
2005, and primarily comprised of coverage of socio-economic issues of relevance to Poles,
combining this with specific forms of advice, cultural features, an extensive classified section,
and a website that acts as a portal for Polish services and events. Marketed as ‘the first and
most significant Polish weekly in Ireland’, the dual aims of inclusive community address and
mass market optimization meant that the Gazeta steered clear of potentially divisive political
commentary. Yet this did not preclude it being explicitly positioned, editorially and in its
publicity, as making a contribution to ‘multicultural society’ in Ireland, by working not only
to address the Polish community, but, as one journalist put it, to ‘accustom Ireland to the
presence of Poles’. To this end it published a weekly multicultural page in English aimed at
primarily notional Irish readers, and mediated an entirely conventional and generic
commitment to ‘multiculturalism’ in the same terms in which RTÉ initially framed its
approaches.
Following the establishment of Gazeta Polska, a Polish media field characterized by the
entrepreneurial identification of more distinct, niche audiences, developed. The free
circulation Polski Express, launched in 2006, marked an immediate shift towards a more
differentiated readership of ‘young urban professionals’ - a shift visible in its core advertising
and frequent featuring of high-end consumer goods – and in contra-distinction to Gazeta
Polska’s projection of a unifying experience of life in Ireland, it aimed to engage with
political issues and specifically, though not in these terms, with the politics of migration and
mobility in Ireland and Poland. Further developments included a range of frequently short-
101
lived lifestyle publications, limited bilingual experiments by established Irish newspapers, and
attempts to establish local and city channel programming.30
30
These include the free circulation Anons paper, which relaunched as Kurier Polski with a
print edition and strong online presence, addressed to a readership in Ireland and the UK. Two
short-lived weekly publications were launched during 2006: śycie w Irlandii/Life in Ireland
was produced by Polish Express Ltd as a complementary publication to Polski Express, and
Sofa was simultaneously launched in Ireland and Britain in December 2006 as a ‘lifestyle
magazine’ which, among other commitments, has consistently dealt with lesbian, gay,
bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) issues. Other short-lived titles have included Szpila and
Nasz Głos. From 2005 there was a noticeable trend to include Polish language and Polishoriented material into established Irish newspapers. This in part reflected the need for market
share in a publishing environment characterized by increased competition for diminishing
advertising revenues. The particular force of this pressure on local and regional newspapers
meant that they were quick to include columns and supplements in Polish and other
languages. Beginning with The Limerick Leader’s dual-language columns in March 2005, a
subsequent Polish column was sustained in The Kildare Post. Polski Herald, a weekly ‘paper
in a paper’ has been published – originally on Fridays and now on Wednesdays - by The
Evening Herald since November 2005, and is the only such initiative still in existence. The
Dublin-based City Channel was an early and innovative channel for migrant-oriented
programming. In 2006, its second year on air, it began broadcasting Oto Polska, a weekly
news digest provided by the international unit of Telewizja Polska. This was subsequently
complemented by the magazine programme Polska Extra, which featured issues of interest to
102
In a previous analysis of this media field, Titley (2008) has suggested that this intense period
of development and differentiation can be understood in terms of a formative, immanent
transnationalism, where the dimensions of transnationalism in question pertain to form as
much as to content. While these media played the informational and orientational role
associated with ‘ethnic community media’, they were not reliant on cultivating the kinds of
situated affective attachments that traditional ‘ethnic community media’ invoke. Instead, they
positioned themselves reflexively in the wider transnational media field available to Poles in
Ireland. This is most evident in news production, where the instantaneous availability of news
- as well as the pronounced transnational tendency to seek the possibility of synchronous
involvement in ‘home’ through news flow – meant that traditional news coverage of Poland
was rarely a central aim of print publications.
An additional line of reflexivity – the balance between niche address and audience
maximization – implied that providing political commentary involved the risk of mediating
political differences. Thus the Polish media developed forms of ‘multi-modal address’, shaped
by their different relations to and knowledge of their audiences, and by a consciousness of
having a visible and symbolic presence in Ireland and Poland. In audience research conducted
during 2007-9 with Polish audiences, it was apparent that the banal transnationalism of
everyday media engagement rendered these strategies fragile at best. Particularly among
Poles living in Dublin, and was framed as a form of lifestyle programming aimed at another
niche group in Dublin’s increasingly ‘cosmopolitan milieu’. Oto Polska Extra was wound
down in mid-2008, and Oto Polska ended in early 2009 due to the cancellation of the news
digest service in Warsaw.
103
young, educated Poles working in Dublin and other urban areas, the very fact of the existence
of Polish-oriented media was sufficient to invite a reading expressed in the dichotomous terms
of hegemonic integration politics:
Poles come here, read Polish magazines, meet only Poles and detach themselves from
Irish society (male, 34yrs).
In some readings, this projection was articulated in class terms, reflecting the heterogeneity of
Polish positions in the labour market in Ireland (Krings et al, 2009) and the impact of this on
imagining future possibilities in Ireland:
I would like to find a media that sees us in our diversity. We are very diverse here. I
have a feeling that I am not a target of Polish media. It is not the quality and profile
which could fit me. It could be nice to have a Polish media that target not only people at
a building site. I think that there are enough professionals in Ireland to be an audience
for that kind of medium (male, 31 yrs).
Despite the evident proliferation of media forms competing to address these ‘targets’, it
appears that the fact of being seen as ‘ethnic media’, and associated with a particular class
imaginary of the ‘migrant’ (on a building site), shaped generalizing responses of the target
audience to these media. As these respondents inhabited a transnational mediascape that
already satisfied their need for access to Polish-oriented media, the media that developed in
104
Ireland was evaluated not only for its perceived inferior quality, but also for its symbolic
import:
I wouldn’t distinguish Polish daily life or Polish aspects of living in Ireland (in these
media) after all we live in this society, I think the same things concern us as well as
(the) Irish (female, 28yrs).
In a similar logic, the various mainstream programmes aimed at ‘migrants’, and aiming to
represent diversity, did not even arise for comment in discussion. This particular cohort
situated themselves outside of, and distanced themselves from, the dominant discourses of
migration management. The exception, as indicated above, involved reducing the strategies of
media actors intent on cultivating particular forms of political capital into evidence of an
unwanted social capital, the unwillingness or inability to ‘integrate’. It is important to note
that this dismissive attitude was consistently mediated by a critique of the perceived lack of
professionalism of Polish-oriented media:
I do not read (them), only scan what can (sic) I find in shops. There is nothing original,
just rewriting and rehashing what could be found in normal media…in childish way, by
journalists who are not real journalists. (Male, 43 yrs).
Regardless of the accuracy or not of these assessments, it suggests that Polish-oriented media
experienced a positioning dilemma; of being judged against standards derived from the
transnational Polish mediascape, while simultaneously been seen as representing a
105
problematic form of ‘unintegrated’ cultural production in relation to life in Ireland.
Nigerian and African media: solidarities and political distinction
In the discursive hierarchies of the migration era, if Poles were produced as the ‘good
migrant’ (Haynes et al, 2009) then ‘Nigerians’ – as an identity, and as a synonym for Africans
– were produced as the ‘bad’ one (a post-racial distinction legitimized by having first
identified and celebrated the ‘good’). According to the 2006 census, 16,330 Nigerians were
living in Ireland, with asylum, education, work and family unification among the main
pathways of entry.31 Of the focus groups held in this strand of research, most were held in the
31
According to the Census, 16,300 Nigerians were living in Ireland in 2006, though – as with
other ‘non-Irish figures cited in the Census - that is widely regarded to be a highly
conservative figure. A relative increase of 82 per cent since the 2002 figure of 8,969, Nigeria
has been the destination from whence most applications from asylum have been received by
the Irish state year-on-year since 2001. Education, work and family networks are other
significant pathways to Ireland. The male/female ratio of the population is 55:45 and the
average age is 26.6 years. Most live in Dublin and east coast towns. Comparative with the
other Census profiles, a relatively high number were unemployed or looking for their first job
(31 per cent). One in five women were working in the home and 17 per cent were students.
The dominant industry is health and social work, and among the top occupations were care
assistants and attendants (11 per cent), security guards (7 per cent), sales assistants (7 per
cent) and doctors (6 per cent) (CSO, 2008, p.23-43).
106
greater Dublin area, including some in state-run, ‘direct provision’ accommodation centres.32
Cumulatively, these discussions, as with the Polish study, illustrated media worlds intensively
networked across Ireland, Nigeria, the UK and elsewhere. Yet this predictable mediascape
was striated with the particularity of positionality: practices of media surveillance and
evaluation directly related to experiences of racialization and racism in Ireland (Lentin, 2007).
The following two quotes are indicative of a consistent, political surveillance of mainstream
media:
I watch news on RTÉ (public service broadcaster) and TV3 (main commercial
channel) but I think RTÉ presents more information when they report about
immigrants. TV3 only shows the surface and they appear not to be interested in issues
involving immigrants. If you watch the same news item on both channels, you will be
surprised at how little the information presented by TV3 is. You really get the
32
Six focus groups were held in Dublin and the east coast, and two of these were held in
state-run accommodation centres. The participants ranged in age from 26-45 with the vast
majority in their mid 30s, and all of the focus groups were gender-mixed. More than half of
the participants were studying and/or working, three women were working in the home, and
the participants involved in asylum-determination cases are prohibited from work or study.
Over half of the participants were educated to degree level, which is above the overall
Nigerian average in Ireland. Nearly all the participants had been living in Ireland for at least 4
years, and a third of them for more than 7 years (this calculation excludes those seeking
asylum).
107
impression that they have no time for immigrants. RTÉ is better and fairer. (Female,
42 yrs).
I read the Irish Times. I used to read the Irish Independent. After I noticed its bias
against immigrants I decided to stop reading it. I also endeavour to read other
newspapers, especially when they publish news that is topical, interesting or relevant
to me or the African communities here. I’m very keen on how the media report issues
involving Africans. I want to see if there are biases in the coverage or if they have
omitted important facts. (Male, 39yrs).
A palpable irony of this surveillance is the fact that many participants displayed a level of
media literacy associated with the kind of democratic citizenship that was, in many cases, not,
or not yet, available to them.33 However it was a mode of surveillance extended across the
transnational mediascape, where the invisibility of Africans in Ireland was held to map onto
the general lack of news coverage or attention paid to Africa:
33
One participant, for example discussed how the 6.01 evening news, traditionally the anchor
evening programme of the public service broadcaster, acted as a shared way of organizing
time in a direct-provision accommodation centre.
Thus the shared time of the modern
broadcasting regime, held to be relativized by media proliferation and audience
fragmentation, retains an important temporal and phenomenological dimension in a lived
context which is in effect an ante-chamber to the nation.
108
I’m not really keen on RTÉ. The station does not show enough news about immigrants
or about Africa. In fact it doesn’t show much about other parts of the world. I watch
Al Jazeera when I want news about the world. I also watch the South African station –
channel 230 on Sky – for news about Africa. Sometimes I watch CNN and BBC but
only sometimes. (Male, 47yrs).
Given this level of concerted media literacy, a recurrent line of discussion involves the
negotiation of taste and evaluative standards with the spectrum of Nigerian and African
publishing available. In some evaluations, given the position of the community, any initiative
is worthy of support - see the first quote below – but for others it depends also on how they
represent both the African population, and also the news:
If we don’t support ourselves, there is no way Africans can publish newspapers that
will inform other Africans and inform the Irish people about us. (Male 40yrs).
As for newspapers published by Africans here, you mostly find the same thing you
would find in mainstream newspapers. They don’t really inform me about the African
communities here. They don’t tell me what is happening in the communities. (Female
37 yrs).
I’m aware of a few media published by Africans but I’m not really sure if they are
based here in Ireland or the UK…I think there is a need for media published by
immigrants. It will cover those of us who are not being covered in the Irish media. I’m
109
thinking of immigrant media that will concentrate on local events and events from the
home countries. (Female 27yrs).
This sense of a symbolic and political need being worked out against questions of taste and
more nuanced political considerations is also present when it comes to mainstream media
efforts to represent interculturalism:
I watched RTÉ every week when they started broadcasting Mono. After some time I
stopped watching the programme because I didn’t agree with some of its
interpretations of multicultural Ireland…I probably will watch RTÉ frequently if they
had programmes like Mono but at the moment RTÉ and indeed most of mainstream
Irish media is very white and Irish. (Male 29yrs).
When I watch telly I look for things that are relevant to me and my communities. I
mostly watch the news and programmes relating to immigrants. But unfortunately,
there are not many programmes in the Irish media that relate to immigrants. They used
to have Mono on RTÉ but since they axed Mono there have not been programmes that
take immigrants into consideration on RTÉ or on other stations, except for, I think,
Home Away from Home. But even that is presented by a white Irish person who travels
to different countries in the world interviewing people in the countries where
immigrants come from. (Female, 46yrs).
110
What these evaluations make clear is that while the participants engage with the politics of
representation, their primary focus is on whether or not they are even represented in some
recognizable way. Perhaps for this reason, deliberations on taste and standards are no less
rigorous, but ultimately more encompassing, than those that took place among the Polish
discussants. Given this evaluation of a basic lack of representation, it is perhaps surprising
that community radio programmes with an African focus, broadcast in the Dublin area over
this period, did not feature in these research discussions. Community radio stations in Ireland,
governed by the AMARC charter, have been at the forefront in providing space for migrantled programming in cities, and urban and rural areas. Katie Moylan (2009) conducted an indepth study of the Dublin City FM programme African Scene, a show that principally
involves discussion between callers and the show’s presenters. As Moylan argues, despite the
overt focus of the programme, the range of stories and perspectives included underpinned a
conscious rejection of the idea that ‘ethnic programmes’ can be type-cast as multicultural
narrowcasting (‘bad guys’) as opposed to ‘intercultural’ programming regarded as
encouraging interaction and exchange. Thus the regular feature of a newspaper and media
review on the programme:
Became a springboard for critique and debate over representations of migrant
communities in the mainstream public sphere. In the context of migrant produced
programmes in Dublin community radio, African scene has a greater potential reach
that non-English language programmes and regularly addresses issues relevant to the
larger migrant community as well as those of specifically African interest. (Moylan,
2009, p.121)
111
Nevertheless, that reach remains limited with regard to the participants featured in this
research, despite the ways in which both the ethos and structures of community radio, and the
forms available, may address some of the basic demands for meaningful representation that
recurred consistently in the discussions. Despite the sophisticated calibrations, in the
discourse laboratory, of precisely how to imagine a diversified society, in these experiences,
fundamental questions of representative visibility and non-prejudicial coverage dominate.
CONCLUSION
This chapter has examined the movement and translation of dominant idioms that envision the
management of problematic difference, in globalized public space. While significant research
energies, and political suspicion, is directed at the transnational networks and cultural flows of
‘migrant’ populations, the profoundly transnational character of discourses institutionalized to
construct and govern the ambiguity of difference is rarely discussed. In the Irish context, this
discursive malleability was well-suited to a situation in which integration discourses did not
frame the development of structures and processes of inclusion or control, but rather
functioned as a recognition of the political need to present visions of national management.
Given that, right at the start of the 2008 economic crisis, the Office of the Minister for
Integration’s budget, and that of a range of influential NGOs, was severely cut suggests that
this reading is accurate (Watt, 2008).
112
In the domain of migrant-led media production in Ireland, there was no overt sense in which
actors were expected to engage with the experiments of the discourse laboratory. However,
the layers of assumption and association that imbricate ‘ethnic media’, communicative power
and cultural outcomes is such that media actors looked to position themselves in some
benevolent relation to the – shifting – discourses in the ascendant at any given juncture. Yet
for their audiences, the adoption, or even the intimation, of these frameworks suggested
evaluations that did not necessarily strengthen their engagements, and in some cases
undermined them. Perhaps the political declaration, midst political-economic crisis, that the
politics of integration has ceased to matter will provide a less problematically ‘experimental’
space for development.
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Chapter 5
Migrant minority media: towards a democratisation of the Western mediascape?
Liliana Suárez Navaz, Alicia Ferrández Ferrer
This chapter offers a preliminary analysis of the recent burst of specialized media produced,
distributed, and consumed by migrant communities in Spain, focusing on the way identity and
politics are represented in these media and questioning their prospects of opening up new
avenues for democratization of the Spanish mediascape. We adhere to Husband’s call to
address the democratization of the media as an extension of the challenges of democratizing
multicultural societies. Even if according to Husband the very existence of migrant minority
media is a perceptible sign of democratization, questions remain about the ‘right to be
understood’, a crucial objective to advance such process of democratization (Husband, 1996).
To explore this, we focus on the intended meanings and actual practices of minority media
vis-à-vis their public in a highly commoditized society like ours. We analyze the social and
cultural processes involved in practicing journalism in migrant minority media and how the
latter are perceived and used by migrants to whom they are oriented. We also unfold
discoursive practices used to represent and reach migrant audiences in these media. And last,
but not least, we inquire into how journalists working in this specialized field engage with the
specificity of migrant minority issues, specifically socioeconomic, political and ethnocultural
ones.
This methodological perspective is inspired by a conception of public sphere where tensions
between market and citizenship should be explored, rather than assumed. In a context where
117
marketing strategies actively construct target audiences based on the accommodation of
difference, we depart from the tendency to use categories such as ‘ethnic’, ‘diasporic’, or
‘transnational’ media as a standpoint of our research. The Bourdieuan theory of social fields
as arenas of political struggle not reducible to economic principles and its application to
journalistic field (Benson and Neveu, 2005; Bourdieu, 2005), allow us to show these
categories more as an effect of journalistic field in the context of transnational migration than
a primordial feature of migrant population and minority media. Based on extensive empirical
information, we suggest three ideal types of migrant minority journalism practices vis-à-vis
the audience they claim to represent, the migrant communities settled in Spain. Thus it is the
positioning of several actors in the field and the use of different forms of capital they possess
(economic, social, cultural) what ultimately conditions the possibility of opening up new
avenues for participatory democracy.
Our analysis is based on extensive and long-term research on the processes of settlement of
immigrant population in the country since its inception in the early 1990s (Suárez, 2004,
2008), and empirical material compiled in the context of an ongoing research project focused
on the relations and tensions between migrants’ settlement in Spain and the burst of migrant
minority media34. We posit these ‘new media’35 and the professionals of migratory origin
34
Funded by the Ministry of Science and Education (CSO2008-03022), the project has been
directed by Prof. Liliana Suárez Navaz in the Autonomous University of Madrid, Department
of Social Anthropology, and will run until March 2012. Alicia Ferrández is writing her PhD
Dissertation within this project and coordinated the research team who compiled empirical
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working here as crucial political actors and a major landmark in migrant population’s access
to the public mass mediated sphere (Ferrández, 2012; Suárez, 2008, 2011; Suárez and
Ferrández, 2011). In this chapter we offer preliminary results of the first phase of our
research, in which 31 media managers and journalists were interviewed, 22 of whom of Latin
American origin. The quantitative importance of Latin American migration to Spain, together
with the linguistic and historical links to the country, has produced the most significant and
abundant minority media in Spain, and so we focus on them as a relevant case study.
Regarding the consumers’ point of view, we carried out four focus groups, between 2007 and
2008, made up of people of Ecuadorian and Bolivian background. Three of them were based
on the variables of sex and age, and the fourth was composed of community leaders,
especially engaged with communities’ interests.
INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION IN SPAIN AND THE GROWTH OF MIGRANT
MINORITY MEDIA
information for the exhaustive database of minority media in Spain (MECODI, unpublished
report) in the first phase of the project, between 2007 and 2009.
35
We refer to ‘new minority media’ in the sense of recently created media, and not
necessarily in reference to digital media. The growth of migrant minority media in Spain
started only a decade ago; while in other European countries their history dates back to the
middle of the XXth century (see Rigoni, 2010).
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After decades of emigration, Spain has dramatically transformed into an immigration country,
becoming in few years the European country with the highest rate of incoming population in
the developed world (UN, 2009). While until the 1990s the most numerous group was that of
Africans, especially Moroccans, the XXI century started a new stage, characterized by a
growing number of Latin Americans arriving to Spain, with almost a 45 per cent of the
residents and more than 60 per cent of the temporary work permits (Gil, 2004; OPI, 2011).
The fast growth of Latin American immigration in Spain is part of a broader shift from the US
as a traditional destination of emigrants, due to the strengthening of North American borders,
as well as the legacy of colonial relations between Spain and its former colonies in the
Americas. In addition to the country’s general high demand of non-qualified workers in
economic sectors such as construction, agriculture and domestic service, which fuelled
immigrants’ speedy settlement in the country, the Latin American countries benefited from
bilateral agreements with states like Ecuador, Colombia and the Dominican Republic, whose
nationals rapidly became the most numerous communities. The high number of applications
of Latin Americans in the 2005 regularization process, as well as the high rates of acquisition
of the Spanish nationality (usually as a second citizenship) further fuelled a strong
consolidation of a Latin American minority in Spain and of transnacional migratory fields
(Suárez 2012).
The situation of crisis in the home countries has also produced significant changes in the
kinds of people who migrate. Following the non-qualified migrant workers of the first wave, a
professional middle class arrived to Spain, like the Latin American journalists and
communication professionals who are the focus of this research. As foreigners, they found it
difficult to get a job in national media and, settled in a society with an hegemonic
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representation of migration as a threat to social order, they soon tried to develop media
projects targeting their compatriots. Thus, migrant minority media started to appear in the
middle 1990s, more as a complement than as a substitute to national media, in a context of
opportunities highly favourable to this kind of projects.
The context of opportunities was marked first by the lack of regulation in
telecommunications, especially in reference to independent and alternative media (Gaya,
2003; Rodríguez, 2002), thus favoring the appearance of a large number alternative media,
and especially pirate radio stations, that competed for space in Spanish mediascape. Second
and most importantly for the context of opportunities, businesses run by migrants transformed
the urban and economic context of Spanish cities (Solé et al., 2007). The growing number of
migrants settling in Spain from 2000 also attracted the interest of transnational and national
capital into minority-oriented businesses. This was a departure from a consideration of
migrant population as labour force to a broader consideration of their potential as consumers,
thus expanding the economic dimension of migrant presence in the territory, until then
reduced to labour force in hegemonic discourse. Advertising for the new consumer target was
crucial to develop migrant minority media: both small migrant family entrepreneurship,
sometimes labelled ‘ethnic’, but also big companies which soon recognized the economic
importance of offering services to the migrant consumers.
Though first migrant minority media projects in Spain appeared in the middle 1990s, it has
been in the last few years –especially since 2004– that this type of media has burst onto the
scene, with magazines, newspapers, radio stations, television channels and websites. By the
end of 2008 our database registered more than 300 migrant minority media in Spain
121
(MECODI, unpublished report), a substantial increase from the 23 migrant media that Gaya
found in 2003.
Nowadays we find a media field ever more diverse, diversified and specialized, a media field
not only made up of national actors, but of numerous international and transnational actors.
This media field has grown parallel to contemporary migration flows, to what Fazal and
Tsagarousianou (2002) designated ‘the diasporic media space’: those from the country of
origin, those from the country of residence, those we have called ‘migrant minority media’,
international news channels, and online resources from anywhere in the world. So, what we
find is a complex picture characterised by a multi-directionality and multiplicity of flows. It is
needless to state the importance of new information and communication technologies in this
process.
LATIN AMERICANS IN THE SPANISH JOURNALISTIC FIELD: BETWEEN
MIGRANTS AND COMMUNICATION PROFESSIONALS
Bourdieu considers the journalistic field a crucial ‘civil and scientific object of analysis’
because ‘for a number of years now the journalistic field has exerted an increasingly powerful
hold […] on other fields and, in particular, as regards symbolic productions, on the field of the
social sciences and the political field’. This powerful hold on dominant symbolic productions
of the media field goes hand in hand with the fact that ‘the journalistic field is losing more
and more of its autonomy [ …] [and] the weight of economy within the field is constantly
growing’ (2005, p.41-42). This process is linked to the ever-increasing weight of commercial
122
interests in the media, producing a structural dependency on ‘audience research’ and
‘audience ratings’, according to which advertisers distribute their budgets. The dangers
associated with the dominance of a commercially controlled media upon the rest of the fields
specialized in cultural production is a crucial focus of Bourdieu’s perspective. To what extent
do these media ultimately produce ‘uniformity, censorship, and even conservatism’ (2005,
p.44)? What are the resources for contestation and production of critical knowledge able to
question some of the tacit presuppositions that shape our perception of the social world?
Both public institutions and civil society have reported systematic bias in media coverage of
migratory processes. Mainstream media tends to represent migrant population as a ‘problem’,
reducing migrants to a profile of either victims or criminals; a pervading set of categories
dominates the symbolic imagery regarding migrations: ‘natives’ vs. ‘outsiders’, ‘legal’ vs.
‘illegal’, ‘rich’ vs. ‘poor’, ‘developed’ vs. ‘underdeveloped’, ‘Europeans’ vs. ‘people of
colour’.36 Latin American journalists interviewed systematically referred to this biased,
discriminatory, and even racist representation of migrants as the main motivation for engaging
in the active construction of an alternative vision and division of migratory processes.
Similarly, most of the migrants who participated in this study emphasized the specific social
and political dimension of migrant media. There is a call not just for the construction of an
36
Mugak, with its Observatory against Racism, is a pioneer initiative and it has actively
participated in our research project in the Basque Country (http://www.mugak.eu). See also
Aierbe, 2003; Casero, 2004; Gualda et al., 2004; Pérez, 2003; Santamaría, 2002; Torregrosa,
2005; Van Dijk, 2006, 2007 for analysis of mainstream media coverage of migration in Spain.
123
alternative representation of migrants and migration, but one that is accountable to the needs
of migrants’ communities, highly heterogeneous themselves.
One empirical finding of our research is that the first projects born to this specialized media
field were genuinely linked to social activism in the local public sphere, be it in a highly
diverse neighbourhood, or as initiative of a group of migrant professionals involved in small
media projects. Nevertheless, the real context of opportunity for minority journalists came –
not surprisingly– with the advent of strong companies interested in taking advantage of the
new target audience and/or clients. Bourdieu’s theory of fields here facilitates a nonreductionist analysis of the forces shaping the subfield of migrant minority media, allowing us
to avoid both simplistic conspiracy theories about the hold of commercial interests on these
media, on the one hand, as well as naïve assumptions about the motivations of Latin
American journalists to provide alternative media images of migration and interethnic
relations on the other.
The burst of migrant minority media produced a positive discrimination towards migrant
journalists. Managers and owners on media needed them to consolidate their connection to
migrant population. This notwithstanding, the analysis of the particular dynamics of
transnational migratory fields brings to light variables of racism shaped by postcolonial
imageries, economic inequality and legal barriers to immigration that should also be taken
into account. Latin American journalists’ migration experiences scarcely differ from the
migratory trajectories of most of the people who arrived to Spain in the last 20 years. Most of
them entered into the territory with a temporary visa, got involved in a labour market highly
tolerant of the black economy, and focused in getting a pre-contract of employment which
would allow them to qualify for regularization in one of the massive regularization
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campaigns. In addition, Latin American journalists got trapped in a bureaucratic system that
makes it difficult to have their professional and academic titles recognized.
Latin American professionals are thus discriminated against in the Spanish labour market and
society in a double-sided and contradictory way thus casting them into contradictory class
positions (Wright 1989). They share with other migrants a similar position in the
ethnostratification ladder, in spite of qualifications and professional experience, but also are
hired as journalists in the migrant media due to their cultural belonging to specific migrant
groups. This sociological feature is important. First, because it marks them as potential
organic intellectuals in the Gramscian sense. Here stratification expands through an
articulation of ethnic belonging and class structure, characteristic of the social fields brought
about by migratory processes. Second, it is important because this structural link to migrant
communities is the essence of these journalists specific symbolic capital in the minority media
field. Their symbolic capital is appropriated by media enterprises, which hire them to
maximize their knowledge about migrants and to more effectively ‘reach the audience’. As
will be explained later, this symbolic capital is also crucial from the point of view of migrants
themselves, who distrust Spanish media coverage of migration and experience racism,
exclusion and discrimination in their everyday life, based on their ethnocultural, racial and/or
religious background.
Minority journalists, and in particular Latin American journalists, perceive themselves -and
are perceived by fellow migrants- as crucial social actors in the transformation of the
hegemonic public and media sphere in Spain. Too frequently however, there is a problematic
tacit premise pervading this kind of perception: the idea that the ethnic and socioeconomic
status shared by Latin Americans in Spain would necessarily make journalists working in
125
minority media to be ‘naturally’ predisposed to produce an alternative politics of
representation of migrants. This is of course false, since ethnic and socioeconomic variables
do not configure a homogeneous collective of migrants nor do they provide a ‘natural’ basis
for actions. This assumption is also dangerous, since dismissing the economic interests
pervading the media may move us away from a more sophisticated analysis of the subtle
transformations crucial to the democratization of media Husband urges us to explore and
promote.
As will be shown in the conclusions, minority journalists contradictory class positions,
together with an analysis of content and reception of migrant minority media and of types of
journalists’ practices –to which we turn in the next two sections–, offers an alternative
theoretical perspective on the potential role of migrant minority media in questioning and
altering a profoundly biased and often racist politics of representation of immigration in
Spain.
POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION OF MIGRANTS IN THE MINORITY MEDIA:
TOWARDS THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE AUDIENCE
From our informants’ perspective, to do a good job in the subfield of migrant minority media
is defined as a matter of providing a good service and keeping close to migrants’ realities.
‘The newspaper Latino is influential in the Ecuadorian collective; our compatriots read
it a lot. Latino shares many things with Ecuadorians, it is situated within the collective,
the journalists go where they should go to report, they do not just pick up the phone
126
and ask us: “what are the news?”. These are the things that make up our reality, our
sensibility, which gradually get expressed through it.’ (Ecuadorian woman,
Community leaders’ focus group)
‘Our idiosyncrasy is commitment. This is the basic thing. I could also talk about how
our programs are more beautiful… how our news programs have a high level of
quality, or how our programs have been awarded in the Latin American radio. But
what really distinguishes us is that our listener feels represented, he/she has a radio
watching over so that his or her voice may be heard.’ (La Nuestra FM, interview).
These media are oriented towards a collective subject-audience-clientele loosely defined as
‘immigrants’37. The way this category is defined is a disputed and complex process, in which
competing economic and symbolic logics intersect. In this section we explore two main
variables used to defined ‘immigrants,’ both present in the entire minority media: their
juridical and socioeconomic situation as recently arrived labour force, on the one hand, and/or
a purportedly shared cultural identity on the other.
We will first deal with the construction of migrants in relation to their legal and
socioeconomic situation. The minority media frequently provides juridical information and
advice, as well as a platform for exchange of labour offers, and other similar services oriented
toward a profile of migrant prevailing in Spain (temporary jobs, intermittent legal situation,
divided families, poverty, unemployment, debts, shared flats). This kind of information
37
While in our work we opt for the category ‘migrant’ in order to incorporate into the analysis
a solid transnational perspective, in the Spanish public space the word ‘immigrant’ is
generally used in Spain, even to refer to the second generation.
127
specific to migrants’ circumstances is considered crucial to reach the audience, who use it to
find a job, compile information about immigration policies, and the like. Some of the
interviewees expressed that this kind of information should eventually disappear, because it
refers to a situation which is not specific to migrants but to a phase of the migratory process:
‘It really depends on the moment [of one’s trajectory] because when I was trying to get
my first Identification Card, I was interested in getting the information anywhere, but
not anymore. Interest vanished completely.’ (Ecuadorian woman, Women focus
group)
The stress on the problems of migrants, however, is a basic conceptual premise that permeates
mainstream media and, more generally, public opinion in Spain. The basic difference is the
perspective from which ‘problems’ are identified. Mainstream media interpret the problems of
migrants as difficulties starting with their arrival, whereas migrants and minority media
interpret them as problems emanating from the obstacles to integration posed by the legal and
economic structures of the country. An Ecuadorian activist and journalist participating in a
focus group stressed this difference, suggesting that the incorporation of migrant journalists
into the mainstream media would dramatically transform public perspectives about who
suffers the ‘problems’ and what the causes are. This seems to be an extended opinion among
both journalists and migrants who participated in our research, although it is generally stated
as a critique of mainstream media:
‘Media should be directed and presented by Ecuadorians, or Latin people who will
provide a different vision of migration, not the one that emphasizes the problems of
the migrants, focusing on delinquency and the Latin Kings.’ (Ecuadorian journalist,
Community leaders’ focus group)
128
Given the importance of ‘problems’ related to migration representation, some minority media
have opted to emphasize what they refer to as ‘positive minority journalism’. This is not a
strategy specific to these media, but reflects a broader anti-racist concern among both Spanish
civil society and migrants alike. To ‘be positive’ is understood as reporting on migrants’
contributions to Spanish society, or more generally as journalism oriented toward migrants’
‘integration’:
‘We are not a newspaper of political protest, nor a sensationalist newspaper; we are
here to support and help people to integrate, to get the positive side of immigration…
The objective was to create a positive newspaper, which brings migrants news that
helps them to integrate in the society in which they are living. That means, like in any
local newspaper, bringing up the news of their countries of origin, sports, local news
from Madrid, Catalonia… reporting about what they are living… [unlike] the national
press which treats immigration with a contemptuous tone.’ (Sí Se Puede, interview)
We cannot help but be critical of this kind of positive rhetoric, which explicitly refuses to deal
with crucial issues shaping the subaltern position of migrants in Spain. We will see later to
what extent this view on migration is strongly criticized also by grassroots migrant
organizations.
The second premise, present both in minority and mainstream media, conceptually constructs
migrants as sharing a common ‘culture’ different from that of the country of settlement.
Reports on ‘cultural expressions of migrants’ pervade these media, both with imagery of
traditions and ethnic icons and with references to famous artists from Latin America. There
are also minority media which focus on the cultural life of ‘Latin’ people in Spain, creating
inventories and reporting about places where ‘Latin’ people gather, such as discos,
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restaurants, hairdressers, and other commercial initiatives oriented towards this clientele.
These are coined as ‘our places’ or the places where ‘our people’ get together.
Culture is conceptualized as part of what people bring with them from their countries of
origin: music, food, traditional celebrations, values, and religious identities. The concept of
culture generally used here tends to reproduce liberal divisions between the public and the
private, conjuring up a model of multicultural coexistence where migrants maintain their
‘culture’ in the private sphere whereas ‘integrate’ in the public one. Common to all minority
media initiatives is the use of the first person plural to refer to Latin Americans, in order to
appeal to an emotional identification, and to use the third person to refer to Spaniards or Spain
(even in those cases of Spanish-owned minority media). Thus culture is constructed as an
intimate feeling only shared with other Latin American people.
This use of cultural identification is double sided. On the one hand it acts as an umbrella for a
strong feeling of belonging and mutual help between migrants from Latin America. On the
other hand it conjures up a kind of homogeneous identity, thus erasing internal difference and
inequalities:
‘And here we have the clichés again. And I think it is really a responsibility of us all to
demand respect for all social groups in our country… because what they [migrant
minority media] represent as Ecuador is not the country. There is a 30 per cent, if I am
not wrong… of indigenous population, and also black and white people, as well as
mestizos, cholos and mulatos.’ (Ecuadorian man, Community leaders’ focus group)
The emerging relevance of a ‘Latin’ identity is not uncontested in Spain and the category is
far from reaching the prevalence it has, for example, in the United States. Quite the opposite,
references to specific national belonging (Colombians, Ecuadorians, Bolivians, Argentineans,
130
Dominicans, and the like), are dominant. Nevertheless, migrants perceive a danger of
ghettoization produced by this kind of national cultural category:
‘50 per cent [of our members] tell us that they do not feel integrated. Why? Because
sometimes our newspapers prompt us to return to ‘lo nuestro’. Come play football, but
only among Ecuadorians; come to eat, but only Ecuadorian food; come to have fun,
because Julio Jaramillo is singing. So that the media are producing a double
segregation.’ (Ecuadorian man, Men’s focus group)
There is a third kind of culturally hybrid migrant category. This is interesting because it
questions the stability of cultural identifiers and addresses the impact of migration into
cultural tastes and desires, as well as the difficulties embedded in reporting from a
transnational perspective, beyond territorialized senses of belonging.
‘It is a very difficult situation [that of journalists working in minority media] because
one has to please both the country of origin and the destination country. One has to
elaborate a discourse about migration which suits the information demands of both.’
(Ecuadorian journalist, Community leaders’ focus group)
Young people in our focus groups appeal to new forms of cultural production and belonging
taking place in between and beyond pristine cultural categories crisscrossed by national,
ethnic or racialized identities. Studies carried out in other European countries show that first
generation migrants tend to use home country media and migrant minority media more
frequently, while their descendants’ media practices combine both in creative ways
(Christiansen, 2004; Georgiou, 2006; Gillespie, 1995; Hargreaves and Mahdjoub, 1997;
Tufte, 2001). Migrant minority media are not alien to this tendency, which is taking shape as a
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future challenge for them, until now focused on a rather stereotyped version of what migrants’
interests are.
‘There are challenges, and one of them is related to a change in the migrants
themselves. The first generation will decrease and second generation will grow, and
this situation will probably force us to change our strategies. We’ll have to think about
how to reach out to this new public, the first generation’s children, because they have
different interests and necessities than their parents.’ (Latino, interview)
LATIN
AMERICAN
JOURNALISTS
AND
THE
CHALLENGES
OF
THE
DEMOCRATIZATION OF THE MEDIASCAPE IN SPAIN
As we said before, the impressive transformation of the Spanish mediascape during the last
decade, and specifically the appearance of migrant minority media, coincided with a strategic
need for a mediatic launch pad for the promotion and publicity of goods and services (Retis
2008, p.60). In fact the opportunity for a democratization of the mediascape in Spain is
structurally dependant on the consolidation and maintenance of minority consumer targets. In
minority media, migrants are thus constructed as a last resort as consumers, rather than
producers of alternative collective interests and imaginaries.
Increasing fragmentation of commercialization strategies not only incorporate but also
produce new consumer targets. Ethnic identity and legal and socioeconomic variables that
define migrants are thus instrumental in the commoditization of media. In this context, to
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what extent do migrant minority media offer new avenues for incorporating deep diversity
into the public and media sphere?
The particularity of Bourdieu’s approach to the field of journalism is that, while recognizing
with Habermas or Halling that the prevalence of a logic of commercialization in the media
usually fuels hegemony –through a ‘process by which a world-view compatible with the
existing structure of power in society is reproduced, a process which is decentralized, open to
contradiction and conflict, but generally effective’ (Halling, 1994, cited in Benson and Neveu,
2005, p.10)–, it opens up a window for transformations in the field. Looking at these
possibilities of transformation, Marchetti (2005) emphasizes the mobility of professionals
within the field to which we referred before: even if the labour conditions of Latin American
journalists are usually worse than those of their Spanish peers, these professionals are able to
revalue their professional experience and ethnic belonging as specific symbolic capital in the
minority media. This is in itself a landmark in the professional mobility of foreigners in the
country since it is highly uncommon to value ethnic belonging to a minority as a bonus point
for a labour position.
The second variable considered by Marchetti is the split identity specialized journalists
experience in the mainstream media, that can be extrapolated to migrant journalists:
‘journalists are often stigmatized as having been captured by their sources or even of serving
as de facto spokespersons for the organization they cover: political journalists or those that
write about social issues like immigration are sometimes characterized as “activists”’ (2005,
p.67). The professional symbolic capital in the mainstream journalism field excludes variables
beyond the mastery of journalistic techniques. This compels Latin American journalists to
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stress professional standard values to gain credibility among their peers, instead of the
‘proximity to the readership’ valued by the companies that recruit them.
Regarding the split identity, Husband offers a brilliant case study of minority journalists in
Britain that illustrates what we perceived as a main dilemma among Latin American
journalists’ discourses and practices: what should be their role as professionals and as member
of subaltern minorities? Husband shows how this is not an easy dilemma for minority workers
and he stresses the importance of exploring empirically how they manoeuvre ‘between their
commitment to a professional identity and status, and the negotiation of their own ethnic
identity’ (2005, p.461).
During our research we found a plethora of cases and possibilities to confront this tension, the
analysis of which points to three main ideal types38 of migrant minority journalism among
Latin Americans in Spain: 1) instrumentalist, 2) clientelist, and 3) organic. We will briefly
38
The development of a detailed description of this three-fold ideal typology goes beyond the
scope of this chapter. Suffice to say here that Weber warns about the danger of understanding
these ideal types as a description of social phenomena, on the contrary they should be
understood as logical constructions: ‘It is simply a methodological tool and should not
therefore be taken as implying any belief that life is in fact dominated by rational
considerations’, a tool that allows explanatory understanding. These ideal types thus, are
‘intended to grasp the complex of meanings into which a directly intelligible action fits in
virtue of its subjectively intended meanings’ (Weber, 1978, p.10).
134
explain a few key characteristics of each of these ideal types before offering some preliminary
conclusions on our study.
Without any doubt, the dominant way to confront this split identity is the ‘instrumental’ one.
It is dominant among Latin American journalists recruited by Spanish-owned minority media
companies to work in the new economic. Here the professional practices as journalists are
prioritized over the objective to counter biased and racist imagery on migration. There are
many testimonies of both journalists and migrants that suggest this instrumental logic co-opts
Latin American journalists’ symbolic capital for the sake of economic benefits for the
company.
‘Now Spanish businesses have turned their attention to us, it is a new market… we
are, let’s say, a virgin land for them; so they are pushing Latin media because we have
the same purchasing power than the Spanish, even more…’ (Latin American
journalist, Interview)
‘I think it’s a radio station with very good intentions, with important projects, but it’s
still caught in a dilemma: to continue to be the station that is close to people and have
the amateurishness of a local radio station; and the reality of growing and reaching a
level where much more professionalism is needed. So there’s the dilemma: how to be
more professional but without losing the amateur spirit.’ (Radio announcer, Radio
Pueblo Nuevo).
In the ‘clientelist’ strategy, we see journalists taking advantage of their position in the media
to create patron-client relations within migrant collectives, which are actually very effective
networks in the design of distribution and advertisement strategies as well as in news
reporting. Classic anthropology considered patronage as part of a political culture
135
characteristic of the Mediterranean and Latin American societies, where an incomplete
centralization of the state stimulated elites to pursue their interests through brokers who
mediate on their behalf through local idioms and agents (Gellner and Waterbury, 1977). More
than a system of social reciprocity in stratified societies, these kinds of relations could be
defined as ‘providing discriminatory access to desired goods’ (Silverman, 1977, p.15). Two
testimonies will help to illustrate this kind of logic in the specialized subfield of minority
journalism.
‘Relationships are generally based on patronage: that is, we help and they ask for help.
This is very common, we have done advertisement campaigns for associations, for
instance, for free of course, we made them knowledgeable, we introduced them to a
good lawyer, and so these associations have grown… this is it, we help with what we
have available.’ (Pueblo Nuevo, interview)
‘[Minority media] do not show the reality of the associative world in any case. But if I
have a journalist friend it is easier [for the activities] to be seen. So there is not a
professional standard to report what is of interest for all … [because] each association,
each institution has projects, programs, they are all trying to get into the system we are
living in.’ (Ecuadorian man, Community leaders’ focus group)
There is a clear demand on the part of migrants for a journalism that could be defined as
‘organic’. In this case, the kind of relationship established between the journalist and the
community of reference is characterized by a connection between them both in terms of
structural position and identity. The minority professional is at the same time an activist, a
member of the community in a very daily basis. Economic and social capital achieved through
this journalism is just a medium to reach other kind of objectives: to critic the home and host
136
country political systems; to struggle for a citizenship rights’ extension; to denounce
situations of discrimination and racism; to provide an alternative space for participation, are
some examples. Journalists who develop an organic relation with migrant communities may
consolidate as ‘organic intellectuals’, defined by Gramsci as those who are part of the process
by which the minorized group becomes self-aware of their condition as a subordinated
collective.
‘This is a radio which, I would say, is plural, politically committed and engaged, with
a tendency to stand up for the public, the constitutions and the Law, and also citizens’
rights… And I think there is an intrinsic need for this kind of radio today in Europe,
where the extreme right is winning elections in Italy… in France… there is a right [for
instance] to live with your family even if these countries are trying to restrict this right.
This radio wants to echo this feeling. We are not going to stop feeling as immigrants,
clearly.’ (La Nuestra FM, interview)
CONCLUSION
The new minority media have emerged in a very favourable context of opportunities. The lack
of regularization of telecommunications in Spain came together with new business interests to
recognize immigrants as new consumers and clients, as well as audiences. Thus, marketing
strategies have been a major factor in changing a reductionist vision of immigrants as
disposable labour force, more important than the initial media initiatives in reverting biased
and even racist media coverage of migrant populations. Commercial interests also allowed for
137
the hiring of journalists of migrant background in an unprecedented way, and for the first time
valuing their ethnonational origin as a bonus point for a labour position. And, as Bourdieu
puts it, transformations of field matter.
We argued that in order to analyze democratization of mediascape as an effect of the burst of
migrant media, tensions between market and citizenship should be explored rather than
assumed. As Dávila (2001) has shown for the American case, consumption is one of the
variables that created new demands for establishing ‘belonging’. The relations between
market and citizenship in a commoditized world cannot be easily reduced ‘to sheer pleasure
or commercial manipulation, but must be considered as constitutive of contemporary
identities and notions of belonging and entitlement’ (2001, p.10).
At the same time, our analysis, based on the articulated consideration of forces shaping both
the fields of journalism and of transnational migration, has illustrated contradictory dynamics
between economic and symbolic capital available to Latin American journalists in Spain. The
description of the contradictory class position shaped by double-sided discrimination of
minority journalists allows for a more cogent understanding of variables shaping processes of
democratization of mediascape. It also allows uncovering problematic assumptions tacitly
endorsed with the use of categories such as ‘ethnic’, ‘diasporic’, ‘subaltern’ media (and the
like), focusing instead on specific articulations of ‘culture’ and ‘class’ in complex and
dynamic social fields, such as that of migrant minority media.
In fact, empirical and longitudinal research proves that despite their original involvement in
communication projects linked to migrant social activism, journalists involved in
commercially oriented ventures have gradually stressed professional standards and labour
constrictions in favour of an instrumental approach to migration issues. As seen in our
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analysis of the construction of audience, the growing weight of the economic field pushes
journalists and their media to publish only that news that ‘sell’, as one of our interviewees
said, leaving aside more problematic themes related to migrants’ political and social interests.
This predicament is even more acute after the credit crunch and the economic crisis, which
has brought dramatic consequences for migrant minority media in general, and especially so
for initiatives without a strong financial support.
As a consequence of the current crisis, the growing grasp of commercial interests in minority
media field is leading to a deep polarization in the subfield: on the one hand, those which
could be defined as ‘mainstream minority media’, well established in terms of funding and
which do not act as a counter-power, but offer useful and non-problematic information to
facilitate migrants’ establishment in the country. On the other hand, those media that could be
categorized as ‘alternative minority media’, in general more engaged in the socio-political
interests of migrants but in a very weak position in the field due to their economic instability
and precariousness. The encapsulation of communication professionals excluded from
mainstream minority media into a class position equivalent to that of mainstream migrant
population is basic to understand their ongoing interest in practicing a more accountable
minority journalism because “to be in a class location is to be subjected to a set of
mechanisms that impinge directly on the lives of individuals as they make choices and act in
the world” (Wright, 1989, p.275).
The lack of public funding and support for minority media are endangering their existence, a
situation that Husband (1996) links to the second-generation rights and the necessity of
effective support for these media to ensure the right to communicate. In this pole of the
migrant minority field, both clientelist and organic ideal types of minority journalism come on
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strong grip on migrant communities’ everyday life, enacting new strategies to reach interests
of a less homogeneous profile of migrants. Media initiatives are shifting to the virtual
mediascape, as a way to reduce expenses and reach out the younger generation; others are
developing more sophisticated sociopolitical initiatives in alliance with Spanish civil sphere.
The challenge for both ideal types of communication initiatives is to be able to make room for
the migrant minorities to be understood in their own terms.
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Chapter 6
Diasporic media as the ‘focus’ of communicative networking among migrants.
Cigdem Bozdag, Andreas Hepp, Laura Suna
INTRODUCTION: RESEARCHING DIASPORIC MEDIA
Diasporic media are crucial for the articulation of diasporic communities, in the sense that
they would appear to offer the most open space for a self-reflexive discourse among migrants.
Paradoxically, though, they are rather seldom used. Upon realizing this paradox during our
empirical research on the communicative networking of migrants we began to ask: Are our
expectations in respect of ‘diasporic media’ right? Do diasporic media really offer an
‘alternative’ space? Or do they represent something quite different for migrants?
The aim of this article is to give some answers to these questions. Crucial for this is our
concept of diasporic media as the ‘focus’ of communicative networking among migrants. By
this, we do not mean that they are the most used media on the part of migrants, but rather that
they complement other media from the country of origin and from the country of migration.
Nevertheless, diasporic media do become the ‘focus’ in the communicative networking of
migrants as these media offer the possibility for migrants ‘to focus on’ their status as members
of a diaspora. Only in this sense do they contribute to the articulation of the core meaning of
diasporas, what it means to belong to them, and defining who belongs to them. However, as
we will see it does not make sense to discuss this within the framing of an alternative public
sphere. Therefore, researching the media appropriation of migrants offers a more
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sophisticated approach to diasporic media than equating them from the outset to an
(alternative) public sphere. As Nancy Fraser (2007) argued recently, we must be careful to
identify each (transnational) communicative space as a public sphere. The concept of public
sphere has a certain normative implication and – as we will demonstrate – much of the
discourses taking place in diasporic media do not fulfil this. However, this does not mean that
these diasporic media are not important for the migrants: They have a high relevance as a
‘focus’ of communicative networking, which can be a moment of an alternative public sphere,
but very often is not.
The foundation of this argumentation is a particular concept of diasporic media: We
understand diasporic media as the media that are produced by and for migrants and deal with
issues that are of specific interest for the members of diasporic communities. An important
point is that diasporic media are not only the ‘big’ mass media, but also the ‘small media’
(Dayan 1999) that are used for (interpersonal) mediated interaction. As a consequence, we do
not only consider diasporic radios, television channels, and magazines as diasporic media, but
also diasporic video and music platforms like Yabiladi.com for Moroccan migrants or web
portals like Germany.ru for Russian migrants or Vaybee.de for Turkish migrants. However,
we make a difference between diasporic media and the media of the country of origin.
Our arguments are based on the research project ‘Communicative connectivity of ethnic
migrant communities’ funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation). Whereas the
project deals with more general questions of media appropriation in diasporic communities
and cultural identity, this article focuses specifically on diasporic media.
Within our research project we handle the complexity of diasporic mediaspaces by means of a
comparative, qualitative network analysis of media appropriation. The project aims to provide
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an understanding of the relevance of digital media for diasporic communities and for their
communicative connectivity and networking in different contexts. We define digital media in
a broader sense, including WWW, e-mail, social software, mobile phone, etc. Digital media
are a crucial part of the ‘media repertoires’ of migrants, that is the totality of media used by a
person or a group of persons (Hasebrink and Popp, 2006). Therefore, our analysis includes the
whole picture of media appropriation, including traditional media (especially television, radio
and press) as well as digital media. The empirical material consists of approximately 30
qualitative interviews, in each case with members of the Moroccan, Russian and Turkish
diaspora in Germany as well as network diagrams, media diaries and material
documentations, ascertained for 100 cases in total.
According to the principles of Grounded Theory, all data is analyzed in a process of open
coding through which we were able to develop a typology of the ‘origin-oriented’, ‘ethnooriented’ and ‘world-oriented’ migrants, who differ in the interrelation of their cultural
identification and communicative networking patterns. The idea of this typology is the coarticulation of cultural identity, belonging, and communicative networking. To put it simply:
The orientation of a migrant person in terms of his or her belonging and cultural identity
results from a certain communicative networking. At the same time, a communicative
networking that is oriented towards the origin or is bi-cultural or transcultural is part of the
articulation of a specific belonging and cultural identity. In all, we understand communicative
networking in a broad sense: being performed with various media of personal communication
as well as of mass communication.
While we cannot discuss this typology here in detail (see for this Hepp, 2009; Hepp et al.,
2011), it is our implicit frame for the following analyses of the everyday appropriation of
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diasporic media. Our core argument is that there is no general tendency towards diasporic
media becoming an ‘alternative public sphere’. Rather, we have to discuss the everyday
variety of diaporic media in relation to broader fields of practices: information, entertainment,
engagement, commerce and faith.
DIASPORIC MEDIA: QUESTIONS OF RESEARCH
Diasporic media – here understood in essence as media from diasporas for diasporas – do not
build isolated media ghettos but mostly complement the whole media repertoires of migrants
that consist of diverse media from the countries of migration or origin and other countries
(Hepp et al., 2011, Weber-Menges, 2006, p.141). Moreover, they enrich the national
mediascapes of the countries of origin and migration, which are mostly insufficiently able to
represent the cultural diversity of their societies (Cunningham et al., 2000, p.1537, Georgiou,
2006, p.46). However, they do not provide homogenous representations and their content are
as diverse as the diasporic communities themselves. Who is represented by whom is always a
question of power relations and the allocation of economic resources within diasporas
(Kosnick, 2007, p.166). Diasporic media are to be understood within this conflictual context:
On the one hand, they contribute to a revitalisation of group identities (Rigoni, 2005, p.575577). On the other hand, only the members of diasporic communities who have rather safe
and established positions in society are able to participate in the production of diasporic
media.
As different research demonstrates, diasporic media have been considered as being important
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for migrants for a long time (Cunningham et al., 2000; Kolar-Panov, 1997; Naficy, 1993).
One can argue that they have become even more important for at least three reasons: First,
new forms of (trans-)migration are established – partially through new transportation
technologies; this is also articulated in a fundamental interest in diasporic media (see for
example Georgiou, 2005). Second, the access to ‘alternative’ forms of media production is
becoming increasingly easier, especially through the Internet. In particular, social web
applications like Facebook allow migrants to carry out their own media production beyond
mainstream media (see for example Deuze, 2006). Third, diasporic media are also
economically relevant (Miller and Slater, 2000, p.145-172). The buzzword in the field of
migration economy is ‘ethnic marketing’ which is also relevant for smaller firms that are
owned by migrants. For example, Vaybee.de is a diasporic website that has been created by a
small German-Turkish firm that is also engaged in ethnic marketing practices, similarly to
Germany.ru or almadina-bazaar.de.
However, we must be very careful about formulating general statements on diasporic media
and their appropriation in everyday life. If we apply our typology of origin-, ethno- and
world-oriented migrants to the appropriation of diasporic media, we can say that the latter are
not exclusive to ‘ethno-oriented’ migrants who are strongly oriented towards the diaspora
itself. ‘Origin-oriented’ migrants also use diasporic media, but mostly to relate to their
country of origin. Diasporic media also play a role for the ‘world-oriented’ migrants; they
constitute a rather small part, though, of the rich media repertoires of this type. This said, the
highest numbers of migrants who use diasporic media regularly are to be found among the
‘ethno-oriented’. To a certain degree, this can be explained by their stronger identification
with diasporic communities, which is one of the important factors that influence the everyday
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appropriation of diasporic media. A strong identification with a particular diasporic
community is mostly co-articulated through a strong use of the specific media of that
diaspora. On the other hand, a person who dissociates him/herself from a particular diaspora,
tends to avoid the media of this community. Other factors that influence diasporic media
appropriation are the availability of diasporic media and the subjective perception of their
quality by the users.
In general, most of the members of diasporic communities are acquainted with different
diasporic media and use these occasionally to complement their media repertoires (Hepp et al.
2011, p.126-9). However, the regular and active users of diasporic media are rather a minority
within the diasporic communities we analysed. Furthermore, diasporic media are used rather
seldom as result of a political consciousness of belonging to a certain community and looking
for or producing political self-representations, but in relation to broader fields of practices:
information, entertainment, engagement, commerce and faith.
INFORMATION: SEARCHING AND INQUIRING
Most of the interviewees have different motivations for using diasporic media, searching for
information that is especially relevant for diasporic communities. Hanna Domeyer and Uwe
Hasebrink (2010, p.54-5) summarize different needs for information searching in four
categories; needs for undirected information, for problem-solving, for thematic interests and
community-oriented needs. This categorization can be applied to the information practices of
migrants through diasporic media. The migrants interviewed by us use diasporic media to
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search for general information about what is happening in the countries of origin and
migration, or within the diasporic community, and to look for solutions to concrete problems;
for example buying tickets to the country of origin, or to gain knowledge about certain
subjects like politics or migration.
Mostly, the rather well-educated interviewees, who are generally interested in current social
and political developments, use diasporic media as a resource for information. If we look at
the field of information as a whole, we can say that the information practices searching and
inquiring can be differentiated according to their geographic references. Migrants look for
information about their local environment, their countries of origin, their country of migration
and the dispersed diasporic community.
Many diasporic media are embedded in certain localities and circulate important information
about the local environments of migrants. Migrants use such media especially to be informed
about the news and events of the local diasporic community. For instance, Halim (m, 33,
Turk) uses a German-Turkish website for Berlin to ‘keep up with the news’. Boris uses
similarly ‘a Russian magazine’ in order to be informed about ‘Russian’ events in Berlin like
‘Festivals or when [they] have Kirmes (amusement park)’. As these examples show, diasporic
media often carry information about diaspora-specific events such as a lecture given by a
migrant author, or a concert by a singer from the country of origin, religious fests and so on
and enable a local (re-)invention of the own migrant community.
Besides the local environment, the country of origin is a further relevant context of reference
for inquiring and searching for information through diasporic media, in which the happenings
in the country of origin are illustrated from the perspective of diaspora, which differentiates it
from the media of the country of origin. The origin-oriented Aziz (m, 50, Turk) listens to the
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diasporic radio station Radyo Metropol because of their news about Turkey, just like the
ethno-oriented Orhan (m, 17, Turk). Radio Russkij Berlin performs a similar task for the
members of the Russian diaspora and bonds migrants with their countries of origin. Boris
enunciates a typical situation of appropriation:
‘Especially in the morning, we listen to [Radio Russkij Berlin]. Afternon we
switch to the German [one]. Mainly, congratulations, the whole information,
News every hour just like our Russian music will be played. It is very well done.
Unfortunately you can listen to it only in Berlin and also Bernau, but further not
anymore […]. It is just like a piece of your homeland is nearby’ (Boris, m, 22,
Russ.).
Diasporic media can bring migrants closer to their homelands. In some cases, the boundaries
between diasporic media and the media of the country of origin are blurred. For example,
Lada (f, 23, Russ.) listens to Radio Svoboda (Radio Liberty), which is financed by the USCongress; its content is produced in Russia and Prag and it has been broadcasting to many
East European countries since Soviet times. Lada especially likes this radio station as it is – in
contrast to other Russian media – critical about the situation in Russia, and she adds, ‘you can
really learn what is happening, not that what the Russians are telling’. Such media help
members of diasporas who have grown up outside their countries of origin to expand their
knowledge about it and to inquire about the situation in these countries.
Especially for the members of the Moroccan diaspora, the Internet is an important source of
information about Morocco because there are hardly any diasporic mass media in Germany
that target the Moroccan migrants. If you do not have a satellite dish at home, you would not
have any opportunity to inquire about news from Morocco, as Adil (m, 43, Moroc.) puts it.
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Fatima (f, 22, Moroc.) also uses diasporic Internet forums like Dimadima.de and keeps up-todate about Morocco through these sources and her friends.
In diasporic media, migrants also search for information about their diaspora community.
Adil (m, 43, Moroc.) explains that on the website Maroczone.de he can find information ‘that
one wouldn’t hear anywhere else’, especially about Moroccans in Europe. Not only websites
but also newsletters or mail groups are important for networking and information exchange
within diaspora. Hakan (m, 47, Turk) or Aysen (f, 44, Turk) receive newsletters on Haber.com, which is a diasporic news website to which users can also post articles. Diasporic
radio stations or newspapers are also still very important for distributing information about the
diaspora itself. Aysel (f, 22, Turk) listens to Köln Radyosu, a diaspora-oriented program run
by Radio Funkhaus Europa to ‘learn about the latest news’ on Turkish people in Germany; or
Vitalii (m, 36, Russ.) reads Kurjer to be informed about ‘[the] Russian people in Germany’.
Furthermore, diasporic media provide information about the country of migration that is
especially relevant for migrants; for example questions about their working rights, residence
situation, education, and language learning. Kamer (m, 47, Turk) is employed as a social
worker in different projects for migrants and indicates that diasporic media in the language of
country of origin can be an important resource of information about the country of migration.
This is especially the case for people who do not have an advanced language level or do not
consume the German media. Such claims are reinforced through the statements of Hamit (m,
40, Turk), who says that he only reads news about Germany and Europe through the Germany
website of the Turkish daily Hürriyet because his German knowledge is not sufficient to use
German media.
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To sum up, we can say that diasporic media open up a different horizon for diaspora-specific
information then other media do. Even if the information that they provide is mainly related to
certain localities in the country of origin or migration, it is still represented from the
perspective of diaspora. On the other hand, looking at the diversity of references to different
contexts, it becomes obvious that this horizon of information is not a homogenous one, but is
rather contradictory in its whole. Such contradictions about diasporic media will be clearer in
the following chapters.
ENTERTAINMENT: OBTAINING, AMUSING AND PLAYING
Migrants interviewed by us appropriate diasporic media also to have entertainment, either on
their own or with others. Migrants tend to look for such (mediatized) entertainment, ‘when it
is boring’ (Orhan, m, 17, Turk), to ‘relax’ (Feraye, f, 35, Turk), or just to ‘have fun’ (Zhanna,
f, 24, Russ.).
Most of the interviewees mention films, videos, music or computer games in this context. The
(diasporic) video and music platforms on the Internet like Stepashka.com for the Russian
Diaspora, Yabiladi.com for the Moroccan diaspora or Diziizle.net for the Turkish diaspora
have a significant value – especially for younger migrants – to reach media content that is
relevant for entertainment. Such platforms have a dual function because they mostly distribute
media content from the countries of origin and also have users in these countries as well as in
diaspora.
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Diasporic video and music platforms can be understood as origin-oriented archives for
entertainment purposes. Especially, younger migrants who are Internet affine find it ‘very
convenient’ (Karina, f, 21, Russ.) to obtain films, music or television programs independent
of national borders. For instance, Mahmut (m, 30, Turk) regularly uses websites, in which you
can find ‘all of the series’ from Turkey. Ayman (m, 29, Moroc.) is a fan of Casevie.com for
Moroccan radio stations and Yabiladi.com for Moroccan music. Moreover, these websites
also provide older media content that has nostalgic significance for the members of diasporas.
Kristina (f, 24, Russ.) uses the website Coolerussen.de to listen to ‘old songs from the eighties
and nineties’. These examples show that Internet platforms can function like ‘archives’ or
‘registries’ for searching and obtaining media content for mediatized entertainment. Such
entertainment is often related to the country of origin. For example, Zhanna (f, 24, Russ.)
likes to listen to the band Ljube with her friends, which ‘reflects the Russian soul’ and ‘you
feel like you are in a Russian town’ when you listen to it. The Internet radio through which
she listens to this band shapes her pleasure of participation in the cultural world of the
imagined country of origin.
The horizon of the entertainment through diasporic media is not limited to the country of
origin. Migrants also use diasporic media to obtain media content that reflect the world of
diasporic community in order to amuse themselves. For example, the radio station Radyo
Metropol is very popular among Turkish migrants. One of the reasons behind this popularity
is the fact that the station produces bilingual programs with constant language switching,
which is typical in the everyday lives of Turkish migrants in Germany. Films of directors with
migration background that tell stories of migrants are also popular among migrants like Cagla
(f, 27, Turk), who is a fan of Fatih Akin. The Internet provides different opportunities to
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produce such content that is related to the everyday worlds of migrants. Fatima (f, 22,
Moroc.), for example, uses a website where she can find sketches from Berber migrants who
imitate German shows like DSDS (German version of Pop Stars) in Berber language and
humour.
Playing games on diasporic websites can also be a way of amusing oneself. For example,
Cagla (f, 27, Turk) often plays on diasporic websites like Turkdunya.de or Vaybee.de.
Besides, the gamers are chatting as they are playing, which is a diaspora-specific fun-oriented
form of networking. Nalan (f, 50, Turk) also plays different games on websites with Turkish
people in Europe and in Turkey in order to do something ‘without having to think too much’
and relax.
Diasporic media, especially diasporic websites supply migrants with different opportunities
for mediatized entertainment: They provide archives through which migrants can obtain
different media content relating to the country of origin or diaspora itself and amuse
themselves. Furthermore, they also serve amusement through online gaming within diaspora
and the country of origin.
ENGAGEMENT: PUBLICIZING, MOBILISING, ORGANISING AND PRODUCING
Diasporic media have a significant value for practices of civic engagement among migrants,
by which we mean any kind of commonwealth-oriented participation in non-governmental
organisations, networks or projects (Huth, 2005, p.37; Weiß and Thränhardt, 2005, p.29-30).
Diasporic civic engagement does not refer to any kind of civic engagement by migrants, but
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projects, networks or organizations that are constructed within the diasporic community and
target these.
In academic literature particularly the role of the Internet for diasporic civic engagement is of
interest, focusing exclusively on Internet-based projects (Goel, 2009; Hanafi, 2005; Mitra,
2005). We find it problematic to separate between ‘traditional civic engagement’ and
‘technology related civic engagement’ (Bimber, 2000, p.329) because our material shows how
interwoven such practices are; the boundaries between them are blurred.
For example, Aysen (f, 44, Turk) is active in different German-Turkish organisations. She
indicates that most of the communication between the members of the organisation is realized
through the Internet. Internet is not only used for internal communication and for organizing
activities, but also to publicize the organisation. For Serhat (m, 48, Turk) and Erkan (m, 57,
Turk), newsletters are the most important resources, through which they are informed about
the activities of the associations in which they are involved. They also forward information to
their contacts in order to mobilize other migrants for these activities. Fatima (f, 22, Moroc.) is
engaged in different aid organisations. Additionally, she organizes meetings voluntarily in a
local diasporic organisation for Moroccan women to discuss different topics, attend sport
courses or social activities like going to the theatre. Most of these activities are organized and
publicized through the Internet and local networks. Thus, the Internet is in general important
for the practices of civic engagement in diaspora beyond the Internet-based projects.
As the examples above indicate, the boundaries between organisational communication,
publicizing and mobilizing are fluent in diasporic civic engagement. A form of online
communication for a self-organization can turn into a diasporic website or diasporic
association which addresses a broader part of the diasporic community and provides them
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with information and mobilizes them. Especially, well-educated migrants are involved in such
mediated forms of mobilization. One of the aid groups Fatima is involved in is a good
example for this. Fatima (f, 22, Moroc.) and other young migrants from different cities are
mobilized through StudiVZ, a social network site in Germany in order to organize an aid
project for an orphanage in Morocco:
‘That is such a group, it is called ‘Hand in Hand for Allah’ and we have just like
that it came that in Ramadan, we wanted to [send] presents to an orphanage in
Morocco. And then it came to be a school carton project, with the children. We
organized it, everything. We tried to do advertisement for it. And now we are
thinking of becoming an association, sometime in the future.’ (Fatima, f, 22,
Moroc.)
The network that Fatima talks about grew quite quickly and has its own website called Hand
in Hand for Allah. They publicize projects on the website, but also information about political
issues like the Gaza conflict. Furthermore, they have plans to become an official association.
Similar to Fatima, Halim (m, 33, Turk) built a group on the same social network site and
aimed to provide a platform for Turkish migrants who are looking for a job, in order to help
each other and exchange information about the job market. As the group quickly grew to
more than 3,000 members, Halim started to think about building a dedicated website for the
same purpose and is working on it at the moment.
Civic engagement can also involve practices of alternative media production. Alternative
media is defined here in the sense that Chris Atton (2002, 2004) uses the term. According to
Atton (2002: 4-20), alternative media should be non-profit oriented, encourage participation
and offer the means for democratic communication to people who are normally excluded from
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media communication by challenging the prevailing hierarchy of access to news production.
An example for participation in alternative diasporic media production is Nalan (f, 50, Turk),
who is an active person in the local diasporic community and has been asked by the owners of
the regional German-Turkish newspaper Türkses if she would be interested in preparing
articles for their newspaper. Now she has a column every month, where she tells stories of
Turkish migrants whom she interviews for the column. In Nalan’s case the engagement in
journalistic practice is rather voluntary and non-professional. There are other cases, like
Anton (m, 47, russ.), who worked as a journalist in Russia before coming to Germany.
Although Anton’s primary job is organising public relations in a German-Russian association,
he continues his journalistic activities in the German version of the newspaper Moskauer
Deutsche Zeitung. Whereas Anton is engaged in journalistic practices in a semi-professional
way, there are others who are engaged in voluntary journalistic practices through diasporic
media. For example, Metin (m, 30, Turk) is interested in the history of Turkey and searches
online archives on different subjects, especially the Armenian genocide. He writes articles
when he finds something interesting in the archives and sends these to the international blog
‘Armenian Genocide Resource Center’, in which among others many Turkish migrants in
different countries are involved.
Social web applications allow different kinds of diasporic media production, which can also
be seen as forms of civic engagement. For example, Halim (m, 33, Turk) used to produce a
radio with his friends. Layla (f, 20, Moroc.) has her own blog, where she posts poems or
pictures of Morocco and her hometown. She defines her blogging as her ‘hobby’ and her
activities are rather ‘fun’-oriented, the same as Halim’s radio production. Yet they provide
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migrants with content that is specifically relevant for the diasporic community, like music
from the country of origin or pictures and poems.
The examples that are presented here make it clear how important the Internet has become for
diasporic civic engagement. The boundaries between the employment of existing diasporic
media for civic engagement and media production for civic engagement is fluent. Internet
enables the organizing and publicizing of different projects within diaspora and mobilising
people in their support. Furthermore, it enables different forms of alternative media
production, which can also be considered as a form of engagement.
COMMERCE: BUYING, SELLING AND ADVERTISING
In addition to their other functions that are described here, diasporic media are important for
the so-called migration economy. This does not imply a shadow economy, but rather relates to
the whole field of trade and economic practices that are specific to the diaspora. Precisely,
three types of appropriation practices are relevant for our analysis. These are the advertising
of own products, selling and buying products.
Diasporic markets existed all through the history of migration and already before the Internet.
Migrants look for products or services that are culturally specific to their diasporic community
and not to be found in the national market of the country of migration. Mostly, the members
of the diasporic community themselves fulfil such economic demands for ‘ethnic’ products.
Within our sample, there were also some who were engaged in diasporic commerce practices.
For instance, Serhat (m, 48, Turk) has a travel agency that addresses his ‘fellow countryman’.
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Mahmut (m, 30, Turk) says that he can talk to his patients in Turkish in his praxis for
physiotherapy, which is an advantage for his business and as a consequence has a clientele of
more that 50 percent ‘Turkish people and foreigners’.
Commercially oriented diasporic media can themselves be seen as a part of the migration
economy as they offer specific media products for diasporic communities for economic
purposes. Additionally, there is a reciprocal relationship between diasporic media and other
types of diasporic markets. On the one hand, diasporic businesses advertise their products
through diasporic media and make themselves known in the diasporic community. For
example, Serhat advertises for his travel agency on the website of the migrant association he
is active in. On the other hand, diasporic media are virtually dependent on the advertisements
of the diasporic businesses in order to cover their costs and continue their existence, even if
they are not profit-oriented. The regional newspaper Türkses is financed only through the
advertisements of diasporic firms in Bremen and Hamburg.
Diasporic media are not only used for advertising diasporic products and services, but also for
buying and selling them. The online diasporic shops like Tikla24.de, Almadinabazar.de or
Polyska.de are typical examples for this. Through our material, we can say that the use of
such websites is not as widespread as one might expect. However, looking at the demand for
such products, we can say that such online shops have a potential to grow and become more
popular in the future. Most of the interviewees buy products that can only be found in
diasporic shops or be ordered through catalogues that come with diasporic newspapers. For
instance, Malik (m, 32, Moroc.) goes to diasporic shops to buy ‘Moroccan Mint’, Aysel (f, 22,
Turk) to buy ‘Turkish films’ and Olessia (f, 27, Russ.) to find ‘things that you can’t find in
German shops’.
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In general, we can say that through the practices of buying, selling and advertising in the field
of commerce, diasporic media are entangled with the migration economy, which in return
increases their relevance.
FAITH: PRACTICING, SEARCHING AND EXCHANGING
Diasporic media are also used for religious purposes by some of our interviewees. The
religious orientations of the interviewees differ considerably in each diasporic community,
varying from nonbelievers to strong religious orientations. Diasporic media can play a role for
the practice of religion, at least for people who define themselves as religious.
In particular, diasporic websites are relevant for practicing religion, for example to listen to
prayers – which is a common form of practicing Islam. Diasporic websites provide audio or
video files of prayers for downloading or online streaming. There are also some television
programs that only broadcast prayers, and which can also be found on the Internet on different
diasporic websites. For example, Halim (m, 33, Turk) uses ‘islamic websites in Turkish’ in
order to download Quran or read texts, ‘where they tell the life of Mohammed, you can
download MP3s or download prayers, download the whole Quran or as PDF to read yourself’.
Noureddin (m, 28, Moroc.) uses similar websites to ‘listen to Quran a little bit’. Mouad (m.
33, Moroc.) uses the website Islamway.com for similar purposes. Aysel (f, 22, Turk)
exchanges religious videos with her friends from the diaspora on Facebook.
Diasporic websites are also used for searching for information about religion(s). Anis (m, 43,
Moroc.) looks for different interpretations of Quran in websites like Islamweb.com or
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Sultan.org. Esin (f, 22, Turk) uses the Internet to find information about different religious
topics that are then discussed at monthly meetings of a group of women. Ljudmila (f, 45,
Russ.) also uses different websites to search for answers to different religious questions, for
example ‘which day is St. Barbara’. Such practical information like ‘timetable for prayers’
(Orhan, m, 17, Turk) or the end of Ramadan can also be found on diasporic websites.
Besides practicing religion and searching for information that is relevant for religion,
diasporic websites enable networking within diaspora and the exchange of ideas and
knowledge about religion. For example, Ahmet (m, 36, Turk) found a website a couple of
years ago in Ramadan, where ‘only religious people’ met. He was very active on the website
for a couple of years and ‘got to know a lot of people’ through this website, with whom he
kept in touch afterwards. Halim (m, 33, Turk) moderates an online discussion group on the
differences between Sunnite and Alevite Muslims, in which he exchanges his ideas with
others. He indicates that he ‘learned a lot through this [group]’. Fatima (f, 22, Moroc.)
participates in the diasporic discussion forum Dimadima.de, in which she exchanges her
knowledge about ‘many subjects, [and] Islam’.
Our analysis shows that not all diasporic media are religion related and not all migrants are
religion-oriented. However, religion is an important field of practice in terms of appropriation
of diasporic media, at least for the religioun-oriented migrants. They enable migrants to
exchange knowledge and ideas independent of physical borders, to search for information,
and practice their religion. Even though local communities and temples are still central for
religious networking, the Internet offers migrants possibilities to complement their religious
practices in different ways.
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RETHINKING THE CHARACTER OF DIASPORIC MEDIA: THE ‘FOCUS’ OF
DIASPORIC NETWORKING
As mentioned at the beginning of this article, diasporic media are often discussed in relation
to the public sphere or are conceptualised as alternative media. The position of Charles
Husband can be seen as exemplary of the conceptualisation of diasporic media as public
spheres. He considers diasporic media in the context of ‘public spheres in multi-ethnic
societies’ (Husband, 2000, p.199). The specifics of diasporic media lie in the difference
between ‘citizenship’ and ‘ethnicity’. As he indicates, patriotism in a country does not depend
on a shared national identity, but can rather be articulated in different ethnic belongings
(Husband, 2000, p.206). According to Husband (2000), whose thesis relies on the concept of
deliberative political public sphere, diasporic media fulfil important functions in multi-ethnic
societies because they contribute to the ethnic diversity of a multi-ethnic public sphere,
whereas the majority media serve the common ground for communication in the society.
Stuart Cunningham, Gay Hawkins, Audrey Yue, Tina Nguyen and John Sinclair (2000) have
another emphasis in their arguments. Based on the work of Todd Gitlin (1998), they use the
concept of ‘public sphericules’ to indicate that through the increasing globalization of media
communication and cultural change the ideal of a singular public sphere in a nation state does
not reflect the contemporary empirical situation. Based on their research, Cunningham et al.
argue ‘the emergence of ethnospecific global mediatized communities suggests that elements
we would expect to find in the public sphere are to be found in microcosm in these public
sphericules’ (Cunningham et al., 2000, p.1534). Such assumptions about multiple public
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spheres are common among other scholars as well. For instance, Donald Browne defines
diasporic media as ‘mini-spheres’ (Browne, 2005, p.204), implicitly adapting the arguments
of Jürgen Habermas. Mark Deuze speaks of ‘dispersed public spheres’ (Deuze, 2006, p.274).
Another approach to diasporic media is conceptualising these as alternative media. Such an
understanding of diasporic media can be linked to the discussions on public sphere that
postulates alternative public spheres. Olga Bailey, Bart Cammaerts and Nico Carpentier
(2008) advocate such an understanding of diasporic media on the ground of more general
understandings of alternative media (for example Atton, 2002, 2004). On the other hand,
Clemencia Rodríguez (2001, p.18-21) argues for an understanding of diasporic media as
‘citizens’ media’ instead of ‘alternative media’. From her point of view, diasporic media serve
the demands of a collective of people in order to intervene and transform an established
‘mediascape’ (Appadurai, 2008) and claim their status as citizens.
How are our empirical findings in relation to the appropriation of diasporic media to be
positioned in theoretical context presented here? We claim that with regard to the diversity of
appropriation practices of diasporic media, a simple conceptualisation of these as part of
alternative public spheres is not sufficient to comprehend them. The different fields of
practices we presented on the basis of our research findings show that migrants do not always
use diasporic media for commonwealth-oriented discursive exchange as the concept of
deliberative public sphere implies, but also for religious exchange, commercial purposes or
individual entertainment.
The practices of appropriation that can be related to questions of an alternative public sphere
are mainly the fields of engagement and knowledge. Through diasporic media, migrants
publicize information that is relevant for the diasporic community, organize civic engagement
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or mobilize people for this. However, looking at the media production practices it will be clear
that such practices of engagement partially depend on the desire for individual entertainment.
Similarly, we can say that people look for information in diasporic media with different
interests as they are searching and inquiring information about the country of origin, country
of migration or the diaspora itself. Here, we can see the ‘rhizomatic’ structure of diasporic
media as it is emphasized by Nico Carpentier (2007) since there is a transgression of the
boundaries between them and commercial media or public broadcasting media.
This transgression also reveals itself in the fields of entertainment and commerce. Especially
in the field of entertainment, people are not just aiming to amuse themselves through
diasporic media, but also to obtain certain media content (from commercial or public
broadcasting media) through these. Similarly, when we look at the field of commerce, we can
observe how diasporic media are related to the migration economy, which manifests itself
rather in form of ‘ethno marketing’ (Musiolik, 2010) instead of alternative media production.
Also in the field of faith, diasporic media are used to practice religion individually and have a
mediatized connection to the religious community, rather than as a form of alternative public
sphere.
We believe that the metaphor of diasporic media as the focus of diasporic networking is a
more useful concept for understanding their role for diasporic communities than alternative
public spheres or alternative media. However, this neither means that all members of
diasporic communities use diasporic media, nor that they are used primarily. Diasporic media
are rather a complementing part of the whole media repertoires of members of diasporas.
They are in the focus of networking practices of migrants in the sense that through these
media it is negotiated what constitutes the diasporic community, who belongs to it and what it
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means to belong to it. Diaspora-specific networking takes place in the communication space
that emerges through diasporic media. This communication space is neither to be understood
as a subset of the (national) public sphere of the country of migration, nor as a separate
(alternative) public sphere. This becomes obvious when we look at different fields of
practices in which diasporic media are being appropriated (see table 2).
Table 2: Diasporic media and their appropriation practices
Field of Practice
Information
Entertainments
Engagement
Commerce
Faith
Type of Diasporic Media
- Discussion forums
- Diasporic web portals
- Mailing lists and newsletters
- News websites
- (Online) Radio Stations
- Newspapers and magazines
- Diasporic web portals
- (Online) Radio Stations
- Online Music and Video platforms
- Gaming websites
- Blogs
- Mailing lists
- (Online) Radio Stations
- Social Web Groups
- Newspapers
- WWW
- Diasporic web portals
- Online Shops
- Diasporic web portals
- Video platforms
Appropriation Practices
- Searching
- Inquiring
- Obtaining
- Amusing
- Playing
- Publicizing
- Mobilising
- Organising
- Producing
- Buying
- Selling
- Organising
- Practicing
- Searching
- Exchanging
This said, we can sum up the following: Diasporic media as the ‘focus’ of networking in
diaspora can not exclusively be seen as the production of an alternative public sphere, but
also not as commercial pendants of the national public sphere of the country of migration.
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When analysing diasporic media we should consider their diversity. Yet, within this diversity,
they are oriented towards the diasporic community in a thematic-organisational sense and
are on that account building a focus for the networking of diasporas. Diasporic media
contribute to the stabilisation of diasporic communities in this sense, but they do not have a
coherent and singular characteristic.
Therefore, if we look at diasporic media in the context of mediatization and change, we can
say that they have become an important part of the increasingly mediatized everyday lives of
migrants. This is true in terms of digital media as well as established diasporic mass media,
such as the diasporic newspaper Russkaja Germania or the radio station Radyo Metropol
among others. In regard to the Internet, we can conclude that certain forms of communication
take place more and more through online communication. Diasporic websites, discussion
forums, mailing lists or newsletters are important communication tools in the field of
information. In the field of entertainment, video and music platforms are crucial to accessing
specific (mass) media content digitally. Likewise blogs, mailing lists, and websites become a
crucial part of diasporic civic engagement. In the fields of faith and commerce, the Internet
fulfils similar functions.
Following on these arguments, we want to come back to the considerations of Nancy Fraser
(2007) we quoted at the beginning of our article. Fraser reminds us to be careful not to equate
any (transnational) communicative space with a public sphere. Her argument for this is that
the ‘concept of the public sphere was developed not simply to understand communication
flows but to contribute to a normative political theory of democracy’ and she continues: ‘In
that theory, a public sphere is conceived as a space for the communicative generation of
public opinion.’ (Fraser 2007, p.7). As we have seen, we can find the deliberative discourse
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Nancy Fraser has in mind only when it comes to what we have called ‘engagement’:
appropriation practices like publicizing, mobilising, organising, producing. Many other
appropriation practices have nothing to do with a public sphere. However, they are never the
less important as they open the space for self-ruled acting in the diaspora. While this is not
necessarily deliberative it is nevertheless highly relevant in migrant lives. So rejecting the
concept of public sphere and alternative media to understand diasporic media in general does
not mean to disesteem them. It rather means that we should be much more careful with
normatively loaded concepts like these. The role of diasporic media should be understood in
the broader social context of diasporic lives, which are increasingly mediatised.
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Part III
Limits and contradictions of counter-hegemonic resistances
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Chapter 7
Cultural practices and media production: the case of Bollywood
Daya Kishan Thussu
This chapter explores how media globalisation has impacted upon cultural production and
practices in a transnational context. The chapter discusses how South-South and increasingly,
South-North cultural flows are challenging US cultural hegemony. It also explores the
complexities of production and consumption of audio-visual media emanating from
Bollywood, the world’s largest film industry. As a Southern production, Bollywood defies the
US cultural hegemony, but as a mass phenomenon it produces its own version of hegemony.
MEDIA GLOBALISATION: MARKERS AND MECHANISMS
The global media landscape has been transformed as a result of the deregulation and
privatisation of broadcasting and telecommunication, enabling a quantum leap in the
production and distribution of media products across continents and in real time. The opening
up of global markets, enabled by the institutional and technological changes that swept the
world in the 1990s had a transformative impact on the communication and media sector –
effecting new contra-flows in global communication from the global South to the North and
within the South. One of the key factors in this was the availability and adoption of new
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information and communication technologies and their diffusion, not only among the elites
but to the wider population, helping to create a global information and entertainment sphere.
The resultant globalisation of media has contributed to undermining distinctive media cultures
at the same time as enriching media experiences. While sceptics fear that the creation of a
uniform and homogeneous communication experience could erode identity, enthusiasts for
new media technologies rejoice in the potential media diversity that the increasingly mobile
digital revolution has promised and, to some extent, delivered. As we enter the second decade
of the 21st century, the world of global media and communication offers exciting challenges
and possibilities of rethinking intercultural exchanges at a transnational level. Time-space
compression in the 24/7 digitized media economy, with its localization and multiple and
multi-vocal flows, has created a dynamic transnational communication space.
Despite impressive growth in communication channels within the global South, transnational
media corporations – mostly based in the North – continue to dominate the global
communication space by virtue of their ownership of multiple networks and production
facilities, benefiting from the growth of markets in large Southern countries and the resultant
increase in transnational traffic in media products. The United States leads the field through
its political and economic power, and its media are available across the globe, in English or in
dubbed or indigenised versions. The US is the global giant in all media spheres: from news
and current affairs (CNN - available in 260 million households worldwide; Discovery - 180
million households worldwide) through youth programming (MTV - the world’s biggest
television network, reaching 418 million households), children’s television (Disney), feature
films (Hollywood), sport (ESPN) to the Internet (Google). These US entertainment and
information networks, which retain the widest international reach and influence - both in
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hardware and software – also shape media and communication in the global South (Thussu,
2007).
According to the figures from the United Nations, the $1.3 trillion media and cultural industry
is one of the fastest growing in the world, accounting for more than 7 per cent of global GDP.
However, much of this is concentrated among a few very powerful and mostly US-based
conglomerates. Africa’s share in the global exports of creative goods and services – valued in
2005 at $424.4 billion - was less than 1 per cent (UNCTAD, 2008). In 2009, the world’s five
largest multimedia conglomerates were all American, and jointly generated about $120 billion
in annual revenue (see Table 3).
Table 3: The world’s top five media companies
Company
Global Fortune 500 ranking 2009 revenue, billion $
Walt Disney (US)
57
36
News Corporation (US) 76
30
Time Warner (US)
82
28
Viacom (US)
170
13
CBS (US)
177
13
Source: Fortune, June 2010
In the global visual media, American film and television exports have witnessed nearly a sixfold increase between 1992 and 2009. Receipts for film and television tape rentals, covering
‘the right to display, reproduce and distribute US motion pictures and television programming
abroad’ have shown, according to the US Government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, a
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steady increase from $2.5 billion in 1992 to $13.8 billion in 2009 (US Government, 2010).
Other Western nations, such as France, Britain and Germany, are also major exporters of
media and communication products, such as programme formats, to a large number of
countries worldwide. There are limited imports of cultural products from the global South
and those too are primarily aimed at a geo-linguistic or diasporic audience.
Such imbalances in cultural trade were at the heart of 1970s debates within UNESCO about
what was then called a ‘New World Information and Communication Order’. A quarter of a
century later, while traffic has increased many fold, nevertheless the majority of Southern
countries continue to be consumers rather than producers of news and cultural products, a
phenomenon in evidence in various media and communication sectors. Global export of
newspapers, magazines, books, and other printed matter, for example, is dominated by
Europe, which accounts for 64 per cent, followed by North America at 20 per cent. Europe
also leads the export of recorded music, sound recordings and related software, accounting for
71 per cent of the export market, followed by North America at 15 per cent. In stark contrast,
the figures for Arab states in these two sectors stood at as low as 0.23 per cent and 0.02 per
cent (UNESCO, 2009).
FROM VERTICAL NORTH-SOUTH TO HORIZONTAL SOUTH-SOUTH MEDIA
FLOWS
As noted above, although the media flow from the West (mainly the US) to other parts of the
world has increased – expanding press freedom and enhancing media professionalism - there
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is a small but significant flow in the other direction, from such countries as China, South
Korea, Brazil and India which have become increasingly important in the circulation of
cultural products (Thussu, 2007).
In the arena of news and current affairs, such ‘contra’ examples may include the world’s first
pan-Arabic news network Al-Jazeera, which, since its launch in 1996 has redefined
journalism in the Arab world. By 2011, this pan-Arabic 24/7 news network was claiming to
reach more than 100 million viewers across the world, challenging the Anglo-American
domination of news and current affairs in one of the world’s most geo-politically sensitive
areas. With the launch in 2006 of Aljazeera English - and its claim of ‘setting the news
agenda’ - the global news-scape has become more diverse. Aljazeera English draws on the
professionalism of the BBC’s public-service ethos, while aiming to privilege a Southern
perspective on global issues. It has more correspondents in Africa than BBC and CNN
combined. The launch in 2007 of its documentary channel promises to bring more Southern
voices and views on to the global television and computer screens. Sharing of programmes
and personnel as well as film footage among Al-Jazeera and its other Southern counterparts –
notably NDTV 24x7, India’s best-known news network – is beginning to take place. This
encouraging sign could be replicated among other Southern news networks.
This shift is indicative of the wider change in media flows among Southern countries, as some
of these become more visible globally, exporting both hard and software for media and
communication industries (UNCTAD, 2008). Exports of media and communication
equipments from Southern countries - including mobile telephones, TV sets, computers, game
consoles, video equipment, CD and DVD readers and recorders – has demonstrated
extraordinary growth, from $51 billion in 1996 to $274 billion in 2005 (UNESCO, 2009).
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China has emerged as the planet’s biggest mobile telephone market, having the highest
blogger population as well as being the largest exporter of IT products.
In terms of ‘software’ too, there is a growing Southern presence in the global media
marketplace. Indian films are increasingly being watched by international audiences in more
than 70 countries: industry estimates show that the Indian entertainment and media industry
will be worth $29 billion by 2012, while exports from its information technology and ITenabled services will reach $148 billion by that date (UNCTAD, 2008; FICCI/KPMG Report,
2011). With more than 100 round-the-clock news channels, India has the world’s most
linguistically diverse media landscape. According to the World Association of Newspapers,
74 of the world’s 100 largest selling dailies were published in Asia, with India and China
leading with more than 100 million copies sold daily in each country. Media exports from
other Southern countries – telenovelas from Brazil and Mexico, television dramas from
Egypt, feature films from South Korea and the Nigerian home video exports - may be cited as
other examples of how these ‘counter-flows’ are modifying the global media landscape
(UNESCO, 2009). The availability of new delivery and distribution mechanisms coupled with
the growing corporatization of media industries in major Southern countries have ensured that
Southern content has entered the global media sphere, with the potential of pushing it in new
directions.
BOLLYWOOD AS GLOBAL MEDIA CONTRA-FLOW
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One manifestation of a global contra-flow of cultural products is India’s $3.5 billion Hindi
film industry, which has not only provided a popular definition of India but also helped to
make it an attractive, not to say, exotic and colourful, tourism and investment destination.
Mumbai (formerly Bombay)-based ‘Bollywood’ is the world’s largest film factory in terms of
production and viewership: every year a billion more people buy tickets for Indian movies
than for Hollywood films (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, 1999; Mishra, 2001; Pendakur, 2003;
Lal and Nandy 2006; Kaur and Sinha, 2005; Rai, 2009).
The term ‘Bollywood’ – contested and commended in almost equal measure - and coined in a
journalistic column in India was globalised as it gained currency through global media outlets
emanating from London. Bollywood denotes a major cultural industry which dominates all
media in India - including music, television, radio, on-line, advertising, and even affects
social, religious and political celebrations and discourses (Rajadhyaksha, 2003; Pendakur,
2003; Lal and Nandy 2006; Anantharaman, 2007).
In addition to productions from Bollywood, there are strong regional centres making films in
India’s other main languages, notably Tamil, Bangla, Telugu and Malayalam (see, for
example, essays on Tamil cinema in Velayutham, 2009). Though many more films are
released in India each year than Hollywood their influence is largely confined to the Indian
subcontinent and among the South Asian diaspora, though in the last decade many ‘crossover’ films have begun to change this situation (Kaur and Sinha, 2005; Thussu, 2008).
India has been exporting films to various countries around the world, the process starting as
early as the 1930s during the colonial period. The primary audience was the global South
Asian diaspora, scattered in all continents, and estimated to be over 35 million. The
unprecedented expansion of television in the past two decades – from a state monopoly until
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1991 to 500 plus channels in 2011 - was a boost for the movie industry, as many dedicated
film-based pay-channels emerged. Digitization and growing availability of satellite and cable
television have ensured that Indian films are regularly shown outside India, dominating the
cinema of South Asia and defining popular culture in the Indian subcontinent and among the
South Asian diaspora. Since the 1990s and in a deregulated and privatized global media
market, Bollywood has expanded to target lucrative Northern markets. Such expansion has
also been possible because of availability of satellite platforms. South Asian channels
including Zee, Sony, Star, B4U, are available in Europe on Sky’s digital network, and in the
US, on Echostar DISH system and DirecTV. The changing global broadcasting environment
and the availability of digital television and online delivery systems has ensured that
Bollywood content is available to new and varied international audiences. This has made it
imperative for filmmakers to privilege scripts which interest the diasporic audience, as well as
to invest in sub-titling to widen the reach of Indian films beyond the traditional diasporic
constituency.
The diasporic dimension of Bollywood was realised in a significant way with the release in
1995 of Yash Raj’s films production Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (The Brave Heart Will
Take the Bride), starring Shah Rukh Khan, one of India’s most popular stars. This was the
first major Hindi film to focus on an Indian family, based in Britain and was a phenomenon
running uninterrupted for ten years in one Mumbai cinema. Arguably, the film also
popularised the ‘great Indian wedding’ scene of music and dance, since replicated in many
films. In some ways, this film was a trail blazer – signifying the opening up of India’s new
middle classes to global trends, with a clear orientation to please the diasporic viewers.
Indians based in the West were also central to director Karan Johar’s 1998 love story Kuch
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Kuch Hota Hai (Something is Happening) and his 2001 family drama Kabhi Khushi Kabhi
Gham (Sometimes Happiness, Sometimes Sorrow). The 2003 love triangle Kal Ho Na Ho (If
Tomorrow Comes) had the distinction of being the first mainstream Indian film set entirely in
the US. Not surprisingly, all these diaspora-oriented films did extremely well in the overseas
market. One result of such interest was that diasporic film makers such as US-based Mira
Nair (director of 2001 Bollywood-inspired comedy Monsoon Wedding) and the British-based
Gurvinder Chaddha (director of 2002 film Bend It Like Beckham and 2003 film Bride and
Prejudice) have set out to make films that bridge Western and Indian popular cinema.
The globalisation of Indian films can also be witnessed in the growing trend of non-Indian
actors appearing in mainstream Indian films. Examples include British actress Annabelle
Wallace in the 2005 film Dil Jo Bhi Kahey and Antonia Bernath in Kisna - the Warrior Poet.
Two versions of the latter film, also released in 2005, were shot - a three-hour version in
Hindi for India and a two-hour English cut for global audiences. Another British actor Rachel
Shelly was part of the love triangle in the 2001 commercially and critically acclaimed Lagaan
(Land Tax) directed by Ashutosh Gowariker. This film, which was nominated for the Oscars,
also starred Toby Stephens, a former Bond villain, who also played a key role in the 2005
historical film Mangal Pandey: The Rising, set in the colonial period. British actress Alice
Patten was the leading lady in the 2006 hit Rang De Basanti. Ilene Hamann from South
Africa appeared in a lead role in Pooja Bhatt’s 2005 film Rog while American actress Sarah
Thompson featured in the 2010 film Rajneeti. In addition, foreign (mainly European) female
dancers from as diverse countries as Turkey and Belarus are increasingly being used in song
sequences.
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THE GROWTH OF GLOBAL BOLLYWOOD
Apart from the diasporic market, Bollywood films have traditionally been popular among
other developing countries in Asia, Middle East and Africa. In Nigeria, for example, where
Bollywood is popular, musicians of the Ushaq’u Indiya (Society for the Lovers of India) use
‘vocal harmonies’ from Hindi film lyrics and rework them into Hausa versions (Uba Adamu,
2010). In Indonesia too, local music has been influenced by Bollywood (David, 2008). During
the Cold War, Indian films were also widely circulated among former communist countries in the Soviet Union and China. These escapist melodrama with song and dance numbers were
considered by communist authorities to be a useful alternative to state propaganda and a
cheap substitute for a Hollywood extravaganza. In the post-Stalin era, Hindi films were
imported into the Soviet Union, where they proved extremely popular. There was even a
dedicated Russian journal, Prem, about Indian films (Rajagopalan, 2008). Even in Putin’s
Russia, Indian films continue to attract interest: in 2007, India TV, a corporation owned by
the Moscow-based Red Media Group launched a 24-hour TV channel, dedicated to
Bollywood, aimed at market of 5.5 million Russians (Bhadra, 2008).
Given the importance of London as a global media centre, Bollywood has invested heavily to
make its presence felt there (see Table 2). In 2002, the Selfridges store in London’s Oxford
Street, as part of the ‘Indian summer’ invited Bollywood star Hrithik Roshan to attract
Britain’s ever-strengthening ‘brown pound’. That year also witnessed the staging in London’s
West End of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical production, Bombay Dreams, with music by A.
R. Rahman, the most well-known Bollywood composer, thus mainstreaming Bollywood into
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the London musical scene. In 2002, the British Film Institute organized ‘Imagine-Asia’, its
eight-month celebration of South Asian film, and launched the 150-page guide, Bollywood
and Beyond, produced in response to the growing interest among students and teachers in
Indian cinema. It was also the year when the word Bollywood entered the Oxford English
Dictionary.
A year later, Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s blockbuster Devdas was screened at the Cannes film
festival in 2002 while the film’s two stars Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai walked the red
carpet. The film was nominated in the foreign language film category at the 2003 Orange
British Academy Film Awards (popularly known as BAFTA), the film was also India’s entry
for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
In the US, the growing presence of Indian diaspora – in professional and business circles - has
made Bollywood a noticeable cultural reference point. Films made by diasporic directors
based in the US have contributed to the popularity of Indian cinema there. Anurag Mehta’s
American Chai and Piyush Pandya’s American Desi as well as Krutin Patel’s 2001 film
ABCD (short for ‘American Born Confused Desi’), were crossover films looking at the
aspirations and struggles of first-generation Indian Americans. One indication of Bollywood’s
growing global appeal is that such stars as Amitabh Bachchan have an international fan club:
Madame Tussaud’s added his figure to its Hall of Fame, while retrospectives of his films are
routinely organized across the world. In a 1999 BBC poll, viewers around the world voted
Bachchan as the millennium’s biggest star, ahead of Hollywood icons. Other actors who have
had international acclaim include Shabana Azmi, Om Puri and Anil Kapoor (who featured in
the 2010 British-made international hit Slumdog Millionaire). In Germany, the popularity of
Bollywood is to be grasped from the fact that the German cable TV channel, RTL, shows
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Bollywood movies dubbed in German. In 2007, Germany saw two major Bollywood-inspired
shows, ‘Bharati’ and ‘Bollywood: Das Musical’ (Shankar, 2007).
Outside the diasporic markets too, Indian cinema has become popular, for example, in Japan
where Tamil films of Rajnikanth, the icon of Tamil cinema, were extremely popular
(Matsuoka, 2008). A shortened, digitised and dubbed version of Lagaan was released across
25 theatres in China, the first Indian film to be imported by the China Film Group (Sengupta,
2003). A. R. Rahman’s first-ever Chinese film as composer was the 2003 film Tiandi
Yingxiong (Warriors of Heaven and Earth), the 2004 Chinese official entry to the Oscars.
Since 2002, M. G. Distribution, part of Melbourne-based Black Cat Productions, has been
distributing Hindi films in mainstream cinemas, raising the profile and visibility of
Bollywood in Australia, New Zealand and Fiji (Bhandari, 2006). Ster-Kinekor, South Africa’s
largest cinema group launched its Bollywood circuit in South Africa with the world premiere
of Lagaan in 2001, while a year later, the first Bollywood Film Festival was organized in the
country (IANS, 2002). The 2004 film Munnabhai MBBS became the first Hindi film to be
reviewed by the British Medical Journal, while its 2006 sequel Lage Raho Munnabhai which
resurrected Mahatma Gandhi’s ideals, became the first feature film to be screened at the
United Nations auditorium.
It may be an indication of the popularity of Bollywood that its current superstar Shah Rukh
Khan is now considered a global icon – of the top ten all-time overseas grossing films, six are
Shah Rukh starrer: My Name Is Khan, Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna, Om Shanti Om, Rab Ne Bana
Di Jodi, Veer Zaara and Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (see Table 4). In 2002, the 55-year-old
Edinburgh Film Festival (the world’s longest continually-running film festival) organized a
special screening of three of Khan’s films - Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, Asoka and Dilwale
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Dulhaniya Leh Jayenge. In Austria, so popular is he that in Vienna ‘the Shahrukhis’ - a term
coined by German-speaking fans of Shah Rukh Khan who loyally collect his memorabilia regularly watch his movies at social events and dance to songs from his films (NDTV, 2010).
In 2010, the University of Vienna hosted an international conference on ‘Shah Rukh Khan
and Global Bollywood,’ an indication perhaps that ‘Bollywood studies’ is poised for take-off
(Ganesh, 2010).
Table 4: Top ten Bollywood films at global box office
Film
Year
UK
N. America Rest of world Overseas total
My Name Is Khan
2010 4.0
4.0
11.1
19.2
Three Idiots
2009 2.8
6.5
6.0
15.3
Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna
2006 3.8
3.2
3.6
10.7
Om Shanti Om
2007 2.7
3.6
3.7
10.0
Dhoom 2
2006 2.3
2.6
3.6
8.5
Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi
2008 2.2
2.0
4.1
8.4
Veer Zaara
2004 3.8
2.9
1.4
8.2
Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham 2001 3.6
3.1
1.3
8.0
Jodhaa Akbar
2008 2.1
3.4
2.0
7.5
Don
2006 2.7
2.2
2.5
7.4
Source: http://boxofficeindia.com, figures in million $
Television is a crucial element in this globalisation process, selling global Indian to the Indian
audiences and glitz and glamour of Bollywood to global audiences. The annual IIFA
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(International Indian Film Industry) awards are a striking example of this. These annual
jamborees attract huge audiences – both domestic and diasporic – and have straddled the
globe, beginning with London in 2000, to Sun City in South Africa (2001); Kuala Lumpur
(2002); Johannesburg (2003); Singapore (2004); Amsterdam (2005); Dubai (2006);
Leeds/Bradford (2007); Bangkok (2008); Macao (China) (2009); Colombo (2010) and
Toronto (2011).
WHEN HOLLY WED BOLLY: A MARRIAGE MADE IN NEW-LIBERAL UTOPIA
The growing visibility of Bollywood outside India and its role in creating a more diverse
global entertainment sphere cannot be understood without taking into account the synergies
between the world’s largest film industry and its richest. Apart from the United States, India is
the only other major film market in the world where the majority of domestic box-office is
dominated by local films – more than 80 per cent in the case of India. Given the size of
India’s market and its growing economic prowess, Hollywood mandarins are extremely keen
to forge business ties with India. The changed geo-political situation, with India becoming a
close ally of the US – pursuing a new-liberal free-market economic agenda - has contributed
to facilitating this relationship.
The collaboration was to be seen in 2002 with the release of the action-packed thriller Kaante,
starring Amitabh Bachchan. Billed as Bollywood’s homage to Reservoir Dogs, it was the first
mainstream Indian film to employ Hollywood production crew. The 2005 historical film
Mangal Pandey: The Rising, based on the 1857 uprising against the British colonial rule,
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became the first Indian-made movie to be released worldwide by 20th Century Fox. Indian
influence on Hollywood cinema could be seen in such films as the song and dance number
‘Chamma Chamma’ in Baz Luhrman’s Moulin Rouge. Aware of the changing global market,
the notoriously ethnocentric American media started to take interest in Indian popular culture.
In 2002, Bhansali’s Devdas and Nair’s Monsoon Wedding were among the movies which won
top honours in a ranking by Time magazine. In 2003, mainstream American television
audiences received their first extended taste of Bollywood when Turner Classic Movies
channel broadcast a 12-film festival of Hindi blockbusters, co-hosted by India-born filmmaker
Ismail Merchant (Rajghatta, 2003). In 2005, to promote her film Bride and Prejudice,
Ashwairya Rai appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show, aired in over 130 countries, as well as
popular talk show Late Night with David Letterman. She was also voted, twice in a row,
amongst the 100 most influential people by Time magazine (Osuri, 2008).
Since then, major US studios, notably Columbia Tristar (Sony Pictures), Warner Brothers,
Disney Pictures and Fox, have started investing in Bollywood. Columbia Tristar (Sony) was
the first multinational studio to enter the Indian filmmaking and distribution business with
Bhansali’s 2007 extravaganza Saawariya. A year later, Yash Raj Films, one of India’s biggest
production houses, joined hands with Walt Disney Pictures for the animated Roadside Romeo.
In 2009, Warner Brothers entered Bollywood with Chandni Chowk To China. Despite huge
financial resources and technical superiority all three films fared very badly at the box office –
both domestically and internationally.
One transnational player who has succeeded where others have failed is Rupert Murdoch with
Fox Star Studios, benefiting also from the extensive presence of News Corporation-aligned
companies in the Indian media sphere, notably STAR Plus. The joint venture between
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Twentieth Century Fox and STAR was set up to distribute in India 15-18 international
(mostly Hollywood) movies. However, it was a small-budget British film the 2010 rags-toriches story Slumdog Millionaire which was its first grand success internationally. It also
distributed the Karan Johar-directed My Name Is Khan. The film about the trials and
tribulations of an innocent Indian Muslim man, based in the US, who is accused of terrorism
charges, was released in 64 countries, and listed by prestigious Foreign Policy journal as one
of the top ten 9/11-related films. As a recent industry report notes: ‘Given its distribution
muscle and worldwide reach, Fox Star Studios was able to distribute My Name is Khan across
previously untapped markets such as Poland, Russia, Lebanon, Egypt, etc. and dubbed
versions across Germany and Italy. Keeping in mind the audiences in some of these non
traditional markets, the length of the movie was brought down for 2 hours 41 minutes to 2
hours 7 minutes’ (FICCI/KPMG Report, 2011, p.56).
Apart from such collaborations, artists representing mainstream Western popular culture are
also regularly appearing in Bollywood cinema. Two recent examples are a cameo appearance
by well-known hip-hop artist, Snoop Dogg, in a song in the 2008 comedy Singh is Kinng,
while pop-singer Kylie Minogue featured in a Bollywood dance number ‘Chiggy-Wiggy’, in
the 2009 film Blue, Bollywood’s first underwater movie.
On the other side of the coin, Indian companies have also started to invest in Hollywood.
Reliance Big Entertainment owned by Anil Ambani, one of India’s leading industrialists, has
invested in DreamWorks, founded by Steven Spielberg, heralding a new era of partnership
between Hollywood and Bollywood. As the Times of India observed in an editorial: ‘The
increased closeness between the two industries is likely to prove beneficial to both. Besides
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increased capital, Bollywood has greatly benefited from Hollywood’s best practices, which
has made the industry more professional’ (The Times of India, 2008).
Increasingly Hollywood films are being dubbed into Indian languages - Spiderman 3 outgrossed many Hindi films in 2007, thanks in large part to its release in several Indian
languages. Shah Rukh Khan provided the voice over for the 2004 Hindi version of
Disney/Pixar’s animation action adventure The Incredibles, called Hum Hain Lajaawab.
Laden with spectacular special effects, Hollywood action or horror films, dubbed into Indian
languages do good business in India (Pillai, 2004).
The Bollywood machinery is also ruthlessly ‘adapting’ successful American films,
indigenising them with a dose of additional melodrama and song-and-dance routines.
Examples abound: Mere Yaar Ki Shaadi Hai was inspired by My Best Friend’s Wedding;
Mujhse Dosti Karoge from You’ve Got Mail; Raaz from What Lies Beneath; and Shakti from
Not Without My Daughter. Even blockbuster films are ‘inspired’ by highly successful
Hollywood productions - the Hindi version of the The Godfather was called Sarkar (Blakely,
2009). Only in exceptional cases has a Bollywood film inspired an American one: Gaurang
Doshi’s 2002 comedy Aankhen was renamed Three Blind Mice.
HEGEMONY RECONFIGURED?
How ‘contra’ is Bollywood in the global entertainment sphere, dominated as it is with
commercial logic of a competitive and crowded marketplace, dictated by the dogma of neoliberalism? There is a danger bordering on the celebratory that this new Indian entertainment
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is widening the transnational infotainment sphere and bringing diversity to a global audience.
In recent years, there has been a trend in the academic world also to privilege the popular and
the subaltern. Increasingly the study of Indian popular cinema is being taken up by
universities in various countries, part of a trend towards internationalizing media and cultural
studies (Thussu, 2009). The Indian government, too, sees its popular film as part of India’s
‘soft power’. The enormous popularity worldwide of Slumdog Millionaire (outside India,
where many found it stereotypical and catering for Western sensibilities) has reinforced
Bollywoodized entertainment to a global audience. It has been suggested that the
representation of slum-spaces in the film symbolise Western trajectories of ‘development’
(Sengupta, 2010).
The film, which received eight Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Music for A. R.
Rahman, is an interesting example of how in a globalized media sphere, a small-budget
British film, set in India, can receive international critical and commercial acclaim.
Bollywoodized media in India has almost completely taken over public discourse – from
television and on-line entertainment, to news, from music to movies. As table 5 demonstrates,
Bollywood stars front some of the most popular television programmes, especially reality
shows.
Table 5: Bollywood-based celebrity shows on Indian TV
Programme
Programme type
Actor
Bigg Boss 4
Reality show
Salman Khan
Kaun Banega Karorepati
Quiz show
Amitabh Bachchan
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Khatron Ke Khiladi 3
Action/stunt show
Priyanka Chopra
Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa
Dance contest
Madhuri Dixit
Masterchef India
Cooking show
Akshay Kumar
Chak Dhoom Dhoom
Children’s dance contest
Mallika Sherawat
Zor Ka Jhatka
Game show
Shahrukh Khan
Source: FICCI/KPMG Report, 2011
The model on which this media system is based is a commercial one. According to industry
estimates, by 2015 television is expected to account for almost half of the Indian media and
entertainment industry revenues (FICCI/KPMG Report, 2011, p.3). In this advertisement-led,
ratings-driven media environment, a particular version of India is being promoted among the
diaspora as well as those interested in a multicultural media landscape. This reinforces a
reconfigured hegemony that legitimizes the neo-liberal agenda, predicated on digital global
communication and culture.
As Punathambekar has demonstrated in his study of Indiafm.com, dot.com companies have
played an important role in the construction of an overseas market for Bollywood and
Bollywoodized content (Punathambekar, 2010). This convergence of the digital technology
and entertainment media has ensured that filmmakers are increasingly realising that the movie
experience – particularly among the famed NRIs (non-resident Indians) – is not confined to
the theatres but downloads through on-line digital delivery mechanisms. Yash Raj Films’
2011 film Band Baaja Baaraat became the first Bollywood film to be made available on the
new YouTube Box Office channel. Each month the channel shows a recently released
premium film.
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In an age of global spectacle, the Bollywood variety of entertainment, with its ‘larger-thanlife’ characters, emotional melodrama, peppered with song and dance, can be a useful
diversion from issues that require attention: the excesses of excessive marketisation at a time
of global economic downturn. Despite unprecedented economic growth, India still remains
home to the world’s largest population of poor people. In the globalized Bollywood the
portrayal of this poverty is increasingly shaped by a Hollywoodised sensibility and aesthetics.
In terms of earning revenue from film exports, Bollywood is no match to Hollywood – India’s
share in the global film industry valued at $200 billion is extremely small, though rampant
piracy distorts these figures (Seagrave, 2003; Athique, 2008). However, the synergies now in
place between Hollywood and Bollywood - both at a corporate level as well as
intergovernmental level - may change this. The Indian government, which gave its film
industry the status of an industry only about a decade back (allowing it to insure films and
procure loans from commercial banks), needs to learn a good deal from how the State
Department promotes American cultural industries internationally. As a major information
technology power in the world, Indian government and corporations can deploy new digital
delivery mechanisms to further strengthen circulation of Indian entertainment and
infotainment in a globalized media world. As Bose has argued, in the digitised scenario, film
entertainment in India is no longer just an artistic or creative enterprise but a global brand
(Bose, 2006).
Though this may make Indian films more visible in the global market, there is a danger that
they might lose their cultural distinctiveness, though as has been argued the ‘Bollyworld’
remains ‘at once located in the nation, but also out of the nation in its provenance, orientation
and outreach’ (Kaur and Sinha, 2005, p.16).
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media and the informal economy’, Media Culture & Society, 30(5), p.699-717.
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Blakely, R. (2009) ‘Plagiarism case could stop Bollywood borrowing from Hollywood’, The
Times, London, 7 August.
Bose, D. (2006) Brand Bollywood: A New Global Entertainment Order (New Delhi: Sage).
David, B. (2008) ‘Intimate neighbors: Bollywood, Dangdut music, and globalizing
modernities in Indonesia’ in S. Gopal and S. Moorti (eds.) Global Bollywood: Travels of
Hindi Song and Dance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota), p.179-199.
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Kaur, R. and Sinha, A. (eds.) (2005) Bollywood: Popular Indian Cinema through a
Transnational Lens (New Delhi: Sage).
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Iconic in Indian Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford University Press).
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in Japan’ in Y. Terada (ed.) Music and Society in South Asia: Perspectives from Japan (Osaka:
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Mishra, V. (2001) Bollywood Cinema (London: Routledge).
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Rajadhyaksha, A. (2003) ‘The “Bollywoodization” of the Indian Cinema: Cultural
Nationalism in a Global Arena’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 4(1), p.25-39.
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Rajagopalan, S. (2008) Leave Disco Dancer Alone! Indian Cinema and Soviet Movie-going
After Stalin (New Delhi: Yoda Press).
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Sengupta, M. (2010) ‘A Million Dollar Exit from the Anarchic Slum-world: Slumdog
Millionaire’s hollow idioms of social justice’, Third World Quarterly, 31(4), p.599-616.
Sengupta, R. (2003) ‘Bollywood: India’s brand new export to Beijing’, The Times of India, 15
June.
Shankar, P. (2007) ‘Bollywood Dreams’, The Times of India, 20 January.
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editorial, 8 August.
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Internationalising Media Studies (London: Routledge), p.13-31.
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and A. Punathambekar (eds.) Global Bollywood (New York: New York University Press),
p.97-116.
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Media on the Move: Global Flow and Contra-Flow (London: Routledge), p.11-32.
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of Hindi music in Hausa popular culture’, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 22(1), p.41-56.
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Chapter 8
Giving voice to voiceless or giving peace to the establishment? The ambivalent
institutionalisation of ‘minorities’’alternative media in Mexico and Israel.
Benjamin Ferron
In 2008, the European Parliament (2008) discussed a legal framework that aimed at
promoting ‘community media’ within the member states, considering them as ‘effective
means of strengthening cultural and linguistic diversity, social inclusion and local identity, as
well as media pluralism’. In 2009, the international media development organization
Internews Network published, thanks to the ‘generous support’ of the United States Agency
for International Development (USAID), a ‘community media sustainability guide’ which
aims at extending their range into the most isolated areas of the globe, such as Afghanistan
(Fairbain, 2009). In 2010, after receiving a grant from the Ford Foundation, representatives of
New York City’s 350-plus ethnic and community media organizations underlined that the
success of these media ‘is essential to an informed and engaged population, and ultimately to
a thriving democracy’ (CUNY, 2010). In 2011, the World Social Forum in Dakar called for
‘building advocacy for a legislative and regulatory framework for public, alternative and
community media’ (WSF, 2011).
These four examples illustrate the increasing support given by national and international
public, private or civic stakeholders to ‘alternative media’ in the 2000s. In an analysis of the
‘rituals of institution’, the French sociologist Bourdieu (1982, p.58) indicates that such rituals
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‘draw the observer’s attention to the transition […] while the important thing is the line’.
Similarly, the institutional recognition of ‘alternative media’ draws the public’s attention to
their transition from illegality to legality, from illegitimacy to legitimacy. But one can
wonder: why and where do institutions draw the ‘lines’ that separate the authorized, wealthy,
democratic ‘alternative media’ from the others? If the norms create the deviance (Becker,
1997), how do these rituals of institution transform the relationships between the groups they
institute or establish (the insiders), and the groups they simultaneously exclude or marginalize
(the outsiders)?
The political consecration of ‘alternative media’ has been reinforced by an academic one. At
the beginning of the 2000s, only a few researchers were working on the phenomenon; yet ten
years later there is a plethora of academic literature surrounding it. The critical academic and
political reflection on the media has moved from the struggle for the ‘democratization of the
mass media’, dominant in the 1970-1980s, to the struggle for ‘democratic media’ in the 19902000s (Rodriguez et al., 2009). How can we explain the fascination for these media, described
as being produced ‘by and for citizens, with civic content’ (Hadl, 2004)?
Many academic studies on alternative media adopt similar basic premises that can be divided
into three types. First, alternative media producers and promoters are analyzed as challengers
of the status quo, ‘heterodox’ agents producing and circulating media outside – or against –
the ‘mainstream’ institutions, including, in particular, the state apparatus, the capitalist market
and the dominant media (heterodoxy/autonomy premise). Second, the organizations that
promote these media are generally considered as representatives of ‘civil society’, working
hand in hand to promote progressive social change (unity/cooperation premise). Third,
alternative media are assumed to be produced ‘democratically’ by marginal, subaltern,
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minority groups of citizens, in order to ‘give voice to the voiceless’ in the public space and
‘empower’ counter-publics (democratic/grassroots premise). This over-simplifies the
complexity of alternative media studies; however, the common point between these premises
is their underlying normative dimension. Social scientists, especially when they have close
relationships with their subject, tend to reappropriate in their academic discourse the
categories used by the social agents they study. Isn’t this the case when a formula like ‘giving
voice to the voiceless’ simultaneously becomes a slogan for ‘mediactivists’ and a hardlyquestioned scientific hypothesis?
This chapter aims to constructively discuss the relevance of these three premises. Is there
sociological evidence that would allow us to make a clear distinction between alternative and
mainstream media? Couldn’t this opposition be better understood, and questioned, as a
collective belief, co-produced by a complex set of mutual (and unequal) interdependencies?
Moreover, is the assumption that ‘civil society media’ tend towards mutual cooperation rather
than conflict supported by empirical and critical investigation? Couldn’t it be better
interpreted as a result of a strategy of self-presentation of these groups as ‘worthy, united,
numerous and committed’ (Tilly, 2006)? Deepening the discussion on the methodologies and
procedures that try to evaluate the ‘democratic’ effects of these media projects would be
welcome. But in a context where the publics for such media projects and their effects on these
publics remain terra incognita, who will evaluate the evaluators when they distinguish the
‘agents of democratization’ from the others, for instance radical or armed groups? How far
does the researcher risk, on the basis of his or her own system of values, contributing to the
consecration of certain categories of alternative media organizations, while excluding others?
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This chapter first presents reflections on the problems of definitions of ‘alternative media’,
and proposes a critical theoretical framework to study them. It then details some specific
fieldwork, showing the similarities and differences in the relationships between the state,
national ‘minorities’ and alternative media in two contexts: the Neo-Zapatista indigenous
media in Mexico, and the Palestinian Arab media in Israel-Palestine.
ALTERNATIVE MEDIA STUDIES: BETWEEN SCIENCE AND POLITICS
Most definitions of alternative media generally reprise the three normative premises
previously analyzed. For instance, Atton (2002) defines them as media produced outside
mainstream media institutions and networks. Downing (2001) considers ‘radical media’ as
‘media, generally small-scale and in many different forms, that express an alternative vision
to hegemonic policies, priorities, and perspectives’. Rodriguez (2001) discusses the notion
itself of ‘alternative media’, which considers them ‘by what they are not, instead of by what
they are’. But her ‘radical democracy’ perspective normatively hypothesises the intrinsic
heterodoxy and autonomy of ‘citizen media’ producers. Similarly, Hadl (2004) defines ‘civil
society media’ in a way that presupposes the sociological consistence of a ‘civil society’.
Cardon and Granjon also underline the fundamental unity of ‘informational mobilizations’,
when they distinguish between ‘anti-hegemonic’ and ‘expressivist’ perspectives, in so far as
all ‘mediactivists’ share common beliefs and values on the democratic harmfulness of
mainstream media (Cardon and Granjon, 2010). Langlois and Dubois’ (2006) definition of
autonomous media as ‘vehicules of social movements’ constitutes an attempt to synthesise
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different contradictory approaches, but it reinforces the sociological problems of the previous
definitions, tending to homogenize very different realities, and to create confusion between
the subjective declarations of intentions of the actors (what they say they do) and their
objective practices (what they effectively do).
These limitations can be explained by the fact that most researchers have a political proximity
with their object of study. This raises classical epistemological questions on the
‘objectification of the objectifying subject’ (Bourdieu, 1987). The academic works published
on alternative media in the last ten years have been very preoccupied with helping these
media to gain visibility and legitimacy. Their approach is in most cases a normative one,
which tries to help alternative media to ‘democratize communication’.
However, two blind spots within the study of alternative media should be mentioned here.
The first one concerns the debates and contradictions between alternative media activists
themselves on the question of their legal status and their sources of finance. The second one is
the question of their social and political impact outside the closed circle of activists or
participants. Some rare studies have tried to measure the effects of alternative media on the
political agenda; see, for example, Mathes and Pfetsch (1991). But studies of the reception of
alternative media remain extremely rare. Does this mean that they only have internal effects,
and very limited external ones (Klandermans, 1988)?
How can we get beyond the social problem of the democratization of the media, and study the
sociological problem of the strategies for legitimization and politicization of the causes of
alternative media? The problem lies in the fact that any attempt to integrate ‘alternative media
studies’ into a more scholarly framework has to face the same problem. On the one hand, we
find a myriad monographs, frequently reclaiming indigenous vocabulary. On the other hand,
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we find a plethora of theoretical discussions, remaining generally silent on the conditions of
production of their empirical data and the conditions of validity of their theoretical
generalizations. So how can we compare monographs produced in the absence of a common
theoretical framework, and how can we test the relevance of theoretical frameworks in the
absence of empirical data elaborated with similar methods?
COMPARISON, METHODOLOGY AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
I will attempt to answer these questions by comparing the relationships between two
transnational activists’ networks and alternative media: the Neo-Zapatista movement in
Mexico and the anti-occupation movement in Israel-Palestine. Despite the extreme
heterogeneity of the two political conflicts the protagonists are involved in, especially in
terms of historical and cultural backgrounds, a comparison can nonetheless be established,
based on several criteria.
The first one is the asymmetrical dimension of the two conflicts confronting low- and highresource groups: the struggle of the Neo-Zapatista indigenous people of Chiapas for
autonomy against the Federal Mexican Government (Velazco-Cruz, 2003); and the
Palestinians’ civil resistance for independence against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank
and Gaza (Norman, 2010).
Additionally, in both cases, the local protagonists claim a nearness to the alter-globalization
movement and benefit from international support. This has caused a frame alignment process
(Snow et al., 1986) that can be observed in the period 1994–2006.
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Thirdly, the media play an active role in the two conflicts, whether they be independent, progovernmental or pro-insurgent. On the one hand, the Israeli and Mexican government
propaganda, or military experts’ analysis, denounce the threat that insurgency, violence and
terrorism represent for peace, the state of law and the welfare of citizens. On the other hand,
the insurgents’ propaganda and the communication media of their civil supporters denounce
the colonial domination of national or sub-national groups, and the infringements to human
and civil rights and international law, and claim their rights to local autonomy or national
independence. In these conflicts for media supremacy, the insurgents’ movements try to
influence the mass media, but don’t always have control over the image the media gives of
them (Wolfsfeld, 1997). In such a situation, the actors can try to create their own media
networks in order to give a positive image of the movement and to make its claims known to
the public (Neveu, 1999). My hypothesis is that the construction of these ‘alternative media’
transnational networks implied an international division of the labour of political
communication, which resulted in several forms of institutionalization of the collective
practices and representations of these media producers.
To demonstrate this, I adopted a qualitative methodology using semi-directive interviews
(n=78) realized between 2005 and 2009 with alternative media activists, coupled with direct
ethnographic observations and systematic recollections of first-hand data. Then I applied the
concepts and models of analysis developed by constructivist sociology, which tries to
understand agents’ action through the logic of their practice. It is generally assumed that, in a
democratic system, social demands create the political offer. But one may wonder whether the
social elites’ monopoly on political categories and institutions does not rather create a
situation in which the political offer largely creates social demands.
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Using such a framework in the case of pro-Zapatista and pro-Palestinian ‘alternative media’
raises several questions. How does the state contribute to the construction of the categories of
minorities and majorities, and how do social movements both criticize and interiorize these
categories, including when producing their own media? What are the effects of these external
processes on the relationships between alternative media organizations?
THE STATE, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND THE POLITICAL CONSTRUCTION OF
NATIONAL ‘MINORITIES’
The definitions of ‘ethnic minorities’ in Israel and Mexico are the products of historical
struggles over the definition of legitimate political identities within sub-national groups.
These struggles are important contributory factors in explaining the genesis and current
structure of the so-called ‘ethnic minority media’ in both countries,.
The Israelization and Palestinization of the ‘Israeli Arabs’
In Israel, the official definitions and political uses of the categories of ‘Arab’ or ‘Palestinian’
result from the historical struggle between the Zionist movement and Palestinian nationalists
since the end of the nineteenth century. Today the ‘Arab minority’ in Israel (excluding the
Occupied Palestinian Territories, OPTs)39 represents around 20 per cent of the population.
39
The OPTs are the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel after the 1967 war: the West
Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.
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They belong to one of the minorities (officially called ‘sectors’) of the population opposed to
the ‘Jewish majority’, alongside the Russians and the Ultra-orthodox (Louër, 2003). But if we
refer to the Palestinian Authority’s definition, the Palestinians are the descendants of the
original inhabitants of Palestine during the British Mandate (1917–1947), who were chased
away from their land by the Zionist forces in the 1948 war. Today, three groups claim
recognition as Palestinian people: the Palestinian inhabitants of the OPTs, the ‘Arab citizens’
of Israel, and the refugees from the Palestinian diaspora all over the world (including the
OPTs). They do not consider themselves as an ‘ethnic minority’, but as a nation without a
state (Khalidi, 1997). In the territory of historical Palestine (Israel & OPTs), they represent
almost 50 per cent of the population.
Since the end of the 1960s, the situation has evolved from official ignorance or denial of the
Palestinian identity, to a certain integration of the ‘Arabs’ in the Israeli ‘melting pot’ (Ram,
1995), and repression of the contentious movements defending the Palestinian rights, in Israel
or in the OPTs. If an ‘Israelification’ of the Arabs of Israel can be observed, a parallel process
of ‘Palestinization’ also occurred, at an ideological level, principally in the mid-1980s, due to
the respective alliances between the two main Israeli parties (Likud and Labour) and small
ones, including the Arab nationalist ones.
The signature of the Oslo Agreement in 1993–1995 also partially changed the relationships
between Israel and the Palestinians from the OPTs, with the official recognition by Israel of
the ‘Palestinian people’, and of the State of Israel by the Palestinian Liberation Organization
(PLO). However, despite the so-called ‘Oslo peace process’, the military occupation and the
civil occupation of the OPTs continued, a situation that brought about the Second Palestinian
Intifada in 2000. The Oslo Agreement contributed to change the vision some Israelis had of
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the Palestinians – not an ‘ethnic minority’, but a people demanding the creation of an
independent state on part of their original land. However, this ‘cultural change’ mostly
concerned progressive and educated groups, especially on the left. But the Israeli right and
extreme-right wing groups gained better representation in the parliament and the government
in the 1990s and the 2000s. For the majority of the Israelis, the ‘Arabs’ are still perceived
through a colonialist, often racist, ‘cultural paradigm’ (Haidar & Zureik, 1987).
In the post-Oslo era the official discourse, adopted by the Israeli mainstream media (Dor
2005), reinforced the distinction between the ‘good’ partners for peace (the Palestinians who
work to counter ‘insecurity’ and ‘terrorism’), and the ‘bad’ (basically the groups who still
refuse the military occupation). Within these groups, we find two main categories. The first
groups have chosen armed struggle, including ‘martyrhood operations’ (or ‘terrorist attacks’
in Israel’s official vocabulary), like the Islamic party Hamas, which gained greater popular
support and became the most significant Palestinian resistance movement in the 2000s. Other,
less mediatized, activists consider violence as a counter-productive political strategy, and
privilege non-violent actions, civil disobedience, and peaceful protests (Norman, 2010). They
generally aim to achieve a positive media image, a strategy that led some groups to form close
relationships with international and Israeli Jewish anti-occupation activists.
The media strategies of the Israeli-Palestinian anti-occupation movement aim at challenging
the mainstream media representations of the Palestinian struggle: instead of ‘terrorism’, they
present the Israeli-Palestinian movement in the media, or their own media, as a national
struggle against oppressive and illegal military action, and a systematic colonization
supported by the state of Israel. Yet, a number of these ‘transnationalized activists’ have
interiorized elements of the alter-globalization ‘master frame’, including a definition of a
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global common enemy, the concept of neoliberal imperialism, and similar ways of defining
their own political identity . For instance, representatives of the Palestinian civil resistance
against Israeli occupation surprisingly defined themselves in the World Social Forum of 2005
(in Porto Alegre, Brazil) as part of the global struggle of ‘indigenous peoples’ for land,
property and individual and collective rights. This vocabulary contrasts strongly with the
traditional Palestinian ideology of resistance as a nationalist struggle aimed at building a state.
But it can be interpreted as a typical strategy of a social movement with few resources which
is attempting to reach an international audience, when national authorities deny their right to
existence, reducing them to a mere ‘minority’.
The Mexicanization and Indianization of the ‘Mexican Indians’
The current situation and history of indigenous people in Mexico is very different from those
of Palestine. However, a similar conflictual process of social construction of these groups as a
‘national minority’ can be observed, within which the Mexican state and indigenous people’s
organizations have played a crucial role. If we refer to official statistics, in 2005 indigenous
groups represented 9.8 per cent of the Mexican population (CND, 2006). Mexico has the
largest number of indigenous language speakers in Latin America and includes more than 50
‘ethnic groups’, of which the majority is located in the southern part of the country (Oaxaca,
Chiapas, Yucatán, Veracruz). However, the category of ‘indigenous people’ is the product of
colonial history, made official by the ‘indigenist’ policies of the state, and imposed ‘from the
exterior’ onto these communities, who generally prefer to be qualified as ‘native people’
(pueblos originarios).
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Indeed, the historical process of construction of the Mexican ‘imagined community’
(Anderson, 2002) is based on its fundamental territorial unity and the cultural homogeneity of
a ‘mixed’ race (the Spanish colonizers and the native ‘Indians’). In 1948, the creation of the
Indigenous National Institute (INI) by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was
dominated by a specific ideology: integrationist indigenism. It officially aimed at ending the
marginality of indigenous people, incorporating them into the economic life of the country,
and promoting Spanish as their everyday language. This cultural objective of
‘Mexicanization’ was conducted through several channels, including education and the media
(Castell Talens et al., 2009). Paradoxically, among the 30,000 indigenous teachers in the mid1980s, many first gained awareness of their ‘Indian-ness’ through precisely the programs
which aimed at assimilating them. This process of ‘Indianization’ favoured the creation of the
‘Indianist’ social movement, which is thus partly a product of the institutionalization of
‘indigenist policies’. The politicization and radicalization of the indigenous movements in the
1970s–1980s is also partly the product of their complex relationships with representatives of
the state and the political parties; but in the 1990s, especially after the Neo-Zapatista
movement of 1994, a more radical claim was formulated by alternative organizations seeking
total autonomy both from the state and the party system.
The Neo-Zapatista movement was critical of this proposal, under which the indigenous
peoples would be a ‘national minority’. They considered this notion as a symbolic instrument
of the political domination wielded by the real ‘minority’ that rules the Mexican party-state’s
oligarchy over the majority of the population. The Neo-Zapatistas demanded ‘radical’
autonomy for the indigenous communities of Chiapas. This demand was supported by the
National Indigenous Congress, which accepted to adopt the notion of joint-management
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control of the indigenous communities at a community and municipal level. This conception
of indigenous autonomy, practised in the Zapatista communities notably since the creation of
the Caracoles in 2003, differs from the more moderate one proposed by the National Plural
Assembly for Autonomy, which demanded some autonomous rights at a regional level. This
distinction between ‘moderate’ and ‘radical’ indigenous organizations has consequences for
the internal organization of the movements as well as in their relationships with the
authorities: the more ‘reformist’ are more ‘integrated’ while the more ‘radical’ remain
‘segmented’ (Oberschall, 1978).
In the case of the Neo-Zapatista movement, the combination of a military, political and a
media strategy has played a major role in their struggle to gain visibility and legitimacy, and
to be listened to by the Federal authorities. The military strategy has consisted of an armed
uprising against the Mexican army in the first 13 days of January 1994. The political strategy
involved constructing national and international networks of support, with political parties,
trades unions, NGOs, collectives, and intellectuals, which helped to avert a military
bloodbath; and negotiations with the Federal government. The Neo-Zapatista movement has
become one of the iconic references of the alter-globalization movement, especially since the
first ‘Intercontinental Meeting for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism’ (1996). But after a
highly mediatized collective march on Mexico City in 2001, the movement returned to a more
nationally-based struggle. This demonstrates that, ideologically, the Neo-Zapatista movement
does not consider the ‘indigenous’ people as a ‘minority’ distinct from the rest of the Mexican
people.
The Neo-Zapatista media strategy consisted of four elements. First, they tried to control the
access of journalists to the conflict zones. Then, through the comunicados of their
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spokesperson (the ‘Subcomandante Marcos’), the EZLN seduced national and international
media. Third, the movement included in its political program a demand for autonomous
indigenous media. Fourth, it created its own alternative media networks.
Yet, whereas the anti-occupation movement encountered difficulties in challenging, nationally
and internationally, the dominant pro-Israeli discourse on the one hand, and the radical
Islamic discourse on the other hand, the Neo-Zapatista strategy appears as quite successful in
its attempt to delegitimize at an international level the government propaganda which
portrayed them as ‘professionals of violence’ and a ‘threat to the State of Law’. They
promoted a different image, often romantic and idealized by Western supporters, of the
struggle of Mexican indigenous peoples for their autonomy. At a national level, the effect
seems actually less pronounced, partly due to a ‘law intensity war’ led by para-military groups
in Chiapas, and the militarization of the state; and partly due to a conflict between the EZLN
and the ‘institutional left’ represented by the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD). Finally, we
should highlight the pivotal role of the televisual private duopol (Televisa and TV Azteca)in
shaping a negative image of protest movements in the country.
Thus, national ‘minorities’ do not exist as natural latent social entities in a national society.
They do not automatically express their demands to the political authorities (including in
terms of media and communication) when new needs or problem arise. In our two case
studies, the struggles inside and between Israeli and Mexican state institutions, social
movements and ‘minoritized’ groups play a major role in the historical definition and
delimitation of these so-called ‘ethnic minorities’. The political ‘offer’, whether it be
ignorance, repression or cooptation, largely contributes to the expression of the collective
demands of the Palestinian Arabs and the Mexican Indians.
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ALTERNATIVE MEDIA: BETWEEN ‘CIVIL SOCIETY’ AND ‘SOCIAL MOVEMENTS’
What are the effects of these struggles between the state and social movements on the genesis,
structure, and production of ‘ethnic minority’ media?
Israeli Arab ‘Minority’ Media versus (pro-)Palestinian Media
The ‘Palestinian Arab’ alternative media networks in Israel and Palestine offer a complex
picture in the 2000s. In Israel, two kinds of ‘Arab media’ have historically coexisted (Caspi
Limor, 1999): official media for the Arabs (for instance the programs in Hebrew on the
national radio Kol Israel), and political media by the Arabs (especially the publications
produced by left-wing political organizations such as the Communist Party). Today, the media
landscape is quite narrow in terms of the variety and of distribution. Before the 1990s, the
Arab press in Israel was mainly produced by political parties (like Alatihaad, published by the
Communist party in 1944, that reached a daily circulation of 60,000 copies in 2002) or by
trades unions (like the Histadrut). Since then, a new independent and commercial press has
emerged, financed by advertisements and independent investors rather than political
organizations, even if it remains closely connected to politics. At a local level, there is also a
huge diversity of private newspapers, radios and television stations. Lastly, a new kind of
political press developed in the 1980s-1990s, an activist press published by radical
movements, such as the anti-occupation movement, linking radical Jewish or Arab Israeli
activists and left-wing Palestinian journalists and intellectuals. This typology allows us to
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establish a distinction between official or commercial ‘Arab’ media, and political or
independent ‘Palestinian’ media.
In the current academic literature, the main definitions and models of ‘alternative media’ in
Israel adopt a functionalist approach (Caspi and Limor, 1999; Peri, 2004; Katz, 2007).
Paradoxically, in these functionalist views, ‘alternative media’ seem to be politically
acceptable when their actors accept the logic of the dominant social order. The authors do not
question the fact that the definitions and delimitations of the ‘sectorial groups’ are the
historical products of work by state agents – especially in the very specific case of the Israeli
Palestinians. The Israeli authorities’ ‘offer’, in terms of the legal organization of the media
system, is analyzed as a result of a social or cultural ‘demand’. But the political offer strongly
contributes to define the social demand. There wouldn’t be such a thing as ‘Arab minority
media’ without the definition by the state itself of the so-called ‘Arab community’. This
functionalist paradigm takes for granted the existence of a ‘national cultural system’,
interpreting the proliferation of alternative or community media as nurturing or threatening it.
Asking how the Israeli national community can ‘integrate’ these ethnic minority media means
implicitly accepting the point of view of the keepers of Israeli social order. This is expressed
by Nahman Shai (the CEO of the second Authority and responsible for the regional radio
stations in Israel) in 2000: ‘so long as [the Israeli Arabs] do not declare an independent State
and do not harm Israel’s democratic foundations, they can broadcast whatever they want’
(quoted in Peri, 2004, p.276).
A quite different perspective is offered by left-wing anti-occupation Israeli or Palestinian
activists, journalists or intellectuals producing their own ‘alternative media’. According to
them, these media are part of a repertoire of contention against what they see as a
213
fundamentally unfair social order. Being radical means protesting against the legitimacy of
the mainstream Zionist paradigm, and fighting against the Israeli social, political, cultural and
military dominant order, based on the military occupation of Palestine, the illegal colonization
of the Occupied Territories, and the wall of silence surrounding the question of the Palestinian
refugees.
For instance, the Alternative Information Center (AIC) is a joint Palestinian-Israeli NGO,
founded in 1984, which ‘engages in dissemination of information, political advocacy,
grassroots activism and critical analysis of the Palestinian and Israeli societies as well as the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict’ (Warschawski, 2006). According to Michel Warschawski, one of
its co-founders – a well-known figure in the Israeli anti-colonialist movement – the AIC is
‘alternative’ in two senses (interview, 2005). First, it publishes dissenting perspectives and
critical information on issues not covered by the mainstream media in Israel and Palestine.
For instance, News From Within, launched in 1985, publishes many articles on Palestinian
political prisoners, torture in Israeli prisons, the Palestinian civil resistance, including the
women’s movement, the condition of the Jews who migrated to Israel from Arab nations, the
Israeli Peace Movement, and the expansion of settlements in the Occupied Territories. It thus
acts as a source of information for both Palestinians and Israelis on the internal evolution of
their respective societies.
But the AIC is also ‘alternative’ in the sense that it aims at constituting a common political
space and partnership for Israeli and Palestinian activists. This partnership is not mere
cooperation, but a political commitment to reinforce the National Palestinian Movement and
Israeli organizations in their concrete opposition to the occupation. This dimension is evident
214
in the numerous connections established between the AIC and left-wing movements in Israel,
the Occupied Territories, and internationally – especially the Global Social Justice movement.
However, after the ‘Oslo peace agreement’, foreign aid for Palestinian ‘citizen’ or
‘community’ media, coming from governments, NGOs or private foundations, reinforced a
paradigm promoting a more ‘independent’ and ‘professional’ press, in the name of the
‘modernization’ and ‘democratization’ of Palestinian society. Foreign promote issues like
gender equality, or ‘empowerment’ of local communities and young people. This importation
of a ‘community media paradigm’ actually contributed to deepen the distinction between
‘multicultural’, ‘integrative’, ‘democratic’, or ‘citizen’ Palestinian media, and ‘nationalist’,
‘radical’, or ‘extremist’ media. For instance, a Palestinian left-wing activist I interviewed,
who contributed to the creation of a radical media organization in 2001 (Indymedia
Palestine), became a few years later director of a ‘community’ local media center in Hebron.
He explained that he can no longer talk about the Israeli occupation, because using such a
vocabulary would threaten the international donations his organization relies on. Similarly,
during an internal meeting at the AIC, the person responsible for fundraising complained
about the fact that the organization never receives funds for their anti-occupation publications.
Another activist replied, jokingly: ‘perhaps if we say that the newspapers are published by
women and kids, we will receive funds?’ The fundraiser laughed and said: ‘yes, but we will
have to add that they are handicapped persons, poor people and refugees!’ (Ethnographic
notes, Alternative Information Center, West Bank, 2007).
Mexican Indigenous Media: Between State Control, Market Logic and Civil Society
Participation
215
The official indigenist programs in Mexico have historically used the media in order to
achieve the ‘integration’ of the indigenous communities into the nation. The INI introduced
the mass media, as well as small-scale local community media, as bridges between indigenous
and non-indigenous cultures. A national network of indigenist radio stations was implemented
with the support of the INI in 1979, which led to a process of semi-professionalization of
indigenous or ‘peasant’ radio presenters. In 1989, a program called ‘transfer of audiovisual
media to Indigenous organizations and Communities’ was launched, which, in 1994 led to the
creation of the first ‘Indigenous Media Center’. However the INI retains control over the
administration of radio and video centers.
This gave rise to struggles between official and alternative definitions of and perspectives on
‘ethnic minority media’. A first example of these struggles can be found in the negotiations
between the Mexican branch of the World Association of Community Broadcasters
(AMARC-Mexico) and the Mexican Ministry of Communication and Transports (SCT)
between 2002 and 2005. The discussions concerned the attribution of legal licences to
AMARC-Mexico’s radio network (Calleja Solis, 2005). According to AMARC, the word
‘community’ refers to a wide range of marginal, discriminated or poor ‘citizens’ groups’
within the wider national community. This means not only the indigenous communities, but
young people, women, homosexuals, peasants, workers, etc.; however, the SCT tried to
reduce the notion of ‘community’ to ‘indigenous community’ in order to avoid a proliferation
of uncontrolled minority media on the national airwaves.
A second, less-studied, example of the conflicts over the definition of ‘indigenous media’
opposed those who, like AMARC-Mexico’s ‘community media’ network, opt for a ‘citizen’
vision and a process of legalization of these media, and those who, like the Neo-Zapatista and
216
their supporters in the ‘free media’ movement, opt for an activist and radical vision. Indeed, in
the list of demands presented to the Federal Government in March 1994 during the ‘San
Cristobal dialogue’, the Neo-Zapatistas demanded ‘an indigenous radio station, independent
from state power, directed and hosted by the Indigenous people’. This claim became one of
the national demands of the EZLN. The movement wanted to include the ‘right to
information’ in the Mexican constitution. This point was included in the San Andres
Agreements in 1996, which express the need to guarantee the access of the indigenous people
to the existing means of communication, as well as their right to have at their disposal their
own communication media (point B.8.).
However, because of the Federal executive’s refusal to accomplish the San Andres
agreements, the EZLN started actively developing its own alternative media network. During
the first two years of the struggle, the international Neo-Zapatista media network was
promoted by supporters of the movement, especially in the United States and Europe. But
during the first international meeting in La Realidad (summer 1996), Marcos called for the
creation of an ‘intercontinental network of alternative communication’, following the
developments of the project in Europe and the United States. Two years later, the NeoZapatistas launched their own video production house, Promedios. In 2002, they started to
broadcast through Radio Insurgente. In addition, their supporters, especially in Mexico City,
produced pro-Zapatista media, for instance the magazine Autonomía (2003), the Critical
Network of Free Media (2004), and following the publication of the Sixth Declaration of the
Lacandon Forest, in 2005, the Zapatista’s Other Campaign called specifically for the ‘free and
alternative media’ to cover the event.
217
A polarization of the Mexican alternative media networks can be observed in the 1990-2000s,
illustrated by two events which occurred in 2006. In the first months of the year, a ‘citizen
front’ (including representatives of AMARC) protested against a law which threatened to
reinforce the monopoly of the main private television channel (Televisa). The activists
organized protests in front of the Mexican Congress to defend ‘community media’, benefiting
from the support of senators from the three main political parties. At the same time, a ‘radical
front’ led by the delegation of the Other Campaign was calling for the development of
alternative media, culture and communication, outside the institutional apparatus. In an
interview, D. I. Garcia Manquirez, the former director of AMARC Mexico considered the
importance of these ‘free media’ as insignificant compared with the long-term legal work
done by her organization, while an activist of the radical students’ Kehuelga radio stated that
rebel groups ‘don’t have to ask permission to be free’ (interviews, Mexico, 2006).
Thus, while ‘civil society media’ aim at representing and defending the interests of subaltern
groups within the framework of the existing political and media system, more ‘underground’
networks of ‘social movement media’ try to organize groups against the political and media
system as a whole. To some extent, this polarization is comparable with what we previously
observed in Israel. If ‘radical’ social movement media generally refuse to use the expression
‘minority groups’, it is because they associate the term with an institutionalized symbolic
universe in contradiction with their struggle against the dominant logic of the social order. As
a result, they tend to be excluded from the rituals of institution paradoxically aimed at ‘giving
voice to the voiceless’.
218
CONCLUSION
To conclude, the distinction between ‘civil society media’ and ‘social movement media’, to
reprise Esteve, Motta and Cox’s critical distinction (2009), gives a better understanding of the
internal and external struggles which contribute to structure ‘alternative media’ landscapes in
both cases. Following on from this, three counter-theoretical proposals can be proposed.
1. The logic of politico-bureaucratic agents, capitalist markets and mainstream media is not
‘exterior’ to alternative media. On the contrary, they can be analyzed in a socio-dynamic
perspective, studying the mutual relationships between ‘established and ‘marginal’ groups
(Elias, 1997).
2. Alternative media producers and promoters do not necessarily opt for cooperative
relationships with one another: divisions, competition and rivalry characterize their
relationships. Some organizations or individuals have relatively bigger financial, social or
symbolic resources, which enable them to gain better power positions and impose their view
on others.
3. Community, ethnic minority, alternative media do not necessarily have a democratic impact
in the public space, and can paradoxically contribute to maintaining a certain form of status
quo.
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223
Chapter 9
Sourcing and representation routines at the Black African press in the United-Kingdom.
Ola Ogunyemi
Literature notes that news is both a journalistic and organizational product and factors such as
profits, legitimacy and raw materials impact on news media’s gatekeeping process and the
distribution of their messages. Hence, sourcing routine is not just an integral professional
norm but also impacts on the diversity of sources and the representation of civil issues.
However, previous studies reveal that the deployment of sourcing routine at the mainstream
media prioritises elite sources, marginalises minority voices and maintains ideological
consistency. While its deployment at the alternative media creates its own layer of hierarchy
of non-elite sources and advances own ideological positions. Consequently, the mainstream
and alternative media entrench the marginalisation of Black and minority ethnics (BMEs) and
misrepresent them in the public sphere. This is because their sourcing routines encompass
mostly ‘…the people who reporters turn to for their information, often officials and experts
connected to society’s central institutions’ (Berkowitz, 2009, p.102). And because their news
values prioritise news stories about elite people and nations over news stories about and of
interest to the BMEs. In response, the BMEs established their own newspapers to contest
negative representations about them and to project their own perspectives on civic issues in
the public sphere.
224
However, we have little understanding of how the media for and by BMEs use sourcing and
representation routines to serve the interest and satisfy the information needs of the minority
groups, and to articulate black perspectives on public issues. Hence, this paper examines these
routines using the case study of the Africa Voice newspaper, an English language newspaper
published weekly in Brixton, London since 2001. This newspaper was chosen because it is the
most consistent in terms of publication and because it plays both the orientation and
connective roles (see Ogunyemi, forthcoming). The former refers to the portrayal of ‘the
social norms and communicative roles of the settlement country’ (Matsaganis et al, 2001,
p.58). The latter refers to ‘…connecting the immigrant to news and events in the home
country’ (Matsaganis et al, 2011, p.58). Hence, the newspaper will make an interesting case
study because it plays both roles unlike other notable London-based publications such as the
Africa Today and New African magazines which prioritise connective role.
Therefore, the study explores the research questions: does the African Voice newspaper
prioritise elite sources over ordinary sources? What are the impacts of sourcing routines on
the representation of immigration discourse? In order to answer these questions, the
researcher conducted an on-site observation of the newsroom for two weeks in August 2009
and was able to participate in editorial discussions, observe the gatekeeping process and
conduct an in-depth interview with the editor. Additional data was collated through content
and textual analysis of 32 editions of the newspaper between July 2008 and August 2009
using the coding manual attached in appendix 1.
SOURCING ROUTINES AT THE BLACK AFRICAN PRESS
225
Sources are important because they are not just potential conduit of information but can
confer credibility to news reports. Sources are available to journalists through ‘news releases,
news conferences, planned events, and leaks that can jump-start the reporting process’
(Berkowitz, 2009, p.102). However, an overreliance on elite sources can exacerbate their
influence on what journalists write about. My on-site observation of the newsroom of the
African Voice newspaper revealed that it has access to a wide spectrum of official and nonofficial channels for collating news. But its news agenda is informed by the orientation and
connective roles and this has implication for its sourcing routines. For instance, the news
agenda gives prominence to news stories that affect the black community and to official
sources who project black perspectives on public issues. Moreover, the news agenda impacts
on the distribution of stories in the newspaper. For example, stories that would make the front
page include immigration, a major event by the African diasporas which is of interest to the
UK government, businesses and investments in Africa. However, the editor argued that ‘we
balance these against general interest news. So, pages 1 – 4 are usually UK based stories, that
is, stories that affect immigrant population; pages 6 – 8 are diaspora news’1. The content
analysis also found evidence of the impact of orientation and connective roles on the
distribution of stories because the first few pages are allocated to domestic news, followed by
international news, cultural/lifestyles, gospel and sports news.
However, the on-site observation found that low newsroom budget profoundly impacts on the
rigours of the sourcing routines at the African Voice. In order to circumvent this, the reporters
monitor governmental, non-governmental and mainstream sources for story leads which are
of interest to readers and quotations which reflect black perspectives. For instance, the
226
reporters extract quotes from mainstream elite sources to inform readers about changes to
policy and to reinforce the positive contributions of Black people to the host country. The
implication is that it enhances the credibility of the stories while reducing the perception of
bias by readers. However, the implication of low newsroom budget is that it threatens the
long-term viability of the newspaper. To illustrate, the owner/editor started the publication on
a shoestring in 2001. He recalled that ‘I started with a capital of £50,000. I was aware that the
estimated starting capital for a medium of this size is £250,000, but it was an amount I could
not raise at the time’2. Moreover, he gave a breakdown of the operating costs as follows:
printing costs at £1700 per week; staffing costs at £400 per week; office space costs at £700
per month; other bills, that is, heating/electricity/council tax, at £1350 per quarter; broadband
costs at £120 per quarter; telephone costs at £350 per quarter depending on usage; website
maintenance costs at £500 per annum; and running costs of equipment at £100 per month. To
meet these costs, the editor estimates that the newspaper needs to generate £3000 weekly.
This is the equivalent of 2 full page adverts or 8 one quarter adverts. However, advertisements
are difficult to obtain because of a lack of verifiable circulation figure that is acceptable to
advertisers. Alternatively, the editor injects money from his household resources to sustain the
newspaper. But robust sourcing routines cannot be sustained on such financial uncertainty.
Consequently, the newspaper struggles to recruit and retain highly skilled staff because it
cannot afford to pay competitive salary which is between £28,000 and £30,000 in London.
Instead, it relies on four hourly paid staff, who come to the office on production days, that is,
Tuesday, Wednesday, and occasionally, on Thursday. There are two volunteers including the
editor and eight computers in the newsroom. The newspaper uses the services of four
freelance photographers, on and when needed, and they are required to file a report with their
227
pictures. The implication of staff shortage is that the editor is involved in all aspects of
production routines including newsgathering, story selection, page layout, advertising sales
and printing.
Another implication of low newsroom budget is that the sourcing routines at the newspapers
are heavily reliant on monitoring the mainstream media and press releases. But an attempt to
quantity the extent of the use of public relations and press agency copies is difficult because
these copies are usually rewritten. My enquiry on what they use them for revealed that they
are mostly used to get leads on stories, for breaking news, to monitor changes in government
policy regarding immigration and education and to monitor political and socio-economic
developments in African countries. For example, a story about Africa which emanate from
press releases was the statistics released by Sentinel that ‘ Ghana’s HIV-AIDS infection rate
has dropped for the first time in five years and is now down country wide to 3.1 percent from
3.6 percent in 2003’3. Other African related stories are sourced from press releases prepared
in ‘pdf’ (which, according to the editor, makes editing difficult) from African Embassies. But
stories about domestic issues in the UK are sourced by monitoring 50 press releases a day
from the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) and 100 press releases four days a week from the
Government News Service (GNS).
The on-site observation also gives an insight into the criteria for monitoring the mainstream
media. According to the editor, the reporters search the BBC website for news thread and to
feel the pulse of government policies and pronouncements. He noted that ‘we always look for
news thread relating to the ‘Home Office’, Central Office of information, City Hall, and
Department for International Development (DFID). The Home Office policy is very important
because what they do affect our people the most. These include in recent past immigration,
228
student visas and the point base system’4. Moreover, the reporters monitor other official
sources including the Government Network Service (GNS), which is a pool of all government
news, the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) press bureau and the Portal Wire News, but the
implication of low newsroom budget is that the newspaper cannot afford to subscribe to
Reuters. The non-official sources the reporters monitor include the Christian AID, Red Cross,
Commonwealth, Amnesty International, Refugee Council, and United Nations.
However, these sourcing routines undermine its competitive advantage because reporters are
handicapped to network and establish relationship with significant mainstream sources and to
cultivate relationship with significant sources within the black community. But the editor
dismissed this claim by arguing that the newspaper enjoys the same level of access to all
government departments as its mainstream counterparts. For example, the newspaper is able
to obtain accreditation for its freelance journalists to cover sporting events. Moreover, the
newspaper gets invitation to attend six news briefings and one conference a month, especially,
between January and March when such events are at their peak. To illustrate, he claimed that
the newspaper was invited to meet the top police officer in charge of Operation Trident
regarding ‘Stop and Search’ in locations in London. The newspaper also has regular access to
the Mayor’s Office in London and to the offices of the Opposition Parties. But he conceded
that the lack of resources impacts on the newspaper’s ability to send journalists to cover these
sources as a regular beat. So, it only sends someone when there is breaking news. For
example, when the monitoring of mainstream media uncovered the breaking news of a fire
outbreak at a 12 storey block in Camberwell, London where six people died in July, 2009, the
editor used his cultural knowledge and contacts to reach one of the victims, an undocumented
Nigerian immigrant, who was afraid to talk to the authorities because of his status. As a result,
229
the newspaper got an exclusive story about his plight. The story began with the ‘intro’ that
‘messages of condolences continued to pour in for Mr Mbet Udoaka, who lost his wife,
Helen, 34, and three week old daughter, Michelle.’5
The onsite observation revealed that the reporters achieve the newspaper’s news agenda by
selecting official sources who project black perspectives on issues. The implication of this is
that the newspaper may be perpetuating rather than reducing the exclusion of the voices of
Black and minority ethnics. However, this is mitigated by the use of cultural capital to reach
significant sources within the black community. According to Fenton (2007), ‘these
resources… also include the cultural capital associated with class, professional status and
expertise as well as the legitimacy and credibility gained through previous activities within
the political and media fields’ (Fenton, 2007, p.145). The use of cultural capital is also
common among alternative media practitioners as they privilege ‘…amateur journalists who
are writing from a position of engagement with the event to process that is their subject’
(Atton, 2007, p.75). But the reporters at the African Voice newspaper adopts cultural capital
through their contacts within the churches, restaurants, African Food Stores and organisations
representing the diaspora community such as the Central Association of Nigerians in the UK
(CANUK)6 and the Nigerians in Diaspora Organisation Europe (NIDOE)7.
The editor illustrated by stating that ‘contacts within the churches provide leads to stories as
reporters talk to relevant individuals about what is going on in the organization in which they,
their partners or someone they know works’8. This suggests that cultural capital gives a
modicum of access to significant sources within the black community. However, the extent of
the use of cultural capital is ad hoc and limited because of low newsroom budget. Hence, the
sourcing routines at the newspaper are not robust and the editorial decisions on what to cover
230
or not are heavily dependent on the availability of resources. For instance, the editor
confirmed that the newspaper ‘will not cover a story if the cost of gathering the information is
too high’9. For example, the editor recalled his attempt to send a reporter to cover the visit of
President Obama to Ghana in 2009 but was abandoned because of lack of money. However,
he adopted alternative newsgathering approach by contacting a local Ghanaian journalist to
file a report.
Overall, it is evident that the newspaper needs to generate new sources of income in order to
enhance its sourcing routines. Hence, the editor announced that he is launching 600
newspaper dispenser bins to start a free distribution around London. This means that the print
run will increase from 25,000 copies to 75,000 copies weekly. The former quantity will
continue to be sold in newsagents and other outlets while the latter quantity will be distributed
free in train stations around London. However, it is pertinent to note that this initiative is also
driven by the competitive media market and the need for the newspaper to retain its market
share. Therefore, the major challenge for the newspaper is how to attract more advertisement
to sustain the increase in the print run, to provide a verifiable weekly circulation figure and to
invest in the newsroom.
DIVERSITY OF SOURCES IN AFRICAN VOICE: A QUANTITATIVE DATA ANALYSIS
This section explores whether the African Voice newspaper also follows the trend in the
mainstream media of prioritising elite sources over ordinary sources. One of the consequences
of that, identified in literature, is that the reliance on elite sources marginalises the voices of
231
Black and ethnic minorities in the public sphere. Hence, Natalie Fenton (2007) argued that the
mainstream media are of very limited value in empowering marginalised, oppressed or
exploited sectors of society...’ (Fenton, 2007, p.147). Another consequence of overusing elite
sources is that it can reinforce mainstream ideological positions. But the expectation of this
analysis is that the African Voice newspaper will subvert this trend by giving black ‘people a
voice to either publicly affirm ‘true’ discourses or alternatively challenge ‘false’ discourses
and attempt to replace them with other discursive formations’ (Balnaves et al, 2009, p.201) .
Therefore, the analysis in table 6 reveals that the African Voice newspaper quoted African
elite sources at 32.8 per cent as representatives of international institutions. For example,
there was a story on the announcement by the former President of Nigeria, Yar’Adua, that
‘Nigeria has recovered $3.4 billion of government funds over the last year’10 as part of the
anti-corruption campaign. And another was the appeal by the Kenya’s Prime Minster’s, Raila
Odinga, to ‘…world leaders to urgently address the Somalia crisis to salvage the troubled
country from the brink of total collapse’11. These suggest that Black people are used as
subjects rather than objects of stories in the coverage of international news and that the
newspaper plays a connective role.
Table 6: Elite and ordinary sources in the African Voice newspaper
Elite Sources
International
32.8 %
institutions
Public institutions 13.8 %
Politicians
12 %
Mainstream
media
Intellectuals with
6%
5.4 %
Ordinary Sources
3.7 %
Religious
organizations
Citizens
Voluntary
organizations
Campaigns and
activists
Interest communities
232
3.5 %
3.1 %
2.9 %
2.8 %
social concerns
Private
institutions
Police
Institutional
intellectuals
Total
2.1 %
1.6 %
and their members
Social formations and 2.2 %
their members
Alternative media
1.9 %
Refugees
0.9 %
78.2 %
Total
4.5 %
21 %
However, the newspaper seems to rely more on mainstream elite sources in the coverage of
political, legal and educational institutions in the UK. Hence, the mainstream elite sources are
distributed as follows: 13.8 per cent cites representatives of public institutions, 12 per cent
cites politicians, 6.0 per cent cites the mainstream media, 5.4 per cent cites intellectuals with
social concerns, 4.5 per cent cites representatives of private institutions, 2.1 per cent cites the
police and 1.6 per cent cites institutional intellectuals. An example of politicians as sources is
the announcement to allay fears about the ID card scheme by the Home Secretary, Jacqui
Smith, that it ‘will help protect against identity fraud and multiple identities’12. And an
example of sources from the institutional intellectuals is the appeal by the UK chief Medical
Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson ‘for urgent investigation into acts of racism concerning ethnic
doctors in the NHS’13. These suggest that the newspaper uses mainstream elite sources to
fulfil its orientation role and that it tries to maintain a balance between the connective and
orientation roles. This is significant because previous research found that ‘residents reported
higher levels of belonging to their new community when newspapers told stories about that
community in addition to providing home country news’ (Matsaganis et al, 2001, p.59).
In contrast, the analysis reveals that the newspaper gives less prominence to ordinary sources.
The top three ordinary sources cite representatives of religious organisations at 3.7 per cent,
citizens at 3.5 per cent and voluntary organisations at 3.1 per cent. An example of sources
233
from the religious organisations is the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, who was
quoted that ‘I congratulate the Sickle Cell Society sincerely as it celebrates World Sickle Cell
Day. Their work has been invaluable in providing better care and tackling serious health
inequalities in the UK’14. An example of sources from the citizens is the mother of Samantha
Orobator, the Nigerian born British girl, arrested over the trafficking of heroin into Laos, who
was quoted that ‘the family are still puzzled over ownership of the unborn child’15. While an
example of sources from the voluntary organisations is the quotation of the members of the
Mental Health and Criminal Justice Third Sector Forum, who ‘voiced their concerns that
police stations are still widely being used as ‘places of safety’ for people who appear to need
emergency mental health care’16.
The coverage of interest communities and their members gives an indication of how the
newspaper highlights the positive contributions of Black people to the host country. An
example is the front page story that ‘a black Briton who has dedicated his career to the
promotion of equality and diversity has been named Civil Servant of the Year 2008’17. The
story explains that ‘the 44 year old was given the highly exalted award at the GG’ Leadership
and Diversity Awards night on Tuesday (18th September) for successfully engaging with
diverse communities as police advisor on knife crime’18. The construction of this story reveals
how the newspaper contradicts the stereotypes that black youths are obsessed with knives and
out of control of their parents and society.
The high level of sources from the representatives of religious organisations reflects the news
agenda to portray the religious values of readers. The analysis found that the newspaper
devotes a regular column to ‘gospel’, usually written by a pastor. For example, one feature
exhort readers to continue to do good by stating ‘my friend, there are lots of people who have
234
been disappointed, abused or misled and are going through bitterness and pain right now.
There are people who are dying emotionally, mentally, physically, financially or spiritually
and they are waiting for you to come along and rescue them’19. According to the editor, the
reason for the regular gospel column is that ‘religion is a strong identity of our people that the
newspaper cannot ignore. This distinguishes us from the mainstream press which hardly
feature such stories. Our news selection ties in with the culture and religion of our people. For
instance, our people own many churches and have deep affiliation with religion. The church is
also a strong part of their Sunday activities, starting from 8am to 6pm’20. But significantly, the
findings suggest that elite sources are used to enhance the credibility of the connective and
orientation roles of the newspaper. Hence, the newspaper conforms with the mainstream
sourcing routines by regarding sources close to the government as more credible. As a result,
one can conclude that its sourcing routines are elitist and ‘…hierarchically structured as those
for the mainstream media’ (Atton & Wickenhen 2005, p.350).
A relevant observation during the coding was that sources are dominated by male gender.
This has been attributed in literature to the domination of male gender in the newsroom. The
onsite observation of the newsroom of the African Voice newspaper reveals that there are only
two female staff members and their role is more gender specific. For instance, one part-time
female staff member writes the fashion column and the other volunteer female staff member
writes the arts column. The implication is that they are not involved in the selection of sources
and stories across a range of topics covered by the newspaper. It also has implication for the
readership profile as anecdotal statistic given by the editor indicates that the newspaper
appeals to more male than female readers. However, the editor argued that ‘the newspaper
runs interviews and writes report to inspire the members of the black community, but we
235
found that we easily access the male personality. We are now making conscious efforts to
achieve gender balance in our reporting. For instance, we have introduced a two spread
fashion page to capture more female readers and sources’21. But this line of thinking seems to
miss the point as it reinforces the stereotype that women are more interested in entertainment
news.
Overall, the editor recognised that the prominence given to elite sources does not help the
newspaper to reduce the marginalisation of Black and ethnic minorities in the public sphere.
But he explained that the newspaper is determined to redress the situation by stating: ‘we
deliberately look for minority sources because we want to give them a voice. We want the
newspaper to be a forum for them to ‘Have their Say’. If the story is about policing for
instance, the newspaper will call the Black Police Association for a quote. Such relationship
has helped to make them indentify with our newspaper. It is only when we cannot find an
ethnic opinion on the subject that we use mainstream sources’22. However, the economic
challenge may undermine efforts to expand the diversity of sources and build a network of
contacts within the black community.
THE IMPACT OF SOURCING ROUTINES
This section examines the impact of sourcing routines on the representation of issues of
concern to the black community through a case study of the coverage of immigration in the
African Voice newspaper. Immigration issue was chosen because it is polemic and previous
studies have noted that some sections of the mainstream press negatively stereotype
236
immigrants without making distinction between migrants, sojourners and refugees.
Consequently, ‘inaccurate terminology and commentary has increased confusion and that
breeds prejudice’23. In terms of definition, a migrant ‘is any person who moves from one
country to live in another one’ (Matsaganis et al, 2011, p.52). A sojourner ‘is a migrant who
only intends to spend a short time in the new country’ (ibid). And refugees are ‘people who
are outside their country of origin and whose life and, or human rights are seriously at risk
because of who they are… and what they believe… and their government will not or cannot
protect them’24. From this perspective, the representation of immigration is contested in the
public sphere because ‘representations have the power to select, arrange and prioritize certain
assumptions and ideas about different kinds of people, bringing some to the fore, dramatizing
and idealizing or demonizing them, while casting others into social margins, so that they have
little active public presence or only a narrow and negative public image’ (Pickering, 2001,
p.xiii).
The textual analysis revealed that the African Voice newspaper uses sourcing routines to
contest the negative stereotypes of Black people in the immigration discourse. For instance, in
contrasting the portrayal of immigrants as a problem in some sections of the mainstream press
which has been criticised for promoting ‘…racism and xenophobia’25, the editor of the
African Voice argued that ‘the UK is a country of immigrants and it should be sympathetic to
the plight of immigrants some of whom are fleeing persecution’26. He added that instead of
demonizing them, ‘they should be helped to be properly integrated into the society and to
become employer of labour or to apply their expertise’27. Previous studies also showed that
the negative stereotypes of immigrants permeate other public discourses. For instance, in
relation to jobs, immigrants are portrayed as economic migrants who have come to take up
237
jobs meant for the indigenes. In relation to health, immigrants are portrayed as health tourists.
In relation to population, immigrants are portrayed as putting pressure on the welfare system.
In relation to housing, immigrants are portrayed as jumping the housing queues. While in
relation to crime, immigrants are portrayed as criminals and terror suspects (Alia & Bull,
2005, p.25-27). The implication is that public attitudes towards immigrants are frosty at best
and violent at worst because ‘the media was an important factor in forming people's opinions
on asylum and immigration…’28.
The onsite observation of the newsroom revealed that the African Voice newspaper gathers
information about immigration from governmental, non-governmental and media sources.
The governmental sources include the Home Office, Central Office of information, City Hall,
Metropolitan Police Service, UK Border Agency and London Boroughs. The nongovernmental sources include the Human Rights Watch, Equality and Human Rights
Commission, and Migration Watch UK. And the media sources include the BBC and the
national mainstream press. This suggests that the newspaper has access to the same sources as
its mainstream counterparts. The reasons for using these sources are because they contribute
diverse perspectives to the immigration discourse and have the power to influence the news
agenda. Hence, the challenge for the African Voice is to select the perspectives that most
reflect the positions of the black community on the issue.
The researcher conducted a content analysis of 32 editions of the newspaper in order to gain
an insight into how the selected perspectives reflect not only the positions of the readers but
also inform them about the implications of immigration policy for their everyday lives. The
analysis found 56 stories on immigration out of which 47 are about immigrants in the UK and
the close textual analysis revealed that the representation is more positive than negative. This
238
suggests that the newspaper conforms with the NUJ guidelines that ‘most migrants are skilled
workers and professionals who contribute to the economy and diversity of the United
Kingdom and Ireland. Immigrants, for instance, constitute a significant percentage of nurses,
doctors and pharmacists and have been recruited to make up for shortages in the UK’29. And
also conforms with the NUJ guidelines that asylum-seekers ‘have a right to seek a safe haven
without further victimisation and stigmatisation as guaranteed by international law to which
the United Kingdom and Ireland are signatories’30.
The textual analysis revealed that the newspaper gives prominence to the positive
contributions of immigrants. For example, it critiqued the introduction of the Australian-style
point by citing the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) that ‘discussion about local
impacts of immigration tend to focus on issues such as public services and wages, neglecting
the many positive contributions that immigrants bring to the local economies31. In the above
example, the newspaper used the IPPR as a credible voice to project black perspectives. The
newspaper also uses elite sources as a credible voice as evident in a story based on the
communiqué from the Speaker’s Conference, a committee set up to consider ways of making
the Commons more representative, which urged black people to join political parties and
become a candidate to ‘replace some 89 MPs who have said they are standing down, many as
a result of the expenses scandal’32. The newspaper quoted the Conference vice chairwoman,
Anne Begg (Labour MP, Aberdeen South) that ‘despite recent change. MPs remain
predominantly white, male, middle-aged and middle-class’33. And it also quoted Ms Harman,
MP, that ‘our local democracy needs to be fully representative – but its not. It lacks the voice
of Black and Asian women at a local level’34. The implication of quoting these elite sources is
that it gives credibility to the perspectives and also gives the black community a sense of
239
belonging in the knowledge that some mainstream official sources share and express similar
views.
The newspaper also uses elite sources to inform readers about changes to the immigration
policy as evident when the government muted the introduction of ID card. For example, it
quoted the former Home Secretary, David Blunkett, that ‘the government should introduce
mandatory biometric passports as an alternative’35. This perspective aligns with the position
of the black community which sees the introduction of ID as a ‘…mythical identity
database’36. The newspaper’s editorial also criticised the ID scheme by noting that ‘in 15 EU
countries where the ID card has been introduced, there is no evidence that identity fraud and
immigration rackets have been nipped in the bud. The ID card is billed to consume a
staggering £18 billion’37. However, the analysis revealed that the newspaper is more reactive
than proactive with regards to the immigration discourse as the stories are a response to
government policies.
A reactive approach is evident in the story which counters the myth that immigrants jump the
housing queues and are displacing or competing with British citizens for council housing. The
newspaper quoted an authoritative Third Sector, the Equality and Human Rights Commission
(EHRC), that ‘less than two percent of all social housing residents are people who have
moved to Britain in the last five years and that nine out of ten people who live in social
housing were born in the UK’38. This perspective aligns with the position of the black
community that the BMEs are not reliant on the welfare state. In another instance, the
newspaper used authoritative voices from the academia to project black perspectives on the
unfairness of the new immigrant rules. For example, it republished a letter in the Guardian
newspaper by some academics in which they threaten to boycott the new student immigrant
240
rules because ‘it is becoming increasingly apparent that members of staff in universities and
colleges are being drawn into a role of policing immigration’39. This perspective is significant
because the new policy threatens the most popular legal migration route to the UK for Black
Africans.
Overall, the analysis found that the newspaper quoted mainstream sources in all stories on
immigration and that these sources are used to either reflect black perspectives or to inform
readers about the implications of the immigration policy. The editor highlighted two reasons
for this. First, ‘the newspaper is sympathetic to issues such as immigration and Asylum. We
highlight their concerns and write from their point of view in order to inform policy’40.
Second, ‘the newspaper has a duty to address the human rights of immigrants in the UK’41.
From this perspective, the findings show that the prominence given to immigration conforms
with the newspaper’s news agenda of educating immigrants not only about changes in
government policies but also about their rights and obligations.
CONCLUSION
The study sets out to determine whether the African Voice newspaper replicates or subverts
the sourcing routines at the mainstream media. However, it found that the newspaper
replicates the sourcing routines of its mainstream counterparts by monitoring the same official
channels. The reasons for conforming are manifolds. First, elite sources are regarded as
credible and authoritative. Therefore, using them confer legitimacy, professionalism and
credibility on the newspaper. Second, it is cost effective in terms of newsgathering and
241
network contacts because ‘news media develop standard routines in response to three kinds of
uncertainty: over profits, legitimacy and raw materials’ (Becker and Vlad, 2009, p.69). The
implication is that it also prioritises elite sources over ordinary sources which could
exacerbate the marginalisation of the BMEs in the public sphere. However, the editor’s
interpretation of the news agenda suggests that the BMEs may not be fixated on hearing their
own voices, rather they are more concerned about the lack of diverse perspectives on the issue
in the mainstream media. Moreover, the articulation of the news agenda suggests that ‘black
reporters understood the need for an unbiased depiction of blacks and other minorities in the
news, and realized that mainstream media had failed at supplying that need’ (Osondu, 2006,
p.26).
From this perspective, the newspaper differentiates its representation of immigration through
eclectic selection of quotations from elite sources which reflect black perspectives. Moreover,
it differentiates its representation by repositioning the discourse within the contest of human
rights, law, racism, jobs and cultural diversity. Hence, the sourcing routines at the black
African press are geared towards meeting the news agenda of serving the interests of readers,
of being informative and of providing alternative perspectives on issues of concern to the
black community.
NOTES
1.
Abiola, Mike (2009) Editor, African Voice. Interviewed in August.
2.
Abiola, Mike (2009) Editor, African Voice. Interviewed in August.
242
3.
African Voice, ‘HIV infection drop for the first time’, 14 – 20 August, 2009, p.17.
4.
Abiola, Mike (2009) Editor, African Voice. Interviewed in August.
5.
African Voice, (2009) Nigerians sympathise with widower, 10 – 16 July, p. 7.
6.
Central
Association
of
Nigerians
in
the
UK.
Available
at:
http://www.canuk.org.uk/53/index.html
7.
Nigerians
in
Diaspora
Organisation
Europe.
Available
at:
http://www.nidoeurope.org/
8.
Abiola, Mike (2009) Editor, African Voice. Interviewed in August.
9.
Abiola, Mike (2009) Editor, African Voice. Interviewed in August.
10.
African Voice, (2008) Nigeria recovers ‘graft billions’, 10 – 16 October, p. 3.
11.
African Voice, (2009) Kenya PM calls on international community to intervene in
Somalia, 26 June – 2 July, p. 17.
12.
African Voice, (2008) Foreign nationals to carry ID from November, 3 – 9
October, p. 1.
13.
African Voice, (2008) BME Doctors suffer racism, 18 – 24 July, p. 1.
14.
African Voice, (2009) UK marks World Sickle Cell Day, 26 June – 2 July, p.1.
15.
African Voice, (2009) Samantha: Who owns the child? 15 – 21 May, p.1.
16.
African Voice, (2008) Many black people with mental health problems held at
police stations, 03 – 09 October, p.3.
17.
African Voice, (2008) Black crime expert scoops national award, 19 – 25
September, p. 1.
18.
African Voice, (2008) Black crime expert scoops national award, 19 – 25
September, p. 1.
243
19.
Adekoya M (2009) Do you care? African Voice, 14 – 20 August, p. 16.
20.
Abiola, Mike (2009) Editor, African Voice. Interviewed in August.
21.
Abiola, Mike (2009) Editor, African Voice. Interviewed in August.
22.
Abiola, Mike (2009) Editor, African Voice. Interviewed in August.
23.
NUJ
Race
Reporting
Guidelines.
Available
at:
Guidelines.
Available
at:
Guidelines.
Available
at:
http://www.nuj.org.uk/innerPagenuj.html?docid=1265
24.
NUJ
Race
Reporting
http://www.nuj.org.uk/innerPagenuj.html?docid=1265
25.
NUJ
Race
Reporting
http://www.nuj.org.uk/innerPagenuj.html?docid=1265
26.
Abiola, Mike (2009) Editor, African Voice. Interviewed in August.
27.
Abiola, Mike (2009) Editor, African Voice. Interviewed in August.
28.
NUJ
Race
Reporting
Guidelines.
Available
at:
Guidelines.
Available
at:
Guidelines.
Available
at:
http://www.nuj.org.uk/innerPagenuj.html?docid=1265
29.
NUJ
Race
Reporting
http://www.nuj.org.uk/innerPagenuj.html?docid=1265
30.
NUJ
Race
Reporting
http://www.nuj.org.uk/innerPagenuj.html?docid=1265
31.
African Voice, (2008) Net tightens for black migrants, 12 – 18 September, p.1.
32.
African Voice, (2009) Call for ethnic minority MPs, 17 – 23 July, p. 1.
33.
African Voice, (2009) Call for ethnic minority MPs, 17 – 23 July, p. 1.
34.
African Voice, (2009) Call for ethnic minority MPs, 17 – 23 July, p. 4.
35.
African Voice, (2009) Scarp the ID card, 1 – 7 May, p. 1.
244
36.
African Voice, (2009) Scarp the ID card, 1 – 7 May, p. 4.
37.
African Voice, (2009) Editorial - ID should be scrapped, 1 – 7 May, p. 6.
38.
African Voice, (2009) Migrants do not get priority in council housing, 10 – 16
July, p. 2.
39.
African Voice, (2009) Academics to boycott new student immigration rules, 15 –
21 May, p. 2.
40.
Abiola, Mike (2009) Editor, African Voice. Interviewed in August.
41.
Abiola, Mike (2009) Editor, African Voice. Interviewed in August.
REFERENCES
Alia V. and Bull S. (2005) Media and ethnic minorities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press).
Atton C. (2007) ‘Alternative media in practice’ in K. Coyer, T. Dowmount and A. Fountain
(eds) The alternative media handbook (London: Routledge), p.71-7.
Atton C. and Wickenden E. (2005) ‘Sourcing routines and representation in alternative
journalism: a case study approach’, Journalism Studies, 6(3), p.347-59.
Balnaves M., Hemelryk D. S. and Shoesmith B. (2009) Media Theories and Approaches. A
global perspective (London: Palgrave Macmillan).
Becker L. B. and Vlad T. (2009) ‘News organizations and routines’ in K. Wahl-Jorgensen and
T. Hanitzsch (eds) The Handbook of Journalism Studies (New York: Routledge), p.59-72.
245
Berkowitz D. A. (2009) ‘Reporters and their sources’, in K. Wahl-Jorgensen and T.Hanitzsch
(eds) The Handbook of Journalism Studies (New York: Routledge), p.102-15.
Fenton N. (2007) ‘Getting alternative messages in mainstream media’ in K. Coyer, T.
Dowmount and A. Fountain (eds) The alternative media handbook (London: Routledge),
p.143-54.
Pickering M. (2001) Stereotyping: The politics of representation (Houndsmills: Palgrave).
Matsaganis M. D., Katz V. S. and Ball-Rokeach S. J. (2011) Understanding Ethnic Media.
Producers, Consumers and Societies (Los Angeles: Sage).
Ogunyemi O. (forthcoming) Media of African diasporas: Production, content and audiences
(Wales: Edwin Mellen Press Ltd).
Osondu S. (2006) ‘Black Press, White Media, and Black Reporters: How can we coexist’, The
York Scholar, 3, p.24-32.
APPENDIX
Appendix 1: Coding Manual for Content Analysis
Elite sources
Politicians and political parties
Public institutions and their
representatives
Ordinary sources
Interest communities and their members
Social formations and their members –
for example the Nigeria Diasporas in
Europe (NDIE), Women of African
Organization
Police and Metropolitan Press Service
Campaigns and activist – for example,
Anti-Apartheid Movement, Human
Rights Watch
Institutional intellectual – academics
Voluntary organisations – for example,
whose work remains within the bounds of OXFAM, Sickle Cell Society
246
the academy
Intellectuals with social concerns –
Refugee stories and sources
academic that may work within the
academy but who also use their work for
political activism
Private institutions including corporations Citizens – as subject of stories, victims,
and so on
International institutions – for example,
Religious bodies and features
Foreign governments, IMF, UN, African
Union
Mainstream media – Reuters, AFP, New Alternative media – PANA, African
York Time, BBC, Le Figaro, and so on
Business Magazine, News Agency,
Sahara Reporters, South African Press
Association, Ghana Chronicle, and so on
247
248