Provincializing Hegemonic Histories of Media and Communication Studies: Toward a Genealogy of Epistemic Resistance in Africa

In the late 1990s and 2000s, a number of calls were made by scholars to 'internationalize' or 'dewesternize' the field of media and communication studies. I argue that these approaches have indirectly silenced a much longer disciplinary history outside 'the West' that has not only produced empirical knowledge but has also actively challenged Western epistemologies. The growing concern in 'the West' with the rising power of the global South may lead scholars in the North American and European academy to listen more attentively to the perspectives of their colleagues, and could offer scholars in the global South an opportunity to simultaneously 'provincialize' Northern perspectives while theorizing what the field looks like from the vantage point of the global South