Postcolonial media theory

The artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena recently commented that in discussions of electronic media “twenty years of post-colonial theory simply disappear.”1 He was referring to the large and influential body of work known as postcolonial studies, which for the past two decades has been notoriously absent from electronic media practice, theory, and criticism. This absence is not due to the lack of theory in the field, as there has always been theoretically based writing about electronic media. Much of the early work was based on the theories of Marshall McLuhan and other utopians characterized as “inebriated with the potential of new technology.”