Digital Unsettling: Decoloniality and Dispossession in the Age of Social Media(Critical Cultural Communication)

How digital networks are positioned within the enduring structures of coloniality The revolutionary aspirations that fueled decolonization circulated on paper—as pamphlets, leaflets, handbills, and brochures. Now—as evidenced by movements from the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter—revolutions, protests, and political dissidence are profoundly shaped by information circulating through digital networks. Digital Unsettling is a critical exploration of digitalization that puts contemporary "decolonizing" movements into conversation with theorizations of digital communication. Sahana Udupa and Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan interrogate the forms, forces, and processes that have reinforced neocolonial relations within contemporary digital environments, at a time when digital networks—and the agendas and actions they proffer—have unsettled entrenched hierarchies in unforeseen ways. Digital Unsettling examines events—the toppling of statues in the UK, the proliferation of #BLM activism globally, the rise of Hindu nationalists in North America, the trolling of academics, among others—and how they circulated online and across national boundaries. In doing so, Udupa and Dattatreyan demonstrate how the internet has become the key site for an invigorated anticolonial internationalism, but has simultaneously augmented conditions of racial hierarchy within nations, in the international order, and in the liminal spaces that shape human migration and the lives of those that are on the move. Digital Unsettling establishes a critical framework for placing digitalization within the longue durée of coloniality, while also revealing the complex ways in which the internet is entwined with persistent global calls for decolonization.

About the Author :
Sahana Udupa (Author) Sahana Udupa is Professor of Media Anthropology at LMU Munich. She is the author of Making News in Global India: Media, Publics, Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and co-editor of Digital Hate: The Global Conjuncture of Extreme Speech (Indiana University Press, 2021). Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan (Author) Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths University. He is the author of The Globally Familiar: Digital Hip Hop, Masculinity, and Urban Space in Delhi (2020).

Review :
"A timely and provocative contribution to debates about the contemporary digital environment, making a novel and important contribution to our understanding of digital media, power, and global society." (Herman Wasserman, Stellenbosch University) "Masterfully excavates the complex affective, material, discursive, and cultural dynamics that allow social media platforms to function both as inspiration for anti-oppressive/resistive political possibility and as technologized refinement of more classic attempts at expropriation, extraction and colonialist exploitation. This thoughtful and decidedly teachable book by Udupa and Dattatreyan challenges our pat and simplistic understandings of what the digital can do, how it might rewardingly be studied, and what its varied popular and scholarly deployments tell us about the past's ongoing influence on our increasingly digitized present." (John L. Jackson, Jr., Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania) "Starting with the digital as a relation rather than an object of study, Udupa and Dattatreyan's Digital Unsettling takes us on a riveting journey through the spaces of radical transformation and historical continuity in the story of media, place, and power. This book commands a truly global vision of how digitality unseats extant forms of coloniality and at the same time disappoints naive hopes for democratic action." (Sareeta Amrute, University of Washington) "Offers a kaleidoscopic analysis of the many ways digital media call contemporary iterations of eocoloniality into question. Exploring an impressive variety of subjects, Udupa and Dattatreyan present a richly textured and forcefully argued corrective to so many of the colonizing impulses of our contemporary, digitally mediated society. Their reflexively collaborative methods and prose style offer fresh and interdisciplinary perspectives on important and timely questions. An intelligent, galvanizing read that will appeal to scholars across a wide range of fields." (Evan Elkins, author of Locked Out: Regional Restrictions in Digital Entertainment Culture)