Racial Entanglements: Postcolonial Belonging and Media in the Global City

In many contemporary societies over the world, postcolonial racism has perpetuated the pernicious idea of racial superiority through cultural difference. Racial Entanglements spotlights the centrality of the media in the ensuing contestations about superiority and difference that individuals from the non-West and Global South find themselves locked in. Jason Vincent A. Cabañes unpacks how these individuals draw on both legacy and digital media to impose on each other their diverse racialized social hierarchies.

Synthesizing qualitative studies conducted over fifteen years, the book uses a transnational lens to trace the flow and flux of postcolonial racism as it is mediated in three distinct but interconnected global cities: Manila, Singapore, and London. It examines the role of the media in the rise of a postcolonial belonging that not only reinforces colonially inflected social and territorial boundaries, but also entrenches the privileging of Whiteness. It then draws on existing initiatives to begin imagining how media might instead be harnessed towards a more solidaristic belonging that recognizes the intrinsic and entwined value of all humans, migrants and minorities included.

Challenging the Western-centric framing of extant works on media and multiculturalism, Racial Entanglements foregrounds the entwined quality of global cities across the world to theorize how legacy and digital media circulate and reconfigure postcolonial racism.