Postcolonial Media Studies
New Book Series from Rutgers University Press
This series aims to publish manuscripts that employ postcolonial theoretical frameworks to examine
contemporary and past media and technology practices and cultures. It also plans to publish
manuscripts that use critical media and technology theoretical frameworks to examine contemporary
and historical logics of colonialism (including resistances to it) and of nationalisms and
postcolonial cultures, especially, but not only, in the global south (which is understood not
through a hemispheric logic but as sites that have a history of colonial dispossession).
In doing so, this series aims to forge a conversation between postcolonial and media studies that
has been, with a few exceptions, sorely missing in academic circles. Such a conversation is
urgently needed because the politics of colonialism, especially today (but also in the past) as
well as its iterations in various forms of nationalisms and global inequalities, are enabled
through mediated and technologized logics and structures that dominate our times. Yet, less is
known about the role of media and technology in enabling colonialisms and nationalisms even though
media and technology scholars for some time have engaged the postcolonial.
The idea for this series emerges from a recognition that no conversation on colonialism and postcolonial nationalisms can
elide the power of media and technology in organizing, enabling, and representing colonial
formations and nationalist structures in the politics of postcoloniality. Thus, how the
"postcolonial" and the medial are entangled needs sustained attention if postcolonial studies is to
be more relevant to our times.
This series thus seeks to expand and advance the epistemic frameworks of both postcolonial studies
(primarily dominated by theories from literary studies) and media/critical technology studies
(primarily dominated by western centric/global north frameworks). The series embraces an expansive
view of media; it acknowledges traditional forms but also recognizes that what counts as media, and
how something functions as media, cannot be known in advance. Thus, it eschews a stable and fixed
understanding of media, and in using the term "media," the series includes technology as well.
While the series is open to all forms of media, it is especially interested in nonrepresentational
foci on media that can address media's materialities, broadly conceived. The series further wishes
to engage media forms and practices that have typically not been considered as media in dominant
media studies, and it welcomes postcolonial engagements with media from diverse disciplines.
Using the term "postcolonial" in the series title is not meant to imply that we are living in a
time "after" colonialism-a critique that has wrongly been leveled at postcolonial studies. Rather,
conceptually "postcolonial" here is meant to invoke a resistance to or a critique of colonialism
and to envision logics of living beyond colonialisms even if that seems impossible.
The series aims to publish books that are in conversation with, and draw on, theories and frameworks in
postcolonial studies by complicating and advancing their scope and frames in ways that open up new
possibilities for rethinking the postcolonial, when seen through the lens of media and technology.
It should be emphasized that this book series does not aim to fall within the "decolonial"
tradition. While the underlying political goal of this series overlaps with the decolonial
tradition, the decolonial tradition is significantly different, especially in its emphasis on
"delinking" from Euro/Anglo modernities-an emphasis that has the potential to lapse into nativism
or ethnonationalism, and that can obscure the reality of entanglements between the colonial and the
postcolony.In the tradition of postcolonial studies, this series is instead focused on analyzing and examining the various functionings of colonial modernities (including non-Euro/Anglo colonial modernities) and national modernities in various postcolonies. It is primarily committed to advancing media studies and postcolonial studies; thus, works must demonstrate significant engagement
with postcolonial theory in their involvement with media.
While postcolonial studies typically has had a South Asia focus, this series-while welcoming
scholarship from and on South Asia-is also interested in expanding the scope of the postcolonial
and thus welcomes work that engages diverse post/colonial contexts such as, but not limited to,
Africa, the Caribbean, Palestine, postcolonial Latin America (including Cuba), Hong Kong,
Afghanistan, Central Asia and the Post Soviet.
The series is open to diverse methodologies. Manuscripts that attend to the entanglement of
multiple axes of power-such as gender, sexuality, cisgenderism, class, caste, religion, and
ability-in exploring connections between media/technology and colonialisms/nationalisms/the
postcolony are especially attractive to this series. Additionally, manuscripts that engage the
planetary are also welcome.
The series welcomes both research monographs and edited collections and is open to books that are
empirically and contextually situated and informed by rich theorizing, as well as wholly
theoretical works.
Series Editor, Raka Shome is a professor and Harron Family Endowed Chair of Communication at
Villanova University. She has published widely in postcolonial, media, and cultural studies. She is
the author of Cleansing the Nation: India, the Hindu Modern and Mediations of Gender (Duke
University Press, 2025) and Diana and Beyond: White femininity, National identity and Contemporary
Media Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2014). Shome has played a pioneering role in
communication and media studies by bringing postcolonial frameworks into examinations of media
cultures, and media/communication studies. Shome is an elected Fellow of the International
Communication Association and has been named a 'Distinguished Scholar' of National Communication
Association. She has won several awards for her research including most recently the Teresa Award
for the Advancement of Feminist Scholarship in Communication Studies from International
Communication Association. Prior to her current position, she also held full time faculty
appointments at University of Washington, Arizona State University, London School of Economics and
Political Science and served as a Visiting Fellow at National University of Singapore. She has
delivered several keynotes, plenary and named lectures in the USA and globally.
Inaugural Editorial Board
Kajri Jain, University of Toronto.
Purnima Mankekar, University of California-Los Angeles.
Rahul Mukherjee, University of Pennsylvania.
Madhavi Murty, University of California-Santa Cruz.
Roopika Risam, Dartmouth College.
P. Thirumal, University of Hyderabad.
Wendy Willems, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Prospective authors are invited to first send a one-page abstract of the book to editorial director
reviewing the abstracts and determining their fit with the series goals, an invitation will be made
to submit a full proposal. Full proposals should be submitted to Nicole Solano. You can find
proposal guidelines on the Rutgers