2023 Dallas Smythe Memorial Lecture

Wednesday, March 8 | 7:00 to 8:30 p.m. Vancouver Time | Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema, SFU Woodwards

The Dallas Smythe Memorial Lecture has honoured critical scholars in the field of political economy of communications since 1993. Organized by SFU’s School of Communication, the lecture brings together faculty, students and the broader community to honour the work and research of Dallas Smythe, who taught at SFU from 1976 until he passed away in 1992.

This year's lecture features Paula Chakravartty, James Weldon Johnson Professor and Associate Professor, Department of Media, Culture and Communication and the Gallatin School, NYU.

Abstract: Early in Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1963), he writes of the “ruling species” or the “outsider from elsewhere” which governs through violence, allowing us to think differently about how racial violence shapes our theories of the political, undergirding contemporary debates about media, democracy and freedom itself. We have to recognize that theories of “free” commercial media and “objective journalism” were themselves forged in the mid-twentieth century in the context of the “three-sided conflict of the Cold War” (Tully, 2021: 24). This includes the most under-theorized of the three sites for media studies scholars today: the site of decolonization and self-determination. In foregrounding the era of decolonization, we stretch our analysis to trace the colonial and racial continuities of media infrastructures as superstructures, as Fanon suggests, recalibrating our discussions of the scourge of disinformation as simply a right-wing aberration to our shared “enlightenment values’. My presentation will focus on a series of transformative US political interventions beginning with Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in the 1960s, and finally Chile in the 1970s. Recognizing the truncated role of US commercial “free” media infrastructures and its formative and contradictory power in maintaining the global color line through the Cold War is vital to how we theorize media and democracy in the 21st century. My attempt to find a common thread across these four geographically dispersed sites of U.S. intervention against democratic anti-colonial self-determination, is meant to provoke critical analyses of the 20th century “gift of commercial free media” designed and deployed by the “ruling species” towards racial subaltern populations.

After the lecture, there will be a reception with light refreshments.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

SFU Woodward's Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema, 149 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, Canada