UWI, November 2, 2020
Introduction
Now that you have an idea of who I am. I think it would be
important to understand who I am not. I am not an academic. My lifetime of reading
and exploring has never explicitly focused on cultural linguistics as a
discrete discipline to apply to the Caribbean or West Indian condition.
Even as a media practitioner – and I am first and foremost
a journalist, a reporter – I have spent little time purporting to study in any
depth, media linguistics and dynamics as being culturally significant.
Instead, as a reporter of some vintage, I am offering some
questions in the hope they elicit
responses and answers that, point at least minimally in the direction of likely
outcomes and resolutions.
This evening has however not found me in completely
unfamiliar terrain. For I have always been concerned with the notion of media
effects and impacts, especially when it comes to journalistic content – to the
extent that journalism occupies much (but not all) of mass media content.
Yet, I would not say I am a media researcher – someone
whose job it is to apply science and reason to the increasingly amorphous world
of mass communication. Indeed, I would suggest that in this region, there is
much too much official and even industry decision and policymaking based on conjecture
and jaundiced intuition than on scientific enquiry.
All I can therefore offer is the perspective of someone
interested in the Caribbean cultural aesthetic and the establishment of a
framework guided by conditions that conduce toward more rather than less free expression.
Someone who is concerned that finding our way in the world, with all our
pre-existing conditions, is as much interested in understanding the world that
resides within us.
The late, great Prof. Rex Nettleford also advised us eleven
and a half years ago, that “self-empowerment”, (if we are to consider it the injunction
of our time as elegantly described recently by PM Mia Mottley of Barbados)
“comes with the capability to make definitions about self on one’s own terms
and to be able to proceed to action on the basis of such definitions.”
I would add that such definitions are increasingly being
expressed in languages and modes of expression other than what we consider to
be our own. I also cannot offer much hope by way of research methods or
methodologies for analysing postmodern texts and discourse.
So, be clear. What is being presented is more of a personal
narrative on the questions posed for exploration today, with some concerns and
suggestions of my own.
Answering the Questions, Raising Others
The framing of today’s given subject impels us to come to
terms with some important preoccupations. The first has to do with the assertion
of “media discourses” being the subject of some kind of ethnogeographic capture,
especially within the problematic context of a modern communication environment
now characterised by essential timelessness, spacelessness and borderlessness.
Another has to do with the unchallenged assertion of a
diversity of voices describing a shared reality, within which space discrete
aspirations for attention and power are being contested and are capable of
being expressed as “conflicting agendas”.
This is not to signal the invalidity of the terms, but
simply to point to the intractable nature of the challenge before us. For me,
it has always been a problematic area to engage the linear nature or causal
impact of so-called “media discourses” and its accompanying languages on the
distribution and/or mediating of conflict and power.
Such a suggestion evokes highly-contestable imperatives
dictated by a notion of the agenda-setting capabilities of traditional mass
media – an environment now subject to pervasive, new, digital realities.
Indeed, since Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw presented
such a proposition to the world of communication theory 48 years ago, it has
been widely embraced as offering an understanding of how mass communication is
capable of not necessarily influencing what
people think about the things around them, but what, in the first place, people
think about – to quote Bernard Cohen who predated these two researchers by
another 10 years.
I have read and encountered enough to suggest that the
digital era seriously challenges the already highly contestable assertions of
McCombs and Shaw, and all who came before – offering instead a case for the examination
of multi-dimensional impacts of relatively uninterrupted, but technologically mediated
sources of expression-based causation and correlation.
Of course I face the possibility of a charge of gross
oversimplification, but so do the numerous public policy interventions, based
on such assumptions, many of which have led to derogations of free expression
and the formulation of what is rather casually described as media and cultural
policy. In instances when I hear the language of such policy there is a
mistaken sense that official intervention is somehow required to rescue facets
of expression, through the suppression of others. In other words, that censorship
is somehow perversely capable of facilitating freedom of indigenous expression.
This comes to the fore each time I hear the hue and cry for
legislated content quotas on broadcasts, comprising both a restraint on trade
and outright censorship through coerced omission.
There is also the realisation, at least by some of us, that
Caribbean people need no prompting from other interests to acknowledge the
non-binary nature of our cultural habits and behaviours. This in turn
challenges the belief in a single community characterised by binaristic values.
This leads to discomfort with everything from Black Lives Matter to All Lives
Matter, the latter signifying recognition of a cohesive, yet exclusionary
political stream of its own.
Some of this greatly challenges but helps us understand the
dissonances occasioned by efforts to develop the idea of an integrated single
market and single economy within the Caribbean Community – as distinct from confederal
trade and economic alliances. Who or what is this “single” anything?
The Report of the West Indian Commission of 1994 contended
with the issue in some depth by locating what it described as the region’s
“genesis, development and general character … determined by common cultural
responses to a variety of shared experiences.”
Such experiences included “aboriginal decimation”, the
“institution of slavery”, “the crucible of plantation life” and “colonialism
which deepened the sense of economic and political powerlessness even while it
reinforced the inheritance of struggle against injustice and the yearning after
self-determination.” But is it really that simple? Are there indeed ‘common
cultural responses’? Won’t that depend on who is the “we” in our investigation?
The Current Challenges
I would suggest that an exercise of the West Indian
Commission variety in 2020 would require an almost complete reassembling of the
framework for revisiting the cultural dimensions of Caribbean development. It
would render these signposts virtually invisible in the face of a new universe.
Who is this “we” to begin with? Successive work on the
subject, including the consultations of the West Indian Commission raised the
issue of “which Caribbean”. Who is being referred to when it comes to a
cohesive rescue mission for the space we (that problematic word again) occupy?
This suggests that what I am hinting at is not new in its origins, neither has
it gone unrecognised.
The emergence of the Association of Caribbean States (ACS),
for example, signified an attempt to engage the challenge through recognition
of countries “washed by the Caribbean Sea” – despite the Atlantic embrace of
countries such as Suriname and Guyana, together with El Salvador which has a
single coastline washed by the Pacific Ocean.
Only Friday, The UWI and ACS signed an MoU, described by
Vice-Chancellor Prof. Hilary Beckles as reflective of the manner in which the
university is “resolute in its agenda to decolonise the structures inherited
from history.”
“Only the integration of our Caribbean world can fully
unleash the potential of our people. It is our mutual intention to advance the
process of regional cooperation and consciousness.”
This, together with other developing scenarios linked to an
ages-old desire to deepen further South-South economic relations, come together
to both challenge and in a sense help re-define a notion of “identity” – as if
capturing a picture of “identity” can serve as some kind of easy transit to a
so-called “common agenda”, as the theme for this discussion proposes.
I believe we have moved beyond CLR James’s binary
formulation which had been based on the suggestion that the Commonwealth
Caribbean, expressed as the West Indies, together with Haiti and the insular
Spanish-speaking countries, is somehow adequately framed as a single socio-cultural
space, through ethnic configuration, colonial history, and other such
antecedents.
Yes, I believe we ought now to dare contest the
philosophical basis upon which the regional cohesion that gave rise to the construction
of longstanding institutional structures has sat for many years. It may well be
that they ought to endure but with an aspiration to better take into account
the condition of the constituents whose identities, even so, are yet to be precisely
recognised.
There is also yet cause to challenge Stuart Hall’s decades’
old conclusions that follow what he describes in his famous essay on “Cultural
Identity and Diaspora” as “an investigation, on the subject of cultural
identity and representation.”
Even he conceded that “the ‘I’ who writes here (meaning
him) must also be thought of as, itself, ‘enunciated’. We all write and speak
from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is
specific. What we say is always ‘in context’ and ‘positioned.’
“If the paper (Cultural Identity and Diaspora) seems
preoccupied with the diaspora experience and its narratives of displacement,” Prof.
Hall conceded, “it is worth remembering that all discourse is ‘placed’, and the
heart has its reasons.”
In yet another context, through St-Hilaire’s “state of
(linguistic) flux” owing to Saint Lucia’s attainment of national sovereignty and
the forces of globalisation, there are objective and subjective conditions that
qualify conclusions related to what he describes as the ‘I’ and the ‘We’.
A lot more is now correspondingly known about how mass
media and the language of media, within the traditional meaning of the value of
legacy platforms, have adapted in accordance with changing situational and
cultural contexts both at the meso and macro levels.
What roles do our various creoles (French and English
based) play in the public media arena? How accepted are they?
I am not certain to what degree this is being studied and
discussed in our region, because it lies at the heart of understanding what is
emerging as discourse generated by mass media output in the Caribbean. St-Hilaire
is useful in this respect, but we need perhaps to go further and deeper.
Even traditional legacy media are confused; crisscrossing form
and content between and among digital platforms in contestation with informal
and formal sources trading in a mass of fact, opinion, creative output,
information, disinformation and outright trash.
In finding research methodologies to better understand all
these phenomena, there might well be measurable attributes to be found in the code-mixing
and code switching of modern cross and intra-cultural communication especially
when you consider it to be mediated by technology platforms that are not by
themselves neutral to the messaging process.
There is now quite some focus on the global GAFAM operators
– Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft – with respect to their roles
both as commercial enterprises and as purveyors of mass communication signals
and messages descriptive and prescriptive of realities we have not had the
chance to contemplate as countries outside of the dominant cultural fold.
As I’ve suggested, all of this is concerned with matters of
form and content, products and processes. Additionally, and to an increasing
degree, communicative practices - as elaborately discussed by Martin Luginbuhl
in his recent paper on ‘Mediality and Culturality’ - are not only blurring the
lines between individual and mass communication but in a sense challenging
definitions of what indeed constitutes the “medium.”
At a functional level, media regulators and professional
communicators have been similarly challenged by this dynamic. Who or what is
the “publisher” in an age of convergent media where the tools are critical to
the processing of communicative signs and signals?
The question is thus being asked in some quarters among
people concerned with researching and understanding such matters: what indeed
is the medium? Is it, asks Luginbuhl, “the technical apparatus that gives
material shape to the transmitted signs (such as a printing press or a TV
camera)?”
“Is it the sign carrier (such as the printed newspaper) or
the receiver device (the television set or tablet or phone)? Or do we refer to
an institution when talking about the newspaper or television – and therefore
to a social group producing the texts with certain routines, within a certain
society and for a certain media market?”
“The research questions that need to be formulated depend
greatly on how we answer these questions,” Luginbuhl proposes.
My Evolving Views
Now that I have tried to focus on some, not all, key issues
and questions. I am going to turn to my own evolving views on mass media
practice and its contribution to socio-cultural expression. It is clear that
while there is quite a lot to understand, the role of traditional media
practitioners is neither neutral nor unimportant. It is not popular to assert
that they will endure, but I believe they will.
For one, there are the implicit developmental impacts to be
derived when attention is paid to ‘who’ and ‘what’ constitute the distinct
elements of a Caribbean ethos – bearing in mind the ground rule of determining
the needs of ‘which’ Caribbean is being attended to.
The Caricom project, for example, has tended to direct
socio-cultural attention largely to the cricket-playing Commonwealth Caribbean
– though in Belize, The Bahamas, Haiti and Suriname, the sport is not as
highly-considered as elsewhere and are irrelevant as a developmental signpost.
As an aside, I can imagine the discomfort of the leaders of
these countries whenever regional resources are being set aside to attend to
the needs of a sport that is fast losing its once favourable place in the
narrative of West Indian development.
But let’s say for the moment we are focused on the
countries of Caricom. Is there a recognisable aesthetic to be captured? Are
there grounds for orienting our focus as mass media to the cultural assets and
liabilities of this geographic space in such as manner as to implant a greater
sense of collective and communal self?
It is not that in the past we, in media and wider society,
have been completely oblivious to such an injunction. Our experiments with the
Caribbean News Agency and Caribbean Broadcasting Union have followed the
University of the West Indies, the Caribbean Examinations Council, the
Caribbean Community Secretariat and West Indies cricket as attempts to harness
a hint of coherence. There have been offerings of success and of failure.
Again, CLR James provided both guidance and obfuscation through
his embrace of a panoramic landscape including by necessity Cuba and Haiti and
the French overseas territories of the Caribbean.
But he did so even as he embraced distinctive West Indian
virtues through the struggle of Afro-descendants emerging from the scourge of
colonialism and the exploitation of the plantation economy.
In defining a common cultural core of the West Indian concentric
circle, he introduced a paradigm that linked the game of cricket to nationhood
– a process observed in 2007 by Prof. Hilary Beckles as being “fractured and
retreating, gradually being replaced by something less understood and arguably
less desired.”
In my view, there are grounds for contesting the latter assertion
if only because the game of cricket has always persisted within the confines of
limited terms of reference with little importance to the wider paradigm of
Caribbean social and cultural development which, in any event, finds far greater
cohesive and creative resonance through music, literature, drama and art.
CARIFESTA persists as tangible evidence of this.
In the modern era, both the extra and intra-regional
cultural dichotomies are also disappearing at an unprecedented and rapid rate. Our
cultural products are increasingly reflective of the global environment in
which they compete for attention on platforms occupied by everyone else.
Our music, to cite one platform, made the passage across
the Atlantic and back again and now the distinctions between what is presented
everywhere are difficult to establish. There is a marketplace of creative
output far more disposed to open access than has ever existed.
It is not the time for parochial protectionism or
jingoistic false pride. Much of what I have heard as proposed cultural policy
in our space willfully dismisses such a reality.
Where, within the context of “local content” do we, for
instance, place Bob Marley, or Sean Paul or David Rudder or Heather Headley or Rihanna?
Is there a residency requirement? Does Burna Boy’s dancehall or Timaya’s soca make
the cut? Is there a birthright issue?
I would contend that the belief that we can be in the world
and not of it betrays a deficient sense of self-worth. Here, as in other
important areas is where Mia Mottley’s “cultural self-confidence” enters the
picture. The fact is West Indians understood and defined the global system long
before almost everyone else. Our past was founded on the principle of a global
marketplace. We participated both as subjects and as objects of the process.
There are few lessons of globalisation we can be taught but
yet so little we seem to understand.
Our approach to tourism as a viable source of income and a
generator of economic activity suffers from the same malaise. There is no way
we can reasonably address questions of service in the sector without
understanding the psychology of entrenched servitude. Indeed, if you want to
talk about branding and selling you have indeed come to the right place! The
double entendre is absolutely intended.
This is why, for example, the dissonance between indigenous
food production and tourism in most of our countries. There is no sense that
the activities of the past can so intrinsically contribute to imperatives of
the present and future.
Instead, we continue to display a far more remarkable
ability to feast our visitors than to feed ourselves. The tourists bring the
foreign exchange in and our food import bills take it out. In the language of
the Trinidadian school child of my generation, we are spinning top in mud.
The vision must first turn inward to see what we can see of
ourselves. This is not to suggest that we repudiate the vast contributions of
those who have sped along the highway of development, but that we now also look
at the footprints we leave in the wake of the steps we take on our own narrow,
dusty path with far more confidence than we have in the past.
Our mass media and our own faltering, uncertain and
sometimes maddening steps also provide cause for concern for some of the same
reasons. Cable television, at one time, satellite broadcasts, and now 5G and the
Internet have helped defy attempts by our societies to impose regimes to
control and regulate what we see, read and listen to.
The new technologies have, happily in my view, made
nonsense of attempts at regulated cultural protectionism, censorship and other
forms of official control.
So concerned have we been with imposing new and higher
levels of regulation and control that we as societies have abandoned the
injunction to seek the creation of better societies – people equipped with the
skills to distinguish between trash and treasure. This is in fact a key
objective of the global push for greater media and information literacy. Some
describe this alongside the need for wider digital literacy.
The way I see it, Caribbean media and cultural expressions
embrace all that there is in the world, because we are in the world and the
world is in us.
The discourses and concerns that greet us in our daily
lives are as global in nature as is the current pandemic. We would be to naïve
to assume the absence of what the title of this paper describes as “conflicting
agendas.”
I want to close with a quote from my 25-year-old son,
Mikhail Gibbings, who was interviewed in the press recently as a young musician
and filmmaker. We need to pay closer attention to his views and the views of
his peers. In this case, he is speaking about the country of his birth.
“I don’t even know if I can define what Trinidad and Tobago
means to me– and that’s why it’s the best place in the world to me. It’s the
most amazing and terrifying thing.
“Trinidad hasn’t been around long enough, as a country, to
even really figure out what direction we’re going in. That means we can make it
absolutely anything we like. It’s not even a choice we have to make. We are, by
our very nature, the road less travelled. And I like it that way.”
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING:
1. The
Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media
Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw
The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Summer,
1972), pp. 176-187 (12 pages)
Published By: Oxford University Press
2. The Caribbean,
Cricket And C.L.R James - NACLA Report on the Americas, Hilary Beckles (2004)
3. The
Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media
Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw
The Public Opinion Quarterly Vol. 36, No. 2 (Summer, 1972),
pp. 176-187 (12 pages)
Published By: Oxford University Press
4. Cultural
Identity and Diaspora
Stuart Hall, Essay (Framework, 1966)
5. Comparing
Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics (2004), by Daniel C. Hallin
and Paolo Mancini
6. From
Frequency to Sequence: How Quantitative Methods Can Inform Qualitative Analysis
of Digital Media Discourse (Journal Article + Infographic) - Mark Dang-Anh and
Jan Oliver Rüdiger (2015)
