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9 - Exploiting Subalternity in the Name of Counter-Hegemonic Communication

Turkey’s Global Media Outreach Initiatives

from Part III - Media and Problems of Inclusion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2020

By
Bilge Yesil
Edited by
Matthew Powers  and
Adrienne Russell
Matthew Powers
Affiliation:
University of Washington
Adrienne Russell
Affiliation:
University of Washington
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Summary

This chapter asks how scholars should grapple with communication initiatives that advocate for inclusion on some issues while remaining anti-democratic and highly exclusionary in other key respects. Taking the case of Turkey’s governing party, Bilge Yesil explores a wide-ranging media ecology – a state-financed public broadcaster and news agency, government aligned English language dailies, NGO digital efforts – that purport to speak on behalf of subaltern groups (Muslim refugees, African Americans, Palestinians) in the global public sphere. She argues that such efforts cannot be read as simply anti-hegemonic; rather, they must be understood as instrumental uses of “subaltern” discourses. Yesil’s analysis demonstrates why scholarship examining authoritarian and populist communication need to look beyond simply the ways such actors speak and polarize publics, and instead grasp how these efforts aim to legitimate themselves while neutralizing their critics. In doing so, she calls attention to the way inclusion-exclusion dynamics are not merely single-nation stories, but rather are constructed in part through transnational relations among nation-states.

Keywords

authoritarian communicationstate mediaTurkish mediasubalternitycounter-hegemonic communication
Type
Chapter
Information
Rethinking Media Research for Changing Societies , pp. 119 - 136
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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