In February 2020, the United States announced its withdrawal from Afghanistan, after almost two decades of war. Anthropologist Wazhmah Osman could have anticipated the Western narrative that followed. Put simply, the ubiquitous portrayal of the situation suggested that if the US left, Afghanistan would turn into a “failed state.” This problematic narrative implies that all good things—such as democracy, modernization, and women's rights—come to Afghanistan from the West. What's more, Afghan people, when left to their own devices, constantly “fail” to progress due to their “backwardness” and “resistance to change.” The image of Afghanistan as “a failed state” and Afghan people as “incapable of advancement” is so firmly entrenched in Western discourse that there is no room for deviation from these intransigent understandings.
In Television and Afghan Culture Wars—the first in-depth ethnography of television and ongoing cultural contestations in Afghanistan—Osman reminds us that those who view Afghanistan through Orientalist clichés miss something critical about the country: many progressive Afghan people have been actively involved in projects aimed at modernizing and democratizing their country throughout history. To illustrate this, Osman turns the lens to Afghan television, which has been a large part of both international development and local modernization projects in Afghanistan, and retells the country's past and present in a way that places Afghan people at the center of the narrative. Drawing on extensive fieldwork (2008–2014) with a wide range of television producers and consumers, Osman highlights the motivations, desires, and initiatives of progressive Afghan reformers and activists who aspire to “build a better Afghanistan” (p. xi). A historical overview of Afghanistan's twentieth-century reform projects, with an emphasis on both the initiatives of Afghan reformers and British, Russian/Soviet, and American interventions, sets the tone for subsequent analysis of development projects and the agency of Afghan media producers. Such a reorientation of inquiry illustrates that Afghanistan, rather than being stuck in time and forever unchanging, as predominantly understood in the West, has always been “on a continuum of change or swinging pendulum of culture wars,” just like any other country (p. 41).
One of this book's significant contributions is Osman's provision of a theory of transnational media flows relevant to the Global South, particularly to states subjected to imperialist ambitions. Arguing that “globalization alone cannot adequately describe the structural imbalances, power disparities, or cultural and ideological issues of the media worlds” she is studying, Osman contends that scholars must pay attention to cultural imperialism as a conceptual framework to account for the power dynamics that permeate contemporary “international communication flows, processes, and effects” (pp. 64, 65). She posits the terms “development gaze” and “imperialist gaze” to distinguish collaborative, benevolent development projects from top-down, exploitative, and duplicitous ones (p. 87). In the context of Afghan television, this distinction reveals that international donor aid to the Afghan media sector does not just promote capitalism or the free market; it also creates robust and diverse television programming that resembles a “public service model of television” (p. 114). Within this fragile yet vibrant “media world,” Osman finds that the vast majority of Afghan producers fall under the development gaze.Footnote 1 Despite being caught in expansionist economic and political arrangements, many are still motivated by “a desire to create a more just future for Afghan people out of the chaos, bloodshed, and ashes of its current dismal state” (p. 137). Osman's theorization provides a new framework for understanding media in places like Afghanistan in a way that accounts for power imbalances in transnational communication flows and the agency of local media producers.
Osman's nuanced and well-researched book also broadens our understanding of what it means to make mass media and what media means in a “perilous state”.Footnote 2 Throughout the book, Osman reminds us that Afghanistan is a politically fraught context that has suffered four decades of war. This foregrounding of the context allows Osman to highlight the constraints Afghan television producers deal with, such as working in a war zone, dealing with imperialist interests and government censorship, coping with warlords, and facing the threat of violence every day. It also illuminates how such a fragile context affects the motivations of Afghan producers, as well as audiences’ expectations of television programming. For instance, despite facing a wide range of local and international constraints, Afghan media producers take bold steps to televise “gory scenes of violence” to remind the public about the horrors of the war, engender debate, and expose power abuses by warlords (pp. 139, 142). Similarly, Afghan producers, particularly women who dare to appear on television despite backlash from local conservative groups, are determined to create their own representations of Afghan women in media to counter the global circulation of their image as one of pure victimhood. Osman finds that, by taking such brave steps in the hopes of achieving peace and unity, Afghan television producers—both men and women—meet the demands of traumatized Afghan audiences, who “want television to bring justice and retribution to local and international warlords” (p. 22). In such a context, Osman therefore argues, television becomes a vehicle for “providing a semblance for justice, debate and healing,” and “has the potential to underwrite democracy, national integration, and peace” (p. 3).
Finally, at a time when there is much debate in both academic circles and popular culture that “TV is dead,” Osman's poignant analysis of the Afghan media world demonstrates that TV is not dead, but indeed flourishing, in Afghanistan—not just as entertainment, but as a crucial platform for debating issues vital to Afghans, such as women's rights, ethnic divisions, and foreign interests. In such a fraught context, television is not just a source of pleasure and escape: by offering diverse sections of Afghan society a space for public debate and reflection, it also becomes “a sort of equalizer” and, therefore, “has the potential to underwrite democracy, national integration, and peace” (pp. 3, 124).
In short, this timely book intervenes in dominant narratives on Afghanistan and the transnational circulation of media, demonstrating the vigor and agency of progressive Afghan producers entangled with imbalanced global flows of communication and entertainment. Osman's argument also expands our understanding of what it means to produce television and what television means in a perilous context. It will garner the attention of students and scholars in global communication and media, development studies, Middle Eastern studies, and gender studies and will make an excellent addition to many undergraduate and graduate-level syllabi. We are fortunate to have this groundbreaking work as a source at a time of increasing efforts to decenter dominant narratives, as it introduces a more diverse array of voices and perspectives into the curriculum.
