School of Communication and Arts

Afrikaans is the home language of 5.9 million people. During the 1980s, Afrikaans was the dominant state language and a widely-used lingua franca in South Africa and Namibia. But by the end of the twentieth century, English had replaced Afrikaans as the dominant state language and a decline in the use of Afrikaans was in evidence, even among native Afrikaans speakers. An examination of this language's twentieth-century journey helps illustrate the relationship(s) between political power, national identity, and the growth and / or decline of languages.

The English are characteristically a class-conscious people. In building their empire they carried their class consciousness with them, but conflated it with race when ranking their new colonial societies. The result was a race ranking system. In the Empire's new social formations, one's life-chances were to be determined by one's ethnic status. Hence, in British-South Africa, for example, the following class-race ranking emerged. British-born Anglos constituted the social elite. Next down in the social ranking order came Anglos born in the colonies. Next came non-Anglo whites (i.e, Afrikaners). Then came Indians and coloureds (mixed-race people). Next came the "mission blacks" (black people who were Westernised and able to speak English; called half-baked kaffirs)J, and finally all other blacks (called Airs). The "other black" category was itself ranked, with some tribes being considered "superior" because they had "fought bravely" (which was seemingly important for a "martial race" like the English). For example the Zulu and Matabele were judged "superior" to the Tswana or Shona. It was a ranking naturalised by the Anglo-colonial media not only in South Africa, but throughout the Empire. But a key feature of this British Empire race ranking system was what Donald Horowitz has called "positional psychology" (Horowitz, 1985:184). In other words, racial ranking allocated group worth. Within the colonial system there were what Horowitz called "backward" and "advanced" groups, and one's worth as an individual was ascribed according to the ethnic group one was born into. Ultimately, the Anglo media (whether in London, Sydney, Johannesburg, Singapore, Toronto or New Delhi) all circulated the same Empire-wide colonial race-ranking system-a world view that justified English rule over an Empire of lesser human types. And echoes of this worldview can still be heard throughout the Anglo world-hence, race-ranking may no longer be "politically correct" (and hence openly practised) in Anglo-derived societies like Australia and the USA, but at a deeper level the old rankings still resonate powerfully in Anglo hearts. As Horowitz said, " ... the colonialists thus set in motion a comparative process by which aptitudes and disabilities imputed to ethnic groups were to be evaluated... [and] .. the evaluations took hold ... [so that] ... no one emerged from colonial rule untouched by the new standards of group evaluation" (Horowitz, 1985: 154). To be born a white Anglo was to see oneself and be seen by others as automatically superior and "advanced". To be born Malay or a black South African was to be automatically "backward". While to be born Chinese (in Malaysia) or Afrikaans (in South Africa) was to be allocated to an intermediary position

This paper explores the political and psychological angles of white South African and Serbian diasporas' discourses on-line. On the basis of textual analysis of diasporic web-sites we argue that participants speak of ongoing grievance over the loss of their countries and assert that they have been the victims of "unjust" history and globalisation. Each online discourse articulates claims of belonging not on the grounds of, for example, citizenship or multiculturalism, but rather on the basis of "a victim-hood", "civilisation", and "grief".

Southern African decolonization, the civil war and post-apartheid turmoil are creating a Southern African diaspora across the Anglo world. Australia has become a popular destination within this diaspora that South Africans now refer to emigration in general as “packing for Perth.” Thus far, little work has been done on this migratory phenomenon. This article seeks to develop an overview of the birth and developments of this diaspora, with a focus on the growth of the South African Australian community. As an overview, the article provides insights on how this emergent diaspora relates to earlier migrations, the factors behind post-apartheid emigration, the patterns and characteristics of post-apartheid migration, and the significance of Australia as a destination for South African migrants.

If South Africa's potential is to be realized, the nation will need to be fully integrated into the global electronic information age. A future South African government can choose between two basic courses of action: (i) emphasis could be placed on reinforcing and expanding the technological infrastructures required to further the development of a post-Fordist South African information economy or (ii) emphasis could be placed on the modernist industrial base at the expense of the information economy and communication technologies of post-Fordism. The challenge lies in avoiding dependency on the West by accepting the top-down relations associated with multinational capitalism.

This article examines the relationship between warfare and the media, arguing that both terrorists and conventional warfare planners in the Pentagon factor communications and public relations into their planning. In this regard, the article sketches out how the Pentagon developed a new genre of `public relations-ized' warfare - warfare planned, not only as a military exercise, but as a televisual media event. Similarly, it will be argued that those attacking the World Trade Center deployed an understanding of terrorism as a `media event', and a grasp of how USA politics (and warfare) has been `media-ized'. This understanding was used by al-Qaeda to provoke the USA into the `War against Terrorism'. This war created a number of public relations problems for the Pentagon. The Pentagon's response to these problems is examined.

This article uses the Foucauldian framework of governmentality and the particular concept of dispositif to analyse two Vietnamese television dramas, Hanoian (1996) and The City Stories (2002). I argue that the first drama presents a memory dispositif of the recent wartime to express dissatisfaction about contemporary situations. Meanwhile, the second drama sought to build a ‘new yesterday’ to engage Vietnamese viewers in the ongoing economic transformations.

Bài viết  này nghiêng về một tổng quan điểm luận hơn là một nghiên cứu trọn vẹn. Nó  xem xét hiện tượng người nổi tiếng trên các phương tiện truyền thông đại chúng trong bối cảnh xã hội Việt Nam, dưới sự quy chiếu của lý thuyết nghiên cứu văn hóa, truyền thông. Phương pháp nghiên cứu chủ yếu là phân tích diễn ngôn. Hình ảnh người nổi tiếng được nhìn nhận như: 1) sự tái trình hiện của hiện thực, 2) diễn ngôn, 3) hàng hóa. Trên cơ sở đó, nghiên cứu thảo luận về chức năng xã hội của người nổi tiếng: 1) chức năng thay thế quan hệ liên cá nhân bị phá vỡ trong lối sống đô thị, 2) chức năng cung cấp các căn tính văn hóa đa dạng, 3) bước đầu đề cập tới chức năng củng cố ý thức hệ. Nghiên cứu đề xuất việc tìm một lối tiếp cận khác trong giáo dục để giúp công chúng sống cân bằng trong thế giới biểu tượng do truyền thông tạo ra.

This chapter explores the content and the production of Người Đương Thời (Contemporaries), one of the most popular talk shows in Vietnamese television after the Reform. This show uses the name of the nation as a means to legitimate the new discourse of self-empowerment. The direct link between the national and the personal reflects how the so-called ‘neoliberal nationalism’ or ‘commercial nationalism’ is enacted in Vietnam through post-Reform television. This new form of nationalist attachment, while departing from socialist orthodoxy, simultaneously abstracts away ongoing political tension and social inequality, thus further naturalises the concept of the nation in the name of self-actualisation.

- Book Chapter in: Zala Volcic and Mark Andrejevic (2015), Commercial Nationalism: Selling the Nation and Nationalizing the Sell, Palgrave Macmillan.

Bài viết này giới thiệu khái niệm “truyền hình bình dân” (ordinary television) – một khái niệm quan trọng liên quan tới sự phát triển của truyền hình thế giới trong bối cảnh hậu Chiến Tranh Lạnh. Mấu chốt của sự ra đời và phát triển của “truyền hình bình dân” nằm ở việc chuyển dịch trọng tâm từ các chương trình tin tức và phim truyền hình sang các chương trình giải trí liên quan tới đời sống hàng ngày, nơi những người “bình thường” - tức là những người không có chuyên môn gì về truyền hình - góp vai trò quan trọng trong việc sản xuất ra nội dung phát sóng. Sau khi trình bày tổng quan lý thuyết, tác giả bài viết dùng khái niệm “truyền hình bình dân” để nhìn lại quá trình phát triển của truyền hình Việt Nam sau năm 1986. Trên cơ sở đó, tác giả phân tích mối quan hệ giữa tính dân chủ và tính thị trường hàm ẩn trong quá trình bình dân hoá nội dung truyền hình.

This book explores Vietnamese popular television in the post-Reform era, focusing on the relationship between television and national imagination. It locates Vietnamese television in the experiences of everyday life and the prevailing network of power relations resulting from marketization and globalization, and, as such, moves beyond the clichéd assumption of Vietnamese media as a mere propagandist instrument of the party state. With examples from a wide range of television genres, the book demonstrates how Vietnamese television enables novel conditions of cultural oppression as well as political engagement in the name of the nation. In sharp contrast to the previous image of Vietnam as a war-torn land, post-Reform television conjures into being a new sense of national belonging based on an implicit rejection of the socialist past, hopes for peace and prosperity, and anxieties about a globalized future.

Routledge, Published October 30, 2019, ISBN 9781138069022.

This article provides a broader context to help understand the current dynamics of the Vietnamese media. This task requires a review of how the Vietnamese media system operates, including its censorship mechanisms, its commercial impulse, and its struggle to balance between the state, the market, and the public demand for quality information. Against this background, I provide a short history of social media (predominantly Facebook) in Vietnam and how it is driven by an escalating sense of political and social precarity. In so doing, I hope to engage readers in a more nuanced description of mediated activities in Vietnam beyond the state-centric view and to diagnose the governing rationality of the party-state behind the adoption of the Cybersecurity Law.