Decolonizing Racialized Media Scripts in the Global South: Analysis of Sports News Reports From the Philippines and Tweets From Kenyans

Satwinder Rehal

In a postcolonial Global South context, representations of race persist manifested through media scripts that subtly deploy White ideological frames. According to Stuart Hall (1990), media deliberately or subconsciously constructs race in a way that reproduces ideologies of racism. Media scripts that deploy White ideological frames are, according to Shawa (2019, 89), “leaving intact the legacies of colonialist world view that is perpetuating a racist discourse within the Global South itself”. On the one hand, ‘Blacks’ tend to be inscribed with assumptions around their physical attributes and athleticism while on the other, persons of South Asian descent are essentialized on certain ‘fantasized’ imaginations (Adam 2015). Informed by a qualitative content analysis of media texts from the Philippines and Kenya, this paper illustrates the perpetuating legacies of colonial mentalities grounded in the civilizing sporting projects of Western imperialism. The paper calls for praxis on decoloniality by reifying the Spirit of Bandung as a broad epistemic concept in offering an opportunity in filling the blind spot for multivalent Afro-Asian epistemic linkages in a new globalist remapping of decoloniality in the Global South.