Kevin Glynn

Hybrid Cultures of Postdevelopment: The Struggle for Popular Hegemony in Rural Nicaragua

Abstract This article contributes to contemporary debates around “postdevelopment” by examining the new social alliances that are reimagining, rearticulating, and refashioning development discourses and practices in Northern León, an impoverished region on Nicaraguas Pacific coastal strip. We examine the strategies and tactics whereby Northern Leóns citizens, local leaders, and nongovernmental organizations have reworked the regions cultural, political, and economic terrains in ways that negotiate and contest Northern Leóns marginalization by the Nicaraguan central government, and that challenge and reshape global spaces and imaginaries constituted through the disciplinary and regulatory discourses of international financial institutions and predatory multinational capital. We draw particularly on Gramscian perspectives and other contemporary theoretical engagements with neoliberalism, globalization, and postdevelopment in order to present the case of Northern León as an opportunity to think through the possibilities for forms of grassroots globalism that mobilize strategies of discursive activism, disarticulation/rearticulation, and “place-projection” in ways that destabilize and disrupt the linear temporalities and spatial fixities of mainstream development thought and practice.

Leaky Geopolitics: The Ruptures and Transgressions of WikiLeaks

The unfurling of violent rhetoric and the show of force that has lead to the arrest, imprisonment, and impending extradition of WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, serve as an exemplary moment in demonstrating state-sanctioned violence. Since the cables began leaking in November 2010, the violent reaction to WikiLeaks evidenced by numerous political pundits calling for Assanges assassination or execution, and the movement within the US to have WikiLeaks designated a ‘foreign terrorist organization’, amount to a profound showing of authoritarianism. The ‘Wikigate’ scandal thus represents an important occasion to take stock and think critically about what this case tells us about the nature of sovereign power, freedom of information, the limits of democracy, and importantly, the violence of the state when it attempts to manage these considerations. This forum explores a series of challenges inspired by WikiLeaks, which we hope will prompt further debate and reflection within critical geopolitics.

Negotiating and queering US hegemony in TV drama: popular geopolitics and cultural studies

This article argues that popular geopolitics should pay closer attention to entertainment television and to the negotiations, complexities, and contradictions associated with contemporary televisual texts. This move requires a closer engagement with media and cultural studies than that initiated to date. In the second half of the article, we discuss the ABC TV drama Commander in Chief, which follows the first female president of the USA, and is set in a post-9/11 world wherein the struggle for US geopolitical domination has become a much more complex endeavor. We end by wondering whether entertainment television might provide us with imaginative resources for queering US hegemony.

Indigenous MediaSpace and the Production of (Trans)locality on Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast

This article draws on notions of networked and multiscalar globalities to explore recent developments around indigenous and Afro-Caribbean media in Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast region, whose inhabitants are reasserting their collective autonomy by reinvigorating and reformulating a centuries-old ideal of cosmopolitanism forged through a long history of intercultural exchange and the indigenization of foreign elements. The authors argue that their activities are advancing the development of convergent cultures associated with counterinscriptions of a grassroots globalization and the expansion of contexts in which new forms of indigenous and Afro-Caribbean cultural citizenship can emerge and become effective. Hence, mediated practices of cultural persistence on Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast intensify and broaden the revivification and circulation of relational, nonmodern ontologies whose epistemic force contributes to wider Latin American movements for social transformation and illustrates in new ways the importance and the potential of indigenous media operations and the intercultural global networks within which they are implicated.

The 2004 Election Did Not Take Place Bush, Spectacle, and the Media Nonevent

It is arguable that the George W. Bush regime has made a more systematically intensive strategic effort to mobilize the management and control of media images as a primary mode of governance than any other U.S. presidency we have yet seen. This article explores the Bush White Houses media imagineering and draws on notions of media spectacle, along with Baudrillards widely misunderstood analysis of the 1991 Gulf War and often overlooked theory of media nonevents, to examine the 2004 U.S. presidential election in particular. It also identifies and draws on what we might see as image insurgencies emerging from the internet, the alternative press, and the mainstream media to raise the prospect that the more fully a regime of power seeks to exert control over and through images, the more vulnerable it becomes to the generation of counterimages, counternarratives, and counterspectacles.

Postdevelopment Television? Cultural Citizenship and the Mediation of Africa in Contemporary TV Drama

Despite well-established critiques from African and Africanist scholars, problematic images and narratives of Africa as a site of disease, famine, and conflict continue to circulate formulaically in mainstream first-world media. Meanwhile, many recent complex humanitarian emergencies in African countries have failed to garner significant attention from mainstream Western media and their audiences. This article examines how these power-bearing patterns of representation and omission can be complicated, contested, and disrupted in contemporary TV drama that takes recent African crises as its subject matter. We focus on six episodes of the hospital drama ER set in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Darfur region of Sudan. Our analysis of the textual strategies deployed in these episodes and of online audience engagements with them enables us to explore what happens when Africa is brought into the regimes of narrative complexity increasingly associated with television drama in the new media ecology. ERs engagements with African conflict innovatively articulate key aspects of the cultural politics of postdevelopment and postcolonialism in ways that challenge familiar Western media tropes of the “troubled continent” and destabilize the wider knowledges that sustain them.

Decolonial Social Movements, Leftist Governments and the Media

This chapter situates events in Nicaragua within a broader Latin American context and in relation to changes that have been actively producing a new media environment in the region. We consider both changes in the nature of social movements in Latin America after decades of neoliberalism and a shift to left-wing authoritarian populism, and the emergence of new media geographies associated with digitalization and media convergence. We show that the contemporary Latin American media environment is a highly contradictory, paradoxical and multidiscursive one in which a plurality of voices can find and forge new forms and spaces of expression.

Constructing the Nicaraguan Conjuncture

This chapter outlines the current conjuncture in Nicaragua and focuses in particular on struggles for Caribbean Coast autonomy in the face of growing mestizo hostility and intensified migratory pressures within the region. It also outlines key changes within both official Nicaraguan and grassroots media. While the government has undertaken serious efforts to undermine the freedom and independence of media in Nicaragua, citizens and activists are developing and deploying innovative media tactics of their own.

Introduction: Democracy and Authoritarianism in Nicaragua

This chapter outlines contemporary threats to democracy in Nicaragua and introduces our analysis of the nation’s growing authoritarianism, plans for the construction of a highly controversial interoceanic canal and aspects of the government’s discursive and communications strategies. It draws on recent work produced under the banner of agnotology and considers attempts to produce public ignorance as dimensions of the Nicaraguan government’s strategy for the evasion of criticism and the consolidation of power. We argue that such strategies must be understood in racialized and colonial terms that highlight historical relationships between Nicaragua’s mestizo elites and its indigenous and Afro-descendant populations. In this context of expanding authoritarianism, many Nicaraguans are engaging in diverse forms of media activism that challenge and disrupt the government’s struggles for hegemony.

Mediated Activism in the Pacific

This chapter focuses on the Pacific region and examines the disruption of Sandinista control over the Nicaraguan mediascape through the interventions of ordinary citizens. It analyzes the mediation of a shooting during an opposition protest in Managua, a protest in the mining community of Mina El Limon, and a march against the interoceanic canal to show how the new media environment complicates the government’s efforts to control the meanings that are attached to such events.