Spotlight
Interviews with authors of new books on migration and mobility
Haneul Lee interviews Ethiraj Dattatreyan about the book Digital Unsettling: Decoloniality and Dispossession in the Age of Social Media (co-authored with Sahana Udupa, NYU 2023).
About the author
Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan is an assistant professor of Anthropology, core faculty in the culture media program, and affiliated faculty in the department of music at NYU. For the last decade he has utilized collaborative, multimodal, and speculative ethnographic approaches to research how media consumption, production, and circulation shape understandings of migration, gender, race, and urban space in diasporic and postcolonial contexts. He is the author of two books, the Globally Familiar: Digital hip hop, masculinity and urban space in Delhi (Duke University Press 2020), and Digital Unsettling: Decoloniality and Dispossession in the Age of Social Media (co-authored with Sahana Udupa, NYU 2023).
About the interviewer
Haneul Lee is a documentary filmmaker and a PhD candidate of the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies. Her dissertation, Platforms of Care: The Global Life of Grassroots Media, explores alternative video production and circulation across platforms for protesters, female migrant care workers, and queer fan-video makers. A portion of her dissertation chapter is included in an anthology, Made in ASIA/AMERICA, published by Duke University Press. Including a short film A Letter to the Letter (2024), her films have been invited to film festivals.
Haneul Lee:
Your book, Digital Unsettling, speaks of what “the digital” implies in the age of digital media by exploring the complexities and contradictions inherent in digital media that we engage in. Can you tell us the story of how this book came to be?
Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan:
Digital Unsettling came out of a series of conversations that I had with my co-writer, Sahana Udupa, who is a professor at Ludwig-Maximilians University (LMU). We first met in 2011 at the University of Pennsylvania where Sahana was doing a postdoc and I was finishing up my PhD. We’ve been in conversation since. In a chat we had back in 2018, she and I discussed how recent theories of the digital left much to be desired as they posited an ahistorical framework for engaging with social media. About a year after this chat, Sahana hosted a workshop at LMU on decolonizing media research. I attended and together we, along with several other scholars, tried to think through what decoloniality as a historical backdrop, a concept, a method, and a political orientation, offered media anthropology and its scholarship on the digital. Soon after the workshop, Sahana invited me to write this book with her.
Haneul:
You and Prof. Udupa offer “decolonial sensibility” as an analytical framework and tool. However, I think that the term decolonial is often used metaphorically or symbolically. Can you tell us about your approach to the term “decolonial”?
Ethiraj:
Decoloniality means different things to different people, in part depending on location. For example, in North America, decoloniality is very much tied to native struggles and offers a powerful argument and political impetus for native sovereignty. Land back! In the Latin American tradition, decoloniality signals an attention to the enduring ‘coloniality of power’ that continues to shape economic, social, and cultural relations. Our challenge was to figure out how our long-term field engagements across various locations – the US, the UK, Germany, India, and South Africa - gave us particular insights into how decoloniality is being articulated in social media spaces in ways that draw from these and other overlapping yet distinct traditions and what our own positions/claims to the concept were. In the book we approached decoloniality in three key ways. First, as a subject of study that appears in online spaces linked to offline social movements; second, as an analytical strategy to push against ahistorical studies of digital media; third, as an ethical and political commitment to developing, cultivating, and sustaining a decolonial sensibility, what we describe in the book as a commitment to working through the ruptures and tensions between multiple and distinct struggles for freedom, equity, and justice.
Haneul:
The chapter on campus as a site of struggle echoes the recently emerging student activism in the US and beyond to build solidarity for Palestine or other political issues. What can we learn about the colonial structure of those social and political conflicts beyond here and now?
Ethiraj:
The campus chapter draws on lessons learned during the South African and UK struggles for racial and economic justice, focusing on how students from across geographic locations utilize social media to directly and indirectly learn from one and other to directly challenge colonial continuities. Learning, we show, is affectively charged and affect, as it is channeled through social media, reveals the resonance of shared colonial histories across contexts. In the chapter we also consider the ways the university works to defuse university social movements by coopting and taming its goals. We foreground the asymmetries of position in university struggles and show how students’ link various issues together – campus police brutality, high tuition fees, racist curricula, and so on – as part and parcel of a colonial legacy and do so in ways that recognize cross-border struggles. What we didn’t discuss in the book, which has presented itself forcefully in the last year, are the ways outside groups – like Canary Mission in the US, for example - seek to disrupt campus based social movements through various tactics of intimidation that rely on digital surveillance, online doxing, amongst other tactics. As has become very apparent in the last year, these outside groups, when coupled with an institutional logic that reinforces an ahistorical position when it comes to, for instance, speech, puts already vulnerable students, academics, and workers who are struggling for a more just campus and world, at even greater risk.
Haneul:
Yes, in that way, the campus chapter would have offered a more expanded view on student activism in the age of social media.
Ethiraj:
Agreed. This reveals, perhaps, one of the limits of ethnography. We were grounding our arguments in relation to what I was witnessing in real time in the UK circa 2018 – when I taught in London. I utilized what I participated in and observed to draw connections to other campus movements. Our goal was to show how student generated unsettling moved through the digital across borders and what the responses at the institutional level were to demands for redress. We didn't want to start free floating with our analysis. The danger is, of course, that in not thinking with other contexts, certain modes of unsettling are left out of the frame.
Haneul:
Thinking of decolonial sensibility that generates affective capital beyond a national border, I wonder how this book could contribute to the larger discussions of migration and mobility?
Ethiraj:
The migration and mobility literatures tend to focus on the movement of people across naturalized borders and key questions focus on the mobility/immobility of people in relation to nation-states and their legal apparatus and, in some cases, the post-war international order that produces these relationships. Our book focuses on a different kind of mobility, one that attends to the cross-border potentials of media circulation in the digital moment and the kinds of unsettlings of taken for granted understandings of citizenship, belonging, etc. these text, image, and video circulations generate. To return to the campus chapter, I was really intrigued by the cross-border resonance that images of the Rhodes statue being pulled down in South Africa generated in their movements. In the context of Goldsmiths, where I taught, second and third generation hyphenated British college students– those whose parents or grandparents migrated to the UK in the postwar period from the Caribbean, South Asia, the Levant, and West Africa in search of jobs and worked to rebuild the country after the devastations of war – took up this image as a call to cross-border call to action. An attention to contemporary circulations of media in relation to previous moments of colonial and imperial era migration, forced and otherwise, opens up interesting ways to think about migration and mobility on multiple scales and pushes back on the nation-state as an organizing principle for research.