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Showing posts with the label theorizing from elsewhere

Why are the white folks doing all the talking?

In preparing for my Communication Theory undergraduate course that I will teach this coming Fall, I am struck by the the whiteness of the theories presented in the text I am using in class and by the limitations in seeking to offer alternative worldviews that open up the spaces of pedagogy to imaginations of communication from elsewhere. What is most important to note here is that irrespective of the paradigm of the theories one picks from, the theories are essentially white in terms of where they have been picked from, which theorists talk about them and cite them, the political agendas of these theorists, the ideologies written into the theories, and most fundamentally, the location of the theories within the neo-colonial sites of knowledge production that reestablish the hegemony of whiteness. Inherent in the articulation of the theories in the pages of the texts is an assumption about the superiority of whiteness as the legitimate producer of knowledge. Simultaneously, written into