ABSTRACT
The current conjuncture is marked by a multitude of global crises that include the COVID-19 pandemic;global warming;conflicts in Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Palestine;growing global poverty and food scarcity;the exponential increase of forcibly displaced people;the escalating use of incarceration to manage migrants, including children;land conflicts with Indigenous peoples;and the persecution and genocide of religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities around the globe, from the Rohingya to the Uyghurs. In Canada, we nessed the of hundreds of unmarked graves of Indigenous children forced to attend residential schools;court rulings in favour of pipelines that violated the constitutional rights of Indigenous peoples;the global mobilization of Black Lives Matters;the escalation of anti-Asian racism;the heightened Islamophobia that resulted in the killing of members of the Afzaal Salman family;attacks on mosques and synagogues;and the ongoing criminalization, incarceration, and violent police murders of Black, Indigenous, and people of colour across the country. The recent occupation of Ottawa and other cities and towns highlights the rise of right-wing extremism that, along with the failure of the state to act swiftly to protect the rule of law, brings up the intersection of misogyny, racism, colonialism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and populism (Karim, 2000;Mirrlees, 2021;Neville & Langlois, 2021). Drawing on their experiences working with the Community Media Advocacy Centre (CMAC) as scholar-activists, King and Odartey-Wellington argue that the canon of Canadian communications scholarship must be expanded to include Canada's history of colonialism and discrimination against ra- cialized people.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has often been referred to in the media as a "war" against the socio-political global body. This discursive use of war as a metaphor implies not only a need for a united defence against an encroaching and insidiously pervasive enemy but also suggests that such a defence protects one and all. Clearly, this is not the case. This short essay tackles these questions using Stuart Hall's notion of structured dominance to interrogate racial hierarchies and the media frames and filters that are used to obfuscate it in the Canadian settler state. It argues that a critical Canadian cultural studies perspective needs to examine where any racialized group is situated in the racial hierarchy of the nation state, and to what ends the racial logics underpinning their status are produced and reproduced through the currency of representations-both in the soft power of the media and the hard power of the state.Alternate abstract:La pandémie de COVID-19 a souvent été comparée dans les médias à une « guerre » contre l'organe mondial sociopolitique. Cette utilisation discursive de la guerre en tant que métaphore non seulement implique un besoin pour une défense unie contre un ennemi envahissant et insidieusement omniprésent, mais suggère aussi qu'une telle défense nous protège tous et toutes. Ce n'est clairement pas le cas. Cet article examine ces questions à l'aide de la notion de dominance structurée de Stuart Hall pour mettre en doute les hiérarchies raciales ainsi que les cadres et filtres médiatiques utilisés pour la cacher au sein de l'état colonial canadien. Il soutient que le point de vue d'une étude critique de la culture canadienne doit examiner où se situe tout groupe racialisé dans la hiérarchie raciale de l'état nation, et dans quel but les logiques raciales qui sous-tendent leur statut sont-elles produites et reproduites par l'entremise de représentations - tant par le pouvoir doux des médias que par le pouvoir dur de l'état.