Split-Screen: Style, Mediation, and Postcolonial Theory in the Digital Age

Abstract

This essay examines the medial effects of postcolonial theory in the digital age. The essay begins with a critical reflection on a YouTube upload of Homi Bhabha's lecture "On Global Memory: Thoughts on the Barbaric Transmission of Culture." But its ultimate aim is to speculate on the work of mediation, style, and visuality that has attended postcolonial theory's migration from page to screen. I ask: what becomes of theory when it is subject to the aesthetic and theoretical effects of online distribution and circulation? What hybrid archives of visuality and theory are made possible by online mediation? How can we come to grips with these new hybrid objects and how might they inspire new modalities of critical and theoretical intervention?