Television and the Afghan Culture Wars: Brought to You by Foreigners, Warlords, and Activists

Thursday, April 28, 2022 | 10:30am to 12pm

Portrayed in Western discourse as tribal and traditional, Afghans have in fact intensely debated women’s rights, democracy, modernity, and Islam as part of their nation building in the post-9/11 era. In her new book, Television and the Afghan Culture Wars, Wazhmah Osman places television at the heart of these public and politically charged clashes while revealing how the medium also provides war-weary Afghans with a semblance of open discussion and healing. After four decades of gender and sectarian violence, she argues, the internationally funded media sector has the potential to bring about justice, national integration, and peace.

Fieldwork from across Afghanistan allowed Osman to record the voices of Afghan media producers and people from all sectors of society. In this moving work, Afghans offer their own seldom-heard views on the country’s cultural progress and belief systems, their understandings of themselves, and the role of international interventions. Osman looks at the national and transnational impact of media companies like Tolo TV, Radio Television Afghanistan, and foreign media giants and funders like the British Broadcasting Corporation and USAID. By focusing on local cultural contestations, productions, and social movements, Television and the Afghan Culture Wars redirects the global dialogue about Afghanistan to Afghans and thereby challenges top-down narratives of humanitarian development.

This talk will be moderated by Prof. Sumanth Inukonda (LaGuardia Community College/CUNY).

Purchase Book: https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p085451

Co-Sponsor
Asian American / Asian Research Institute – CUNY

 

Author Bio

Presented By:

Wazhmah Osman is an assistant professor in Temple University’s Department of Media Studies and Production and a faculty member in both the Master of Science in Globalization and Development Communication program and the Ph.D. program in Media and Communication. She is a faculty affiliate of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies (GSWS) program, as well as the South Asia Center at University of Pennsylvania.

Osman earned her Ph.D. in 2012 from New York University, where she studied Media, Culture and Communication. She is also a graduate of the Culture and Media program in Anthropology. Her research and teaching are rooted in feminist media ethnographies that focus on the political economy of global media industries and the regimes of representation and visual culture they produce.

Osman's book, Television and the Afghan Culture Wars: Brought to You by Foreigners, Warlords, and Activists (University of Illinois Press, 2020), analyzes the impact of international funding and cross-border media flows on the national politics of Afghanistan, the region and beyond. She is also researching how new technologies of war, violence and representation, predicated on old colonial tropes, are being repackaged and deployed during “the war on terror.” Her critically acclaimed documentary, Postcards from Tora Bora, has been shown in festivals around the world.