Postcolonial Theory and Public Relations

Postcolonial theory is a relatively new lens through which to examine the academic discipline of public relations and other corporate and governmental practices. In essence, postcolonial theory offers the rationale for interventions that uncover traces of colonialist styles of thinking manifested in prevailing discourses on economy, society, culture, and politics.

Postcolonial is a way of theorizing challenges and resistances to dominant, often Western, theoretical and methodological perspectives. This interdisciplinary tool has been used extensively in literary criticism and cultural studies to critique the takenfor-granted worldviews of mainstream Euro-American writers, scholars, and thinkers. In recent years, postcolonial scholars have been trying to articulate radical new ways of understanding the world that challenge both overt and covert forms of economic, social, and cultural imperialism.

The postcolonial perspective gained currency in the domain of communication studies when Communication Theory brought out a special issue on the subject. In their introductory essay in this issue, Raka Shome and Radha Hegde pointed out that “there is a growing awareness of the limitations and parochialism of theory so steeped in Eurocentrism that it either ignores completely or oversimplifies the complexity of the ‘rest’ of the world” (2002, p. 260). Postcolonial theory plays a significant role in not only making sense of this complexity on the fluid matrix of a deterritorialized world but also in communicating this complexity.

In public relations literature, one of the earliest references to postcolonial theory is in a 1996 essay by Nancy Roth, Todd Hunt, Maria Stavropoulos, and Karen Babik, who, drawing on postcolonial scholar Edward Said (1978), talk about the need to address issues of relative power in the framing of universal ethical principles for the practice of public relations.

Power, which is central to postcolonial theory, is often neglected in the study of public relations. The discipline of public relations, of course, does acknowledge multiculturalism. But although the recognition of multiple identities, cultures, and ethnicities is a crucial first step in acknowledging demographic, ideological, and cultural diversities in the world, postcolonial scholars argue that global relationships and interactions have to be understood in terms of existing power differentials within and among nations, institutions, and organizations. For instance, one of the key postcolonial projects is to show how Western or West-trained policymakers seek to control power by legitimizing Western ways of thinking manifested in the Western paradigm of global management.

In the domain of public relations, there is an overwhelming emphasis on the communication of corporate goals. This communication is channeled through messages about a dominant, largely Western, model of economic growth and development. Such a model, postcolonialists argue, is often shaped more by powerful Western or West-based multinational corporations and their strategic publics in the market, trade, finance, and high technology sectors than by the needs and aspirations of a vast majority of the global population. In other words, publics that are not perceived to be “strategic” are marginalized or ignored.

A postcolonial examination of the predominantly Western paradigm of public relations is carried out by Debashish Munshi and David McKie, who postulated that the more common “homogenised worldview of public relations maintains old colonial legacies that support neo-colonial economic interests” (2001, p. 16). They pointed out, for example, that the Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984 in India, which claimed thousands of lives and maimed countless others, continues to be seen through the eyes of a [Page 632]major Western corporation (Union Carbide). Most mainstream public relations literature continues to depict the ways in which the company dealt with the crisis and maintained its line of communication with its shareholders and investors. The fundamental aim of the mainstream public relations approach in this case was to manage the impact the case had in the United States, where the corporation was based. The voice of the victims of the tragedy, akin to the marginalized subaltern publics of colonial historiography, is rarely heard in such depictions. Clearly, therefore, there is a significant power differential among a diverse range of publics.

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