Digital Unsettling: Decoloniality and Dispossession in the Age of Social Media

Digital Unsettling explores how digital networks are positioned within the enduring structures of coloniality, examining events such as the toppling of statues in the UK, the proliferation of #BLM activism globally, and the rise of Hindu nationalists in North America. It demonstrates how the internet has become the key site for an invigorated anticolonial internationalism but has also augmented conditions of racial hierarchy within nations, the international order, and the liminal spaces that shape human migration.

Format: Hardback
Length: 256 pages
Publication date: 11 April 2023
Publisher: New York University Press

Digital networks have become increasingly influential in shaping contemporary decolonizing movements, as evidenced by the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, and other global protests. Digital Unsettling, a critical exploration of digitalization, examines the forms, forces, and processes that have reinforced neocolonial relations within contemporary digital environments. Sahana Udupa and Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan interrogate the ways in which digital networks have disrupted entrenched hierarchies and created new opportunities for anticolonial internationalism. The book explores events such as the toppling of statues in the UK, the proliferation of #BLM activism globally, the rise of Hindu nationalists in North America, and the trolling of academics, and how they circulated online and across national boundaries. Udupa and Dattatreyan demonstrate how the internet has become the key site for an invigorated anticolonial internationalism, but has simultaneously augmented conditions of racial hierarchy within nations, in the international order, and in the liminal spaces that shape human migration and the lives of those that are on the move. Digital Unsettling establishes a critical framework for placing digitalization within the longue durée of coloniality, while also revealing the complex ways in which the internet is entwined with persistent global calls for decolonization.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781479819140