ABSTRACT
The work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is deeply insightful in connecting public relations theory to postcolonial studies. Postcolonial studies as a eld of inquiry not only seeks to understand the processes underlying colonization, but also is committed to an emancipatory politics that attempts to undo these processes of colonization; it is fundamentally transformative in seeking to alter those knowledge structures that erase the stories of violence inherent in global neocolonial con gurations and create spaces for listening to the voices of the subaltern sectors of the globe. Connecting the histories and geographies of colonialism with the project of modernity and modern knowledge structures, postcolonial scholarship1 attempts to “redo such epistemic structures by writing against them, over them, and from below them by inviting reconnections to obliterated presents that never made their way into the history of knowledge” (Shome & Hegde, 2002, p. 250). With reference to theorizing and scholarship in public relations, a postcolonial approach draws attention to the unequal terrain of disciplinary knowledge in public relations that has been dominated by primarily U.S.-based and to some extent, Europe-based perspectives-see, for instance the two
volumes on public relations theory edited by Botan and Hazleton (1989, 2006). Further, the deconstructive move in the postcolonial approach creates openings for disciplinary transformations through the interrogation of the taken-for-granted assumptions in Westcentric productions of knowledge (Broadfoot & Munshi, 2007 ; Dutta-Bergman, 2005; Pal & Dutta, 2008a,b).
