Recolonising East to West: McLuhan’s “tribal” village

With well over 100,000 citations and counting, Marshall McLuhan continues to be an important and controversial figure in media and communication studies on the tribalised society of the “global village.” Since 2019, McLuhan theory has appeared as a key factor in sports, music and religious studies, as well as feminist and Black feminist studies, adding to a long history of divergent applications of his global village theory. I argue that McLuhan’s style is central to the disparate definitions of his theory, owing to the way in which his writing functions like a colonizing system of representation. Especially in Understanding Media (UM), his syntax hammers out what he called “aphoristic formula” with profusions of stereotypes for the world he saw “tribalised” by electronic media, including representations of dark indigenous clans within a violent tribal “universe.” Readers of McLuhan’s UM can find, and have found, flexible, multivalent spaces of tribal definition within his texts, including the definition that completely ignores the worn racist trope. Using Voyant term-mining, I counter the approach of scholars who align McLuhan’s racist typing with 20th-century ethnography and “primitive” language surrogates. Instead, I place McLuhan’s tribal village in the context of colonial and Enlightenment notions of “primitive” others, and I conclude by suggesting that the current adaptation of McLuhan theory comes at a cost for the new generation of scholars who explore globalization and power relations in media environments.