Global communication and the scalar politics of race: tensions in transnational articulations of (anti)-racism(s)

The media and cultural imperialism paradigm’s reliance on Marxist world-system analysis and class as well as the globalization paradigm’s faith in cosmopolitanism ensured that debates on race have been relatively uncommon in the field of global media and communication studies. Recent literature on race and digital technology has put race firmer on the map in our wider field but the bulk of this work has been nation-centric and not addressed the tensions in transnational articulations of (anti)-racism(s). This article develops an analytical framework —“the scalar politics of race”—to make sense of the ways in which a range of different actors strategically deploy scale to address race via social media, legacy media and physical space. I apply this framework to three case studies which examine the global disciplining of national forms of racism, the hegemony of transnational forms of anti-racism and solidarity and translocal appropriations of anti-racism.