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, alongside the globalization paradigm’s faith in cosmopolitanism, has made debates on race relatively uncommon in global media and communication studies. Recent literature on race and digital technology has placed race more firmly on the map within our wider field, but the bulk of this work remains nation-centric and has not addressed the tensions in transnational articulations of (anti)-racism(s). This article develops an analytical framework—“the scalar politics of race”—to understand how various actors strategically deploy scale to address race via social media, legacy media, and physical space. I apply this framework to 3 case studies, examining the global disciplining of national forms of racism, the hegemony of transnational forms of anti-racism and solidarity, and translocal appropriations of anti-racism.