‘Fiwi TV:’ Ethnic media and the West Indian diaspora

Abstract

This article explores the Caribbean International Network (CIN), analyzing the ideological work it performs for West Indian audiences within the cultural, socio-political and economic contexts in which it operates. I identify the specific messages that the network proffers to its audiences, and the subsequent image of the Caribbean being constructed through its rhetoric and content. The analysis of the network specifically entails assessment of its structural features, the nature and origins of its programming, as well as the manner in which it presents itself in the public sphere through its website and press releases.

Keywords

diaspora ethnic media neoliberalism West Indians

Migration is a perennial feature of the Caribbean existence, and one that distinguishes this region from others in the western hemisphere where emigration is relatively recent (Chaney, 1987). In spite of the issue of brain-drain and other concerns associated with the departure of citizens, outward migration is not seen as a problem from the Caribbean perspective, but as an institutionalized strategy for economic betterment. The recruitment of English-speaking, skilled workers by the United States since 1965 – coupled with barriers against Commonwealth immigration erected by Britain in the 1960s – has encouraged the migration of English-speaking Caribbean peoples (West Indians) to the United States, and has led to the creation of significant West Indian communities there. New York City’s five boroughs, particularly Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, host one of the largest populations of West Indian immigrants in the United States. Numbering more than half a million, this is about five times the size of the population of Grenada, and twice the size of that of Barbados (Foner, 2001; US Census Bureau, 2012). When considered together, immigrants from the Anglophone Caribbean constitute the largest immigrant group in the city (Foner, 2001). Driven by desire and necessity, West Indians abroad use various forms of communication to maintain connections to their homelands. While personal communicative methods (including mobile phones, emails and social networking sites) are significant in the maintenance of this transnationalism (Miller and Slater, 2000), mass mediated communication methods, specifically migrant media, are also important in the diaspora as they not only transmit information from and about ‘home’, they also inform the diasporic subjectivities of their audiences.

Diasporic identity and ethnic media

As elucidated in the works of scholars such as Stuart Hall, James Clifford and Avtar Brah, diasporic identities are not simply moments on the assimilation–insulation continuum, but rather discursive spaces that are being continuously negotiated and remade in response to the cultural and social discourses within their diasporic space (Brah, 2003; Clifford, 1994; Hall, 1993). In this sense then, diasporic identities exist in a temporal ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1994) where their original influences are remade to create unique and liminal phenomena. As Gentles-Peart and Hall (2012: 3) posit:

Diasporas … cannot be perceived as perpetuating cultures that have been fossilized or mummified. Rather, diasporic spaces have to be seen as actively producing new cultural practices and forms in which the traditions, values and mores of original homelands are recast within the new cultural context, and the dominant culture is reinterpreted to facilitate the practices from home.

Furthermore, given the power inequality among cultures, diasporic spaces reflect power struggles between the hegemonic cultural forms of immigrants’ new homes, and those of their homelands (Ong, 1996). These struggles are particularly salient for non-white peoples from the global south residing in the global north, as they often have to contend with ideologies that mark them as inferior and available for exploitation. Diasporic spaces and identities therefore entail negotiations with the imperialistic institutions and discourses in immigrants’ countries of residence.

Ethnic media are instrumental to the construction of this space as they are some of the places that provide the discourses that immigrants use to construct their subjectivities and sensibilities in their new homes. As Leela Tanikella (2009: 170) states, ‘media producers are important agents in the production of diasporic communities because they … reflect locally constructed identities back to the target communities and also represent these identities in the public sphere’. Therefore, media oriented towards West Indians provide the texts, scripts and discourses that shape the way West Indians conceive of and present themselves in the United States. Given their discursive potential, it is worthwhile to explore the particular information disseminated by West Indian migrant media institutions, and consider the ways in which they help their audiences to reimage or sustain themselves and their place in the cultural and socio-political milieu of their new home. This article explores the nature of and possible ideological work performed by a West Indian television network in New York City, analyzing and contextualizing the discourses and rhetoric propagated by the medium, and assessing their implications for the diasporic community they address.

Ethnic media research

Among American scholars and professionals, ethnic or migrant media have been widely assumed and accepted as mass media originating from within diasporic communities with the purpose of addressing the immigrants’ cultural and social needs. However, this assumption simplifies the actualities of ethnic media industries and their productions. First, with current advances in technology, media content (particularly broadcast) now transcends national spheres (Appadurai, 1993), increasing the possibility of diasporic communities accessing the mass media of their countries of origin (Albizu, 2007). In fact, much of the material disseminated by ethnic media is created in the immigrants’ homelands, and reproduced in the diaspora (Shi, 2009). These cross-border contents are embedded with the cultural discourses and ideologies of immigrants’ homelands, and undoubtedly influence their negotiation of their new cultural space. Second, the assumption reifies the myth that all ethnic media are community-based, non-profit institutions, and thus the counterpart of mainstream/commercial media. It presumes that ethnic media are always already working on behalf of their audiences, and committed to the empowerment and upliftment of their target communities. This is problematic because it ignores the commercialized nature of contemporary ethnic media and, as Yu Shi (2009: 606) demonstrates, it pre-empts research that ‘investigates whether the commercial nature of … contemporary ethnic outlets sets limits to their ability to attend to the weak and the poor’.

The extant literature in ethnic mass media research in the United States further suggests that such media are crucial in both enabling and encumbering immigrants’ assimilation or acculturation into American culture and society. Some researchers in this area have argued that ethnic media often aid immigrants to acculturate to their new homes by serving as instruments of social control, promoting the dominant ideology of the receiving society, and socializing communities to contemporary or modern standards (Johnson, 2000; Riggins, 1992; Viswanath and Arora, 2000). Concurrently, pluralistic functions of ethnic media – services that help to sustain ethnic differentiation in the majority society (Subervi-Velez, 1986) – have also been prolifically identified. Significant pluralistic functions of ethnic media include the preservation and transmission of the culture of the homeland (Johnson, 2000; Lin and Song, 2006), the sustenance of ethnic identification and ethnic pride (Jeffres, 2000), and the creation of imagined communities among expatriates (Naficy, 1993).

In this sense then, ethnic media research has been preoccupied with assessing the efficacy of ethnic media in connecting immigrants to their homelands, or in fostering relationships with the dominant cultures of their new homes. In other words, many of the studies take a macro, functionalist approach to ethnic media, focusing on how these institutions work to maintain the immigrant or dominant community, but conducting little semiotic analysis of the ideologies and discourses that they proffer. Such an approach obscures issues of power at work in and around ethnic media, and fails to interrogate their relationship to the ‘mainstream ideological apparatus of power’ (Shi, 2009: 599), and the extent to which they import and reinforce the power structures of immigrants’ homelands.

Rather than simply assessing how ethnic media may function to pull from or push towards the dominant culture, we should also examine the myriad discourses embodied within their texts, and their implications for immigrants’ self-presentation and navigation of their cultural space. In other words, as Ginsburg et al. (2002: 3) suggest, we need to situate ethnic media as a ‘social practice within … shifting political and cultural frames’ so that we may be able to address ‘how media enable or challenge the workings of power and the potential of activism; the enforcement of inequality … and the impact of technologies on the production of individual and collective identities’.

In light of this evaluation of current research, I argue that we need what Lawrence Grossberg (2006) refers to as a ‘radically contextualist’ approach to studying ethnic media: we need to study ethnic media in the context of the set of relations and material conditions in which they operate. Such an approach precludes a priori assumptions, over-generalizations and essentialism, and facilitates situated (as opposed to purely theoretical) semiotic interpretations of ethnic media symbols (Grossberg, 2006). With this in mind, I turn, then, to the Caribbean International Network (CIN), with a case study of the FiWi Choice Top Ten Chart Show, analyzing the ideological work it performs for its audiences within the cultural, socio-political and economic contexts in which it operates. I identify the specific messages that the network proffers to its audiences, and the subsequent image of the Caribbean being constructed through its rhetoric and content. The analysis of the network specifically entails assessment of its structural features, the nature and origins of its programming, as well as the manner in which it presents itself in the public sphere through its website and press releases.

CIN and the commodification of a diaspora

There are several media produced by and for West Indian immigrants living in New York City and the surrounding areas, a landscape dominated by terrestrial radio (music) stations and web-based newspapers. However, CIN prides itself in being the only television service that specifically targets the ‘Caribbean American’ communities situated on the east coast of the United States. Launched in 1996 by Stephen Hill and Ronnie Nasralla, the network is based in Kingston, Jamaica, and airs on New York City’s Channel 73, a venue for leased-time programming from international program producers. It broadcasts over 27 hours of ‘Caribbean’ programs each week (usually on the weekend) that ‘make sure that … Caribbean-Americans stay connected to their rich history and culture’ through the presentation of ‘timely, accurate and inspiring’ content (CIN, 2013). CIN currently offers 15 shows, featuring news, sports, drama, music and lifestyle programs, as well as specials and lecture series that highlight the achievements and thoughts of Caribbean nationals. Most of the programs are re-broadcasts of shows created in the Caribbean.

This content is available to audiences in the five boroughs of New York City as well as New Jersey and Connecticut. According to CIN, in 2004, a Nielsen Media Research Telephone Coincidental targeting the Caribbean populations in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx showed that CIN had the fourth largest rating in this demographic when compared to the seven major networks received in the area (CIN, 2013). In addition to disseminating on-air content, CIN also supports social, cultural and educational programs in the Caribbean as well as New York City, and endorses elected officials in the United States who promote the interests of the Caribbean community (CIN, 2013).

The success of CIN in legitimizing its presence among New York-based Caribbean media is manifested in the network’s affiliation with influential members of the political, economic and intellectual communities of the Caribbean. For example, its repertoire of speakers in the lecture series include past prime ministers of Jamaica, the honorable P.J. Paterson and Edward Seaga; the late Rex Nettleford, Jamaican scholar, social critic and choreographer; Ronnie Thwaites, Jamaican politician, lawyer and broadcaster; and Lowell Hawthorne, Jamaican-born international entrepreneur (The Gleaner, 2012). In addition, CIN has partnerships with premier media corporations in the West Indies, including the Gleaner Company (owner of The Gleaner and the Star newspapers), which sponsors the CIN lecture series (The Gleaner, 2012), and Television Jamaica Limited (Morgan, 2001), the number one television station in Jamaica (The Gleaner, 2011).

The significance of CIN is also evident in the community’s (specifically West Indian) engagement with the network. My participation in the community, and interactions and relationships with members of the community, reveal that CIN is a popular destination for information about ‘home’, specifically as related to news and entertainment. West Indians of all nationalities tune in to newscasts and music-based programs to get up-to-date information on the social, political and economic aspects of their islands. For them, the network provides an experience with their ‘homes’, complete with familiar sights and sounds, that cannot be replicated in its aural and print counterparts.

Notwithstanding its distinction as a major conduit of information between the Caribbean and its diasporas in New York City, CIN’s actual practices perpetuate the essentialization and commodification of peoples from the region. First, despite its claim to ‘Caribbean’ programming, as suggested by its name, most of the shows are created by and address Jamaicans. Of the 15 programs in CIN’s repertoire, 12 of them exclusively present Jamaican news, sports or entertainment, two comprise Trinidadian content, and one presents a mixture of Jamaican and Trinidadian fare. Furthermore, as part of its selling points, CIN boasts that it broadcasts more reggae, the dominant Jamaican musical genre, than any other television station in the United States (CIN, 2013). Thus CIN programming is not representative of the Caribbean; rather, it addresses a small section of the West Indies or the Anglophone Caribbean, notably Jamaica, the largest English-speaking island in the Caribbean.

Another very conspicuous feature of CIN is its business imperatives. Similar to many other ethnic media in the United States (see for example Shi, 2009; Tanikella, 2009), CIN is a commercial medium, relying on advertisers and sponsors to fund its operations. As such, a significant part of its work is to attract potential advertisers, which it does by offering up the large West Indian communities in New York City. CIN boasts that it is the most effective connection to ‘powerful Caribbean consumers’, and explicitly states that it aims to provide ‘the most affordable and efficient media platform for [its] sponsors to air their commercials, thereby importantly increasing their sales and market share’ (CIN, 2013).

The construction of the Caribbean diaspora as a market (to both Caribbean and United States based businesses) is also evident in the press releases and public records of the network. For example, in a statement announcing the addition of the Jamaican program Rising Star to the CIN offerings, the network states that ‘CIN continues to spread its wings and afford [its] sponsors deeper market penetration into the large Caribbean community’ (Jamaica.com, 2007). This statement suggests that CIN’s expansion of its program catalogue is less about building cultural connections, and more about providing access to the ‘Caribbean’ diasporic consumers. Therefore, while CIN provides an avenue for select Caribbean expatriates to interact with the cultures of their homelands, the network is also committed to and immersed in the selling of West Indian expatriates to businesses. In fact, based on its self-representation, the purpose of CIN is to create consumers; it deploys the promise of connections to ‘home’ as a means to attract West Indian expatriates, not to forge a community, but to build a market.

The network’s commercial motive is further evident in its choice of name. Deploying the term ‘Caribbean’ in its title is a commercial strategy that allows CIN to advantageously position itself in the media landscape of the United States. It immediately distinguishes the network from other broadcasting services in the area, and readily attracts audiences and businesses with interest in this region. Moreover, while ‘West Indian’ is prolifically used in the Anglophone Caribbean community (and would be a more appropriate title given CIN’s main focus), ‘Caribbean’ has more cultural currency in the United States at large, and better facilitates the network’s successful participation in the United States market. Likewise, emphasizing Jamaica (and to a lesser extent Trinidad and Tobago) in its line-up is also a good business move. Jamaicans comprise the largest West Indian immigrant group in New York City (almost 200,000 strong, according to the 2010 United States Census) and represent CIN’s largest potential audience. It is therefore in the best commercial interest of CIN to court and accommodate this large community.

In this sense then, CIN reflects the values of the neoliberal American media. Economic neoliberalism refers to policies and processes that promote the deregulation and privatization of businesses so as to achieve optimum economic performance and enhance profit-making opportunities (Kotz, 2002; McChesney, 2001). In the United States media industry (and the global media at large), this pursuit of profit has led to the relaxation or elimination of barriers to the commercialization of media and the proliferation of concentrated media ownership (McChesney, 2001). Highly concentrated, commercialized media have significant cultural and political implications, including compromising the free press necessary to maintain a democracy and undermining citizens’ rights of freedom of expression (McChesney, 2001).

This model of media ownership is also problematic in its commodification of media audiences (Bermejo, 2009). According to Dallas Smythe (1977), capitalistic (commercialized) media, with their prioritization of private interests and profit, use their content to manufacture and serve up media audiences to advertising companies. He says, ‘the information, entertainment and “educational” material transmitted to the audience is an inducement (gift, bribe or “free lunch”) to recruit potential members of the audience and to maintain their loyal attention’ (Smythe, 1997: 5).

This commodification is explicit in the mission of CIN. Framing itself as a means of connection to their cultural heritage, CIN entices viewership from Caribbean audiences on the east coast of the United States, garnering ‘eye balls’ which it then offers to advertisers in exchange for sponsorship. Furthermore, its commercial mandate, which dictates that CIN appeal to the largest audience possible, necessarily results in the exclusion of most West Indian cultures represented in the diaspora. The market imperatives of CIN thus diminish the network’s ability to truly address the diversity of the West Indies, and limit its potential to act as a platform for advocacy for the community. In this sense, then, CIN has abdicated its role in constructing informed citizens and empowering communities (Miller, 2006).

The ideological work of CIN

In addition to political economy implications, the structure and content of CIN necessarily has ideological implications for the diaspora. First, it may function as an empowering, unifying factor for those from the West Indies. Within the American broadcast media context, stations have become ultra-specialized, catering to and representing increasingly more specific groups. Nevertheless, none speaks to any sector of the large West Indian communities that exist in the United States. Furthermore, West Indians in general have been misrepresented by the media industry, and have been relegated to stereotypical images in the commercial media. Specifically, Jamaicans are often depicted as violent and criminal, as exotic and life-giving, as having a propensity for dreadlocks and bright colors, and as self-sacrificing, loving nurses or nannies (Du Bois, 2004; Vickerman, 1991). This ‘symbolic annihilation’ (Tuchman, 1978) perpetrated by the commercial media of America is indicative of Jamaicans’ exclusion from cultural citizenship in the United States. By fostering a mediated space in which one of their languages and accompanying sensibilities are privileged and celebrated, CIN participates in the politics of recognition (Taylor, 1994), providing a counterpoint that challenges the literal and symbolic erasure of West Indians from American media fare. Therefore, while problematic in its commodification of the West Indian diaspora, the network does provide West Indian immigrants to the United States with some cultural representation, and thus helps them gain cultural citizenship, the right to be known and to speak in the cultural context of the United States (Miller, 2006).

Ironically, while the presence of CIN works to allow the margins to speak back to the center, and thus contest existing power structures, it also enacts its own hierarchies. First, CIN’s practice of privileging Jamaica reinforces the cultural hierarchy of the Caribbean. More specifically, the prominence of Jamaican televisual fare on this ‘Caribbean’ network reproduces and sustains the ‘Jamaicanization’ of the Caribbean so prevalent in the global sphere. Largely owing to the proliferation of reggae music, images of Rastafarian dreadlocks, and the red, green and gold emblazoned on global television commercials, Jamaica and its (essentialized) culture have now become synonymous with ‘Caribbean’ (Mulligan, 2007). This conception fosters the idea that there is little distinction between ‘one island and the next … nothing but sand, sea and sun from Bahamas to Bonaire’, and that the islands embrace a singular ‘belief in the [Jamaican] “one love”’ (Mulligan, 2007: 118).

This homogenization of the region makes it difficult for individual islands to promote their uniqueness in the region (Mulligan, 2007), and to develop distinct identities in the diaspora as their citizens tend to get subsumed under the ‘Jamaican’ identity. This negatively influences the level of empowerment and optimism that non-Jamaican West Indians (particularly those from less visible islands) incorporate into their self-representations in the United States. Rather than helping to problematize and deconstruct this singular image of the Caribbean and the West Indies, CIN instead becomes a part of the media that reinforce it. In fact, even as the network attempts to ameliorate the ‘symbolic annihilation’ of West Indians in the United States, it perpetrates its own eradication of the Caribbean and West Indies by focusing almost exclusively on Jamaica.

Furthermore, CIN shores up the socio-linguistic power structure of Jamaica. Necessarily and ineludibly so, all the programs are broadcast in English, specifically the English bearing the particular phonological characteristics of educated, upper-class urbanite Jamaicans (Sand, 1999). Standard English is the official language of Jamaica and is expected in formal communications, the educational system, the government and journalistic media (Sand, 1999). However, the dominant oral language of Jamaica is patois or Jamaican Creole, which is the medium of communication in informal settings, popular music, folkloric literature and, most recently, social media. Despite their enactment in disparate social spheres, these two linguistic forms do not exist in a binary, but rather, much like other places in the West Indies, they are spoken on a continuum; Jamaicans employ variations of the combination of the languages based on interpersonal, social and cultural contexts (DeCamp, 1971; Sand, 1999).

However, the variations in this code- and ‘style-switching’ (Sand, 1999) are not neutral, but are signifiers that connote class, erudition and status. Specifically, variations that are performed with the particular enunciation of uptown Kingston – the geographical and symbolic center of the Jamaican elite – connote education at a ‘good’ school and high social status. This association was cultivated in the pre-independence era in Jamaica when an emerging middle class gained access to and became the beneficiaries of schooling established and run by the colonial class. Colonial erudition, and subsequent access to professions, gave this middle class the ability to negotiate with both the laboring and the colonial classes (Brown, 1979), securing them a dominant position in society that continued after Jamaica gained independence in 1962, and still persists today. One of the most distinguishable markers of this class (then and now) is a particular mode of speaking cultivated under colonial tutelage that immediately differentiates its speakers from those of the lower, laboring classes.

Several variations on the Standard English–creole continuum are evident in the programs of CIN, but the one constant across all the shows is the use of the ‘uptown’ inflection. The prevalence of this lilt in Jamaican media is not unusual as this is the accent of choice for Jamaican broadcasters. However, broadcasting programs in this accent to the diaspora has significant implications for its audiences. It privileges the speech of the Jamaican elite in the diaspora, explicitly importing and reinforcing the social discourses of Jamaica in the diasporic space of New York City. Furthermore, by emphasizing a particular class-based, Jamaican speech code, CIN participates in a larger historical colonial hierarchy: it perpetuates the class divisions fostered under colonial rule, which continue to plague contemporary Jamaican society. These pre-migration, postcolonial discourses constantly remind the CIN audience of their original social positions, making it more difficult for them to shed their pre-migration positionalities, thus placing limits on the diasporic subjectivities that West Indians in general, and Jamaicans in particular, can imagine and develop in the United States. Therefore, even as it creates a space for the cultural voices of Jamaicans in New York City, CIN simultaneously reinforces dominant hierarchies, functioning as social control for the homeland, replicating, preserving and promoting the position of the elites.

Case study: Fiwi Choice and the transcultural imaginary

One of the most popular programs in the CIN line-up is FiWi Choice Top Ten Chart Show (FiWi Choice), a weekly half-hour program that highlights the most popular reggae and dancehall songs in Jamaica for the week. The show began its broadcast in 2009, and currently comprises the presentation of the music videos of the most popular songs on the island, and interviews with two of the top artists of the week. The program also includes specialized segments, including an ‘opinion-on-the-street’ segment where ‘typical’ Jamaicans respond to topical issues, and a gossip corner where the latest news about artists and their lives is disseminated. A host (usually female) moderates the countdown and conducts the interviews. As one of the quintessential programs of the CIN catalogue, examination of FiWi Choice provides further insights into the ideological work of CIN. Exploration of the program entails analysis of 20 episodes that aired between January 2009 and December 2010. These episodes are analyzed regarding their use of language, the operation and execution of the program, the types of subjects discussed, and how they were presented.

FiWi Choice exhibits the characteristics observed across the spectrum of CIN programs (that is, it addresses a Jamaican audience and privileges the accent of the Jamaican elite), but it manifests other significant features as well. Perhaps the most noteworthy of these is its transcultural purview. A sense of borderlessness and cultural fluidity pervades the organization and content of FiWi Choice. This is evident in the manner in which songs are selected to be broadcast during each episode. The songs are chosen in a process that engages multiple communication platforms: viewers nominate their favorite songs by calling the music radio station FAME FM. The top 20 songs are then published in the Star (a major newspaper in the island) and on its website, and audience members vote for their favorite from the list by calling or texting a code using their mobile phones. In this way, FiWi Choice employs communication methods (such as mobile phone text messaging) that correspond to the material culture of Jamaicans at home and abroad.

As Miller and Slater (2000) found in Trinidad, the material culture of digital technology are important parts of the everyday lives of Jamaicans. However, in contrast to Trinidadian society, the internet and programs like email and instant messenger are not as widely used in Jamaica; instead, the communicative ecology of the Jamaican society has been dominated by the mobile phone (Horst, 2006; Horst and Miller, 2006; Miller 2006). Jamaica has one of the world’s highest levels of mobile phone ownership (Pertierra and Horst, 2009), with a 78.9% penetration rate (Horst and Miller 2006), and by the end of 2004, Jamaica had more than 2m subscribers out of a population of 2.6m. Nearly 8 out of every 10 persons owned or had access to a mobile phone device (Horst, 2006). This technology, buoyed by the arrival of the Digicel telecommunication company in Jamaica in 2001, has become a major mode of communication between Jamaica and its diaspora, helping to construct and maintain transnational communities. The mobile phone has enabled emigrant parents to more easily participate in the day-to-day affairs of their children, has changed the long-distance relationship between couples living abroad, and has simplified the coordination involved in sending and receiving remittances (Horst, 2006).

While the mobile phone has allowed Jamaicans at home to connect with and insert themselves within transnational spaces, this technology has also allowed Jamaican emigrants to participate in the social, cultural and political life of Jamaica. The decision of FiWi Choice to prominently feature these techniques in its operation strategically capitalizes on the popularity and centrality of these modes of communication in the lives of Jamaicans, but it also allows Jamaican expatriates to further their involvement in island life. Mobile phones allow Jamaicans to call the radio station, access the Star’s website, and text their votes from any geographic location; they do not have to be physically in Jamaica to participate, which permits participation by Jamaicans on the island as well as overseas. The opportunity for expatriates (and other nationals, for that matter) to contribute to the program fosters a public sphere where participation is not limited by location or geography. Therefore, by allowing engagement with Jamaican popular culture, FiWi Choice undoubtedly connects viewers to concrete Jamaican life, but because of its use of transnational communication technologies, the program also necessarily promotes an imagined (Anderson, 1983) global Jamaican community.

The content of FiWi Choice echoes this global consciousness. Specifically, the hosts and guests routinely include and make references to extra-Jamaican (particularly American) popular culture. In this age of global media flows and relatively easy access to international content, it is not unusual for ethnic programs to present news and information from around the world, particularly that coming from the United States. Furthermore, the Jamaican music industry has deep-seated ties in the United States. Its early and contemporary sounds are influenced by American rhythm and blues (R&B), many Jamaican promoters and record labels are based in the United States, many artistes are more popular in the reggae and dancehall circuits of the United States than in Jamaica, and American tours legitimize and bolster the careers of Jamaican artists in the eyes of Jamaicans (MacDonald, 2012). Therefore, references to the United States are not unusual. However, it is striking that a local program that claims to present ‘fiwi’ (‘our’) culture includes content from abroad.

Furthermore, this information is not presented in a discrete section on ‘international’ news, but rather is seamlessly interspersed throughout the show, prefaced by no introductory or explanatory remarks, and is embedded in American popular cultural references (such as songs, terminologies and celebrities). Thus FiWi Choice assumes an audience that is knowledgeable about American popular culture, and that is already equipped with the necessary contextual information to decode information. Within its programming then, FiWi Choice moves seamlessly between local and American content, fostering the impression that there is no barrier to access and participation in American culture. The show engenders a transcultural sensibility that encourages Jamaicans to look outwards. Therefore, contrary to findings of many scholars that ethnic programs predominantly insulate immigrants in the cultures of their homelands, FiWi Choice seems to call viewers to participate in a transcultural sphere where the culture of their homelands intersects with other cultures introduced through mediated or direct interactions.

Admittedly, this practice is problematic in several ways. First, the non-Jamaican content is predominantly from the United States with little reference to neighboring islands, reflecting the structures of dependency that characterize the relationship between Jamaica and the United States. Largely due to the region’s proximity to the United States and the size of their media industries, media in Jamaica (and in the Caribbean in general) rely heavily on programming and information from the United States, fostering a remarkable integration of American media content into the region (Pertierra and Horst, 2009). While media consumers in the region and its diaspora are not passive recipients of the texts – thus complicating the media imperialism paradigm (see for example Miller 1992) – this reproduction of American content reinforces the larger economic and structural relations of dependency. Furthermore, the media industries of the Caribbean disseminate information from a Euro-American perspective, and thus support the cultural, social and political interests of the more dominant nations of the world (Sheller, 2003). By engaging in dialogue with the United States instead of other developing countries of the Caribbean, FiWi Choice recuperates imperialistic structures, specifically communication patterns. As with postcolonial discourses in the diasporic space, neo-imperialistic practices such as these solidify rather than deconstruct hierarchies.

Second, it perpetuates the myth of the ‘global citizen’. Because of the ease of travel and communication outside of national borders, there is a popular belief that it is relatively easy and commonplace for individuals to move and settle freely around the world. However, the reality of the situation is that unfettered global mobility continues to elude the vast majority of nationals, particularly black and brown bodies moving from developing to developed nations (Ong, 1996). For people from the West Indies traveling to the West, immigration policies are huge obstacles, as most require visas for entry, an application process that is dehumanizing and prohibitive. If entry is granted, these travelers and immigrants have to contend with processes of marginalization. In her study of working-class West Indian women living in New York City, Gentles-Peart (2009) found that these women routinely encounter ethnocentric ideologies that label them as intellectually inferior, socially unsophisticated and culturally backward. They also have to contend with derision and marginalization from both black and white people in New York City, which fosters the construction of a complicated diasporic identity that resists the simplistic categorization of ‘black American’ (Gentles-Peart 2009). Furthermore, West Indians encounter racialization strategies within economic and social structures that threaten to track them into low-income neighborhoods, low-paying jobs and general downward mobility (Du Bois, 2000; Gentles-Peart, 2009; Waters, 1999). Therefore, the cosmopolitan sensibility of FiWi Choice highlights a very northern/western white ideology that obscures the challenges that real West Indians encounter as they cross cultural and national boundaries, and betrays a certain disconnect with their immigrant black audience.

Conclusion

CIN and its programs have a very ambivalent position in the West Indian community of New York City. As the only television service that exclusively addresses West Indians, the network helps to cultivate cultural citizenship for its audience, but its current practices undermine its ability to effectively allow the community to see and be seen. Operating within the context of neoliberal tenets, CIN actively commercializes and commodifies the West Indian community. The dominance of Jamaican programming in its supposedly ‘Caribbean’ repertoire essentializes the Caribbean and the West Indies, and renders invisible other nations of the region and their unique identities and cultures. In addition, by foregrounding the ‘uptown’ accent of the Jamaican elite, CIN endorses and maintains national and social divisions in the diasporic community, recuperating and projecting the pre-migration, postcolonial discourses into the diasporic space. CIN’s popular program, FiWi Choice, underscores this activity by advancing a transnational and transcultural sensibility that is not accessible to the majority of its audience, and by upholding hegemonic global relations.

The operations and programming of CIN thus undermine the strategic inventions that are possible within the West Indian diasporic space. As discussed before, diasporic identities are constructed and exist within liminal third spaces (Bhabha, 1994) where the values, traditions and ideologies of both the receiving country and the homeland are negotiated and remade, constructing cultural duality or hybrid identities. While not wholly liberating, the hybrid nature of the diasporic space has a subversive potential as it allows immigrants to rework dominant cultural norms. However, by circulating the hierarchies and ideologies of the West Indies into the diasporic space, CIN reminds West Indians in the United States of their pre-migration positionalities, and ‘interpolates’ them to reproduce them (Althusser, 1971). Rather than multiplying their reinvention possibilities (for instance, by being a forum for discussions about community issues, or providing information about resources for advancement), CIN operations constrain the process by projecting the past into the present. Furthermore, by presenting the ideologies and hierarchies constructed and/or fostered by Euro-American powers, CIN promotes the interests of the global north to the neglect of its own community.

Analysis of the CIN network in general and the FiWi Choice television program in particular challenges the popular conception of ethnic media as empowering for its audience. It also reveals that classification of ethnic media as assimilative or pluralistic does not adequately capture the discursive potential of ethnic mass media. Media oriented towards diasporic communities, particularly media originating from their homelands, respond to economic, cultural and political exigencies that foster the dissemination of complex and often ambiguous discourses into the diasporic space. These often concurrently challenge and reinforce the existing power structures of both the immigrants’ homelands and their new homes, actions that cannot be observed by simple evaluations of cultural preservation. We need to explore ethnic media on an ideological, not functional, level, highlighting the discourses that necessarily influence and contribute to the formation of diasporic identities.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Author biography

Kamille Gentles-Peart is an Associate Professor of Global Communication at Roger Williams University, USA. Her research explores West Indian women’s diasporic identity in the US. Her most recent publication is an edited volume titled Re-constructing Place and Space: Media, Power, and Identity in the Constitution of Caribbean Diasporas (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2012).

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