Book Reviews 
 

Book

Television and the Afghan Culture Wars

Media and Culture

By Muhammad Omar Iftikhar | April 2021

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“One of my fondest memories as a child growing up in Kabul in the 1970s was gathering with my extended family to watch television at my grandparents’ house” This is the opening line of the Introduction from Television and the Afghan Culture Wars.

Wazhmah Osman presents a clear picture of what it was like to live in Afghanistan while being enveloped by its government’s laws and the strictness of the country’s cultural norms. Wazhmah Osman is a filmmaker and assistant professor at the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University in Philadelphia, United States. She is the co-director of the critically acclaimed documentary Postcards from Tora Bora and the co-author of Afghanistan: A Very Short Introduction.

In Television and the Afghan Culture Wars, Wazhmah presents an insider look into Afghanistan’s social norms and cultural narratives. The book’s six chapters cover a lot of insights into the social, ethnic, traditional, and political aspects of Afghanistan. The concept of the true Afghan culture is discussed in the light of how the Western media have been portraying it.

In the first chapter, “Legitimizing Modernity: Indigenous Modernities, Foreign Incursions, and Their Backlashes” Wazhmah shares a brief historical account of the reforms and sheds light on how the intervention of external forces (British, Soviet/Russian, American) changed the political and social fabric of Afghanistan. The era discussed ranges from the colonial times to the end of the Cold War.

In the second chapter, “Imperialism, Globalization, and Development: Overlaps and Disjunctures”, Wazhmah looks into how the involvement of other countries in Afghanistan’s state of affairs has affected its present day situation and stance in the region. She ponders over the impact of the ‘post-9/11 international development interventions’. In the section, “Imperial Ambitions: Foreign Projects, Occupations, and Invasions”, Wazhmah writes, “Known as the ‘Gateway to Asia’, Afghanistan has historically been at the crossroads of imperial ambitions. In what was called the Great Game, the colonial powers of England and Russia would often instigate trouble, pitting the various ethnic groups against one another.”

The third chapter, “Afghan Television Production: A Distinctive Political Economy”, presents a holistic view of the key rudiments that comprise the television industry of Afghanistan. She discusses the political players who have been exercising their influence over the industry that has its links with foreign and other ethnic groups.

The book’s fourth chapter, “Producers and Production: The Development Gaze and the Imperial Gaze”, gives an overview of how television is observed in Western and non-Western nations. She writes, “Every new media technology is celebrated for its utopian promises and liberatory potentials – and also criticized for its dystopian possibilities. Television in the West has been seen through both lenses; in the United States, where commercial models have dominated, it has often been considered “a vast wasteland” (Minow 1961) (with the exception of public and community television), while in the UK, television is imagined as a technology for the uplift and education of the citizenry of the democratic nation.”

Wazhmah writes in chapter five, “Reaching Vulnerable and Dangerous Populations: Women and the Pashtuns”, “In Afghanistan, two of the main targets of social uplift and modernization projects of most television stations are women and ethnic Pashtuns – also historically the object of the colonial gaze and civilizing missions.”

The sixth chapter, “Reception and Audiences: The Demands and Desires of Afghan People” investigates the dynamics of the want and need of the audiences concerning how these aspects are thought upon by the producers and industry people (experts, decision-makers). Wazhmah talks about how audiences are imagined; audience feedback, technologies and measurements, the rating industry, and how Afghan and foreign programming reflects on the audiences’ tastes and identification.

Paula Chakravartty, co-editor of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime, has endorsed the book by saying, “This is the first richly observed ethnographic account of the landscape of media in post-US invasion Afghanistan. Osman’s self-reflexive voice in telling the story of the dynamic media field in Afghanistan is in and of itself of import. The limited scholarship that exists on media and democracy under occupation in the Global South tends to reproduce paternalistic narratives of development. In contrast, this critical work foregrounds the geopolitical context that leads to a television ‘boom,’ highlighting the important role of women and ethnic minority communities in Afghan media production and consumption. Television and the Afghan Culture Wars is a must read for scholars and students of global media and American empire.”

According to Matt Sienkiewicz, author of The Other Air Force: U.S. Efforts to Reshape Middle Eastern Media since 9/11, “Television and the Afghan Culture Wars is an insightful, powerful book. Weaving together nuanced ethnography, complex media theory, and even a touch of personal memoir, Osman provides a compelling perspective on the world of Afghan television. Nuanced and deeply researched, the book is an important contribution to a number of fields, including war and conflict studies, media globalization, and development communication.”

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