Book review: Valerie Alia, The New Media Nation: Indigenous Peoples and Global Communication

Book review: Valerie Alia, The New Media Nation: Indigenous Peoples and Global Communication

Valerie Alia, The New Media Nation: Indigenous Peoples and Global Communication. Oxford and
New York: Berghahn Books, 2009, 270 pp., US$80 (hbk).

Reviewed by: Andrew Jakubowicz, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology
Sydney, Australia

Source
 doi: 10.1177/1750481311426907 DISCOURSE & COMMUNICATION February 2012 vol. 6 no. 1 125-127

Abstract
The New Media Nation is the second volume of Berghahn Books’ Anthropology of Media
series. Author, anthropologist, film-maker and poet Valeria Alia has been working on this
project for more than 20 years; it represents the culmination of fieldwork wherever first
peoples survive and communicate with each other and the wider world. Although her
major area of interest remains the societies of the Arctic region, this book, while including
case studies from that area, also explores Indigenous media in countries like New Zealand
Aotarea and Australia. Her proposal is made on opening, namely that ‘[s]ome of the
world’s least powerful people are leading the way toward creative and global media citizenship’
(p. 7). One is reminded of Eric Michaels’s revelations of Indigenous creativity
and communicative innovation from his 1986 The Aboriginal Invention of Television,
reporting the Warlpiri people’s Yuendemu project at Ernabella. Alia proposes that the use
of media is allowing Indigenous peoples to reform their nations, thus producing society
through discursive practices.
Alia argues her thesis that the failure to acknowledge Indigenous media’s range and
diversity reflects the continuing power of colonial and post-colonial cultures and the
central role that their media play in interpreting the world. Her opening chapter seeks to
show the range of Indigenous media around the world, encompassing the strength of
North American, Australian, Maori and other operations, from the local and low tech to
the more wide-reaching and technologically sophisticated. In particular she looks to the
appropriation of technologies of communication to reassert a contemporary Indigenous
voice, one that integrates tradition with innovation, that projects culture through digital
and electronic forms. These appropriations are often turned back on the colonizer,
parodying their pretensions, and demonstrating the weird and inappropriate behaviour
that lurks in the history books of the invaders.