The Munchetty Controversy: Empire, Race and the BBC

Abstract

In September 2019, Naga Munchetty, a BBC presenter, was charged by the corporation as having breached its guidelines in sharing her personal experience of racism in reaction to Donald Trump's “Go Back” outburst at four female political opponents, an incident understood worldwide as a racist attack. The BBC, acting on complaints from some viewers, upheld that Munchetty had partially breached its journalistic guidelines in speaking about her experience of racism. This article, through a postcolonial critique of the incident, argues that the BBC guidelines and the censure of Munchetty have to be viewed through an organizational “dual consciousness” of the libidinal economy of the BBC as part of the British Empire and being an active broker of race relations in Britain through the national broadcasting space as a public service broadcaster. The BBC, both as an organization and a broadcaster, is inscribed through its historicity and a long trajectory of “fixing” the identity of the racial “Other.” In the Munchetty controversy, her racial subjectivity is made “uncanny” or alien to the racialized subject through the BBC's organizational ethos of “objectivity and impartiality” to reassemble race as fiction within its “regime of representation.”