Page - 7 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/02

Editorial | 7www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/2, 7–14 Philippe Bornet, Stefanie Knauss, and Alexander D. Ornella Media and Religion in (Post)Colonial Societies: Dynamics of Power and Resistance Editorial Media and religion, both broadly understood, often form the mise-en-scène for power struggles in competing narratives of conflict, protest, oppression, and resistance. Religious practices are visual and material practices that communicate meaning, and media thrive on harnessing the cognitive and affective power of religious symbols or narratives. Many media producers draw on the ability of religions, as communicative systems, to distill human experience and to create particularly powerful structures of affect. The in- tricate and dynamic relationships between media and religion are part of cultural efforts to inscribe and embody meaning on an individual and collec- tive level, and thus to turn chaos into order, to establish and communicate categories and boundaries. Yet up until quite recently, the study of these relationships has not always paid attention to the fact that meaning is not simply communicated in a neutral fashion, but that meaning-making happens in a context of asym- metric relationships of power. With their images, stories, and practices, me- dia and religions shape a community’s imaginary and knowledge about self and others, and they contribute to the very “imagining” of “homogenous” communities and nations1 that has played a central part in colonial history. These imaginings have resonated throughout the postcolonial emergence of independent nation-states, and they continue to affect the attempts to la- bel, organize, and frame postcolonial and neocolonial (power) relationships between communities and nations. In this issue of JRFM, we focus on how religion and media participate in and complicate the power relationships between (western) colonizers and 1 Anderson 1991. DOI: 10.25364/05.7:2021.2.1