Thirty years ago the Springboks tour created the conditions of possibility for sharpened discussion and debate among New Zealanders about forms of pervasive but mostly unacknowledged (in mainstream discourse) racism. The predominant mythologies of the Pakeha (European-descended) majority, which cast New Zealand race relations in Panglossian terms, were ruptured in ways that would facilitate important advances in Māori struggles for cultural rights and the redress of historical grievances concerning land and resource privation stretching back nearly a century and a half. Moreover, the intensification of transnational affective alliances between Māori and Black South Africans contributed to a Māori sense of justified anger and growing political will, while Pakeha protestors’ concerns for the plight of racially subordinated peoples half a world away lent enhanced moral leverage to Māori demands for racial justice closer to home.

Half a decade after the watershed moment of the 1981 Springboks tour, Aotearoa New Zealand was in the grip of full-scale economic neoliberalization that included substantial privatization of public media operations. Meanwhile, a Māori communicators’ association, Te Manu Aute, was forming to advance the cause of Māori broadcasting on the basis of rights and entitlements enshrined in the Treaty of Waitangi signed in 1840 by the British Crown and some 500 Māori chiefs. It would take almost 20 years of struggle against various political opponents and enemies (particularly on the right), but the first of two Māori Television Service (MTS) channels went to air in 2004, followed by the appearance five years later of a multiplatform strategy, a webcast-capable website and Maori Television’s YouTube channel.

Further iterations of the political struggles to establish a stable and sustainable Māori television service ensued when, in 2009, a successful initial bid by the indigenous broadcaster for exclusive rights to deliver the national sport’s premier global event, inflected with Māori trappings and linguistic elements, spurred a backlash that ultimately resulted in a negotiated deal under which broadcasting rights to all major 2011 RWC games are shared with non-indigenous media outfits. This deal thus partially circumvented the complex implications for Pakeha imaginaries of a situation characterized by prohibitive indigenous control over the presentation of iconic national sporting images and narratives in post-colonial Aotearoa New Zealand. Nevertheless, there is something both remarkable and heartening about the transmediated and multi-platformed emergence of everyday haka at sites such as street corners and shopping malls, and their recirculation via YouTube, Facebook, and nightly newscasts.  While it is clear that “convergence culture” is, as some contributors to the current issue of Cultural Studies caution, a site where key forces of neoliberalism can gain purchase, it seems also to be the case that in this corner of the globe participatory cultures of media convergence have something to contribute to the reconfiguration of how we both imagine and interact with the spaces and places of our everyday lives.

As Jodi Dean has observed, one thing that differentiates members of the self-appointed “9/11 Truth Movement” from earlier advocates of “conspiracy theory” (such as the alternative knowledge communities that have adduced counter-evidence and counter-narratives around, for instance, the assassination of JFK, or the involvement of the CIA in the distribution of crack-cocaine within African American communities in order to generate funds for the Nicaraguan Contras and so undermine the strength of political oppositionality among both Sandinistas and US Blacks) is a certain degree of conviction, certitude, or what Dean labels “drive” regarding the incontrovertibility of their assertions and the righteousness of their activism.  However, such an observation does not fully capture the diversity of attitudes and orientations toward the numerous counter-discourses circulating among those who are skeptical of the official conspiracy narrative propounded by the likes of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the members of the 9/11 Commission (some of whom have themselves famously denounced the deep flaws in their own final report).

Richard Gage, for instance, provides a compelling example of drive: he has for years been passionately asserting and painstakingly documenting (with what many academic researchers and others consider to be scientific precision) the physical impossibility of the three WTC towers collapsing symmetrically at nearly free-fall acceleration into their own footprints, as they did on September 11, 2001, except under conditions of controlled explosive demolition.  Gage has attracted considerable international attention as a member of the American Institute of Architects who in 2006 founded the organization Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, which has secured the signatures of about 1,400 architectural and engineering professionals on its petition demanding a new Congressional investigation into the September 11 attacks.  See: http://www2.ae911truth.org/videos/Close-Up_Richard_Gage.mov

Among the most astonishing pieces of evidence touted by Gage and his associates are the studies published in peer-reviewed physics journals by well-respected professors such as Steven Jones that demonstrate the inexplicable presence of large quantities of a high-tech explosive incendiary substance known as “nanothermite” (manufactured by only a few secretive military contractors such as Livermore Labs) in the dust blown across lower-Manhattan on September 11, 2001.

Geraldo Rivera, by contrast, took many years to shift from a position of unyielding refusal to even consider the viability of alternative accounts of the 9/11 attacks (“Oh, get a life!” he once yelled on camera at a group of protesters chanting, “9/11 was an inside job”) to one of self-proclaimed open-mindedness toward such accounts, which he announced last month on Geraldo at Large in the wake of the recent “Building What?” media campaign launched by key members of the 9/11 victims’ families such as Bob McIlvaine.

Indeed, the existence of a large group that adamantly dismisses out of hand any evidence that undermines the official conspiracy narrative of the 9/11 attacks may be more notable than that of a somewhat smaller group that asserts conspiratorial counter-narratives from a stance of righteous certainty.  Meanwhile, there seems to be very little discursive space for suspended judgment or considered agnosticism.  Is this yet another byproduct of the oft-noted “unprecedented polarization” of the political terrain in the contemporary US?  Not in any clear-cut sense of partisan or left/right division; recent sympathizers with the 9/11 Truth Movement include, for example, Marxist intellectual and former European Parliamentarian Gianni Vattimo, right-wing Fox News commentator and former New Jersey Superior Court judge Andrew Napolitano, and political category-defying gadfly, investigative news show host and former independent Governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura.  Moreover, media figures claimed by both progressives and conservatives are united in their willingness summarily to dismiss the mere discussion of alternative 9/11 narratives as “crazy talk,” including Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Bill O’Reilly, and Glen Beck.

This dismissiveness reveals very little about the evidence in support of either the official 9/11 conspiracy narrative endorsed by the Bush Administration or the counter-narratives suggested by the Truthers.  However, it tells us much about the denunciatory force and exclusionary power of the discourse of “conspiracy theory,” which at this point in history seems capable by its mere invocation of rendering dissident perspectives and counter-knowledges illegitimate a priori.  As Jack Bratich has shown, this denunciatory discourse of “conspiracy theory” is part of a larger discursive apparatus that works to keep US politics “within reason” and thus to exert control and discipline over dangerous forms of thinking.  This power-bearing “reasonability” expresses of course not a universal position but rather an historically specific (and contested) formation of reason.  While the Enlightenment was surely indispensible for the American Revolution, so too was the highly active conspiracy-mindedness of leading colonists bent on discerning obscure patterns of orchestrated deceit, manipulation and treachery in the machinations of key British parliamentarians of the day.  If the American Revolution was a product of both Enlightenment rationalism and colonial conspiracy theorization, today it is the shadow cast by a particular historical formation of “reasonability” that makes it difficult for most of our mainstream media outlets to contemplate either the possibility or the evidence of something deeply rotten at the core of our democracy.