“Pure Fabrication”: Information Policy, Media Rights, and the Postcolonial Public

Abstract

This article interprets the debate over freedom of speech and the regulation of the media in The Gambia as a debate over the calibration of the public sphere and its subject. Rather than accepting the framing of the debate as one of human rights versus the state (or versus culture), the article argues that it is a debate involving competing visions of community, responsibility, and information flow. The author charts arguments about the role of information in society and the status of the press advanced by Gambian journalists as well as government representatives to show how these arguments pivot around a particular understanding of an informed public subject and not around human rights. Rights are, however, upheld as a goal by both sides inasmuch as they are held as an abstract aspiration and not as a legal claim, a fact that points to the ways in which human rights mesh with (neo-)liberal modalities of rule and their simultaneously emancipatory and regu- lative impulse. [Human