Colonial empires once exported their power through gunboats, missionaries, and railroads. Today, the carriers are subtler: streaming platforms, global pop industries, and entertainment franchises that arrive not with armies but with recommendation algorithms. The media landscape of the Global South is now a battlefield of soft power, where sovereignty is measured less in territory than in screen time.
It is tempting to dismiss Netflix binges or K-pop fandoms as distractions, but postcolonial theory urges us to look differently. Media is never neutral. It encodes histories of domination, fantasies of modernity, and hierarchies of value. The question is no longer whether empire is over, but how it has morphed into new infrastructures of attention.
Theory Snapshot: Soft Power as Neo-Empire
Joseph Nye’s term “soft power” described the ability of nations to shape preferences through culture, values, and institutions. In the postcolonial context, it gains sharper teeth. Streaming services bring not only content but also the frameworks for measuring taste, popularity, and legitimacy. The “top ten” list is not just a neutral tally; it is a cultural border checkpoint, filtering what becomes visible, desirable, or “global.”
Here, thinkers like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Arjun Appadurai remain instructive. Ngũgĩ warned of the cultural domination embedded in language and narrative, while Appadurai described global media flows as uneven “scapes” that could enable both resistance and domination. Streaming platforms embody both: they amplify South Korean dramas to global audiences, yet also drown out local industries in Nigeria, Indonesia, or Peru with algorithmic preference for hegemonic forms.
Case in Point: K-pop and Disney+
Consider K-pop. Its global rise is often framed as the triumph of South Korean cultural diplomacy: a postcolonial periphery exporting back to the West. Yet, K-pop’s global success relies on infrastructures—YouTube, Spotify, TikTok—that are overwhelmingly Western-owned. The fandom may feel like a decolonial reversal, but the profits and data still flow toward Silicon Valley.
Or take Disney+. When the platform entered India, it absorbed Hotstar, the country’s dominant local streaming service. This wasn’t just a business merger; it was a reconfiguration of cultural power. Disney inherited not only subscribers but control over which stories travel, which genres thrive, and which languages gain visibility. Postcolonial pluralism collapses into a catalog curated in Burbank, California.
The Streaming Paradox
What we see in streaming is a paradox. On one hand, postcolonial nations are not merely passive consumers—they actively produce global phenomena, from Nollywood films to Turkish soap operas. On the other, the distribution networks remain colonially inflected, embedding hierarchies of capital and infrastructure that favor the Global North. The empire hasn’t vanished; it has become cloud-based.
This doesn’t mean resistance is impossible. Regional platforms—like iROKOtv in Nigeria or Viu in Southeast Asia—experiment with decolonial models of circulation. Audiences, too, resist, remix, and pirate, creating unruly shadow economies of viewing. Still, the question persists: can cultural sovereignty exist when the means of distribution are owned elsewhere?
The postcolonial lesson is that empire mutates. Today, it looks less like a foreign flag over a capital city and more like a subscription renewal on your credit card. Yet the stakes remain the same: who gets to imagine the world, and who gets imagined.
