Valorizing Erasure: Imperial Knowledge Production in Anglo-American Coverage of Chad's 'Toyota War'.

Abstract

How does imperial knowledge production operate when Western media coverage of a Global South subject is predominantly admiring instead of hostile? This article addresses that question through critical discourse analysis of sixty-three Anglo-American news articles covering the Chad-Libya conflict of the 1980s, the 'Toyota War'. Despite Chad's decisive military victory and broadly favourable coverage, systematic coding reveals that Chadian political subjectivity was structurally withheld. Chadian figures appeared as sources in 41.3 per cent of articles but were granted political or strategic interpretive function in only 6.3 per cent: interpretive exclusion despite presence. Western or French officials served as primary interpretive sources in 77.8 per cent of articles, and France was positioned as sovereign arbiter in 82.5 per cent. Three interlocking devices produced this structure: selective valorization, which absorbed political relations into a commodity object; an interpretive hierarchy that routed authority through Western institutional channels; and Orientalist fascination, which made exclusion pleasurable and thereby imperceptible. The article develops a three-tiered model of differential life-worth (Libyan soldiers, Chadian soldiers, and Chadian civilians each constituted through distinct textual genres) and argues that valence, the positive or negative tone of coverage, is an insufficient analytic register: the imperial operation runs through how subjects are constituted, not through valence alone.