Theorizing race, marginalization, and language in the digital media

• Deepali Mallya ^[1] ; Rini Susanti ^[2]
  1. [1] Christ (Deemed to be) University
  2. [2] Univ. Muhammadiyah Palembang
• Localización: Comunicación y sociedad = Communication & Society, ISSN-e 2386-7876, ISSN 0214-0039, Vol. 34, Nº. 2, 2021 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Special Issue: Visual motifs and representations of power in the public sphere), págs. 403-415
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
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• Resumen

  • Digitization of the communication medium has transformed the mute, marginalized ‘audience’ into a heterogeneous and credible content ‘producer.’ Drawing on this dynamics and operation of the digital media, it has urged the need to re-theorize ‘marginalization’ and ‘race.’ Hence, this paper critiques the digital-media tool, blogs, using a rhetoric-textual analysis method and critical discourse analysis method for the fictional text, Americanah. These methods employ the psychoanalytical-Althusserian critique of Adichie’s fictional narrative, Americanah. In the psychoanalytical sense, blog-writing can qualify as a mechanism of ‘sublimation’ in the post-modern world. In the Althusserian sense, blogs become persuasive mechanisms for a subject’s interpellation into non-dominant ideology. Among the plethora of marginalized global communities, African-Americans are enormously embracing the virtual communication trends for socio-political motives. This paper theorizes the correlations between race-related blogging, psychoanalytic sublimation, and the socio-political repudiation of power structure by employing the literary text as material evidence. Accordingly, the literary study has concluded that digital-mediums (i.e., in this case, political blogs) can depose the power vested in the ideological-state-apparatuses and impose a high potential for expression of unrestrained, credible, and democratic voice of the marginalized. It also validates that blogs/blogging influences and moulds national/political/racial discourses by lending a liberated voice and context-independent perspective to the racially oppressed.