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Theorizing race, marginalization, and language in the digital media
- Source :
- Communication & Society (Formerly Comunicación y Sociedad), Vol 34, Iss 2 (2021)
- Publication Year :
- 2021
- Publisher :
- Universidad de Navarra, 2021.
-
Abstract
- 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.
Details
- Language :
- English, Spanish; Castilian
- ISSN :
- 23867876
- Volume :
- 34
- Issue :
- 2
- Database :
- Directory of Open Access Journals
- Journal :
- Communication & Society (Formerly Comunicación y Sociedad)
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- edsdoj.001a174f8fd544b89eab20a79fddb7f2
- Document Type :
- article
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.15581/003.34.2.403-415