Theorizing race, marginalization, and language in the digital media

Theorizing race, marginalization, and language in the digital media

Blog Article

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 Drinks 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 Building Set 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.