Theorizing race, marginalization, and language in the digital media
African-Americans; Digital media; Dominant ideology; Marginalization; Racerelated blogging; Sublimation
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 psychoanalyticalAlthusserian critique of Adichies 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 subjects 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 ideologicalstate-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. 2021 Communication & Society.
Communication and Society, Vol-34, No. 2, pp. 403-415.
Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra
Mallya D., Christ (Deemed to be) University, India; Susanti R., Univ. Muhammadiyah Palembang, Indonesia