Towards a Poetics of the Digital Protest Text: Insights from the #BlackLivesMatter Movement (2013-) and Anti-CAA and Anti-NRC Protests (2019-2020)
With the rise of digital activism in the global protest cycle, it is imperative to formulate theoretical frameworks, or a poetics, of the role digital texts play in creating, sustaining, and outliving protest. For all its ubiquitous use, the form has been slippery to conceptualize; its literary value overshadowed by its function as an appendage to sociological and historical readings of protest. I construct a poetics for the digital protest text by examining the (largely online) protest texts of the Black Lives Matter movement in the US and the anti-CAA and anti-NRC movement in Shaheen Bagh, India: both of which had significant in-situ participation, as well as a vibrant virtual life. I offer comparative, and at times, complementary readings of these two movements to provide a theoretical framework for understanding the digital protest text beyond localisation or specialised archives. In this PhD, I examine a variety of texts, ranging from seminal protest texts such as ‘Sab Yaad Rakha Jaayega’ (‘All Will Be Remembered’) by Aamir Aziz, Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine, A Fortune For Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraqib to community-produced volumes and images with directed circulation. In doing so, I posit embodiment, archiving, and doubling as key poetics of the digital protest text. I argue that their triangulation is key for the sustenance of contemporary protest movements. Finally, I reinstate the central—rather than incidental—role that the digital protest text plays in modern protest.
digital humanities, protest, protest culture, Black Lives Matter, Anti-CAA, Anti-NRC, Shaheen Bagh, Embodiment
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