Towards a Poetics of the Digital Protest Text: Insights from the #BlackLivesMatter Movement (2013-) and Anti-CAA and Anti-NRC Protests (2019-2020)
type: CreativeWork
description: 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.
abstract: 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.
author: Pachisia, Stuti
language: eng
keywords: digital humanities, protest, protest culture, Black Lives Matter, Anti-CAA, Anti-NRC, Shaheen Bagh, Embodiment
license: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/507339a1-0568-4036-9d93-536101c8d0df/download
license: http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved
date published: 2025-06-20
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:33:25Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.124798