THE GRAMMAR OF SUBALTERNIZATION AND THE COLONIALITY OF DIGITAL HATE: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF DEHUMANIZATION, POLITICAL MISOGYNY AND REGIONALISM IN BRAZIL (2018–2022)
Aug 2026· Revista de Estudos Interdisciplinares· 0 citations
TL;DR
The findings identify a shared grammar of subalternization: sanitary and zoological metaphors authorize symbolic expulsion, pathologizing predications discipline women in public life, and territorial generalizations transform historical inequality into presumed civic incapacity.
Abstract
Brazilian digital polarization unfolds within a Global South ecosystem in which transnational platforms interact with historical inequalities of gender, class and territory. This qualitative-critical study examines how discursive constructions of dehumanization, political misogyny and regionalist xenophobia withdraw humanity, public authority and civic discernment from political subjects. The corpus consists of purposively selected public posts from Twitter/X and public Telegram channels published between 2018 and 2022. Maximum-variation sampling considered platform, period, target, linguistic markers and the contrast between explicit and implicit formulations. The analysis connects Fairclough's three-dimensional critical discourse framework with decolonial theory and platform studies, focusing on vocabulary, metaphor, transitivity, predication, modality and intertextuality. The findings identify a shared grammar of subalternization: sanitary and zoological metaphors authorize symbolic expulsion, pathologizing predications discipline women in public life, and territorial generalizations transform historical inequality into presumed civic incapacity. Platform affordances shape the persistence, recirculation, contestation and visibility of these repertoires without determining them. The study offers a situated interpretation of digital violence and graded citizenship in the Global South, while making no claims of statistical prevalence or population-level inference.
This article examines how performative forms of digital communication contribute to the production and normalization of political reality under authoritarian and hybrid political conditions, with Georgia as the primary contextual frame. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s theories of productive power and governmentality, Erika Fischer-Lichte’s performance theory, and Branislav Jakovljević’s analysis of event, script, and actors in the theatre of war, the study combines conceptual analysis with in-depth interviews with seven experts in political science, cybersecurity, media and communication, international relations, human rights, social psychology, and performing arts. The thematic analysis identified six interconnected mechanisms: Performative Camouflage, perceived authenticity and trust formation, affective activation, audience co-production, algorithmic amplification, and normalization of political reality. The article introduces Performative Camouflage to describe the circulation of politically consequential meanings through communicative forms that may appear personal, professional, cultural, educational, protective, or otherwise not primarily political. The findings suggest that digital political influence emerges through recursive interactions among performers, audiences, platforms, affect, and unequal communicative resources rather than through isolated messages alone. The study distinguishes political function from unverified strategic intention or organizational coordination and emphasizes the ambivalence of digital participation, which can support both political control and democratic resistance. It proposes the Digital Theatre of War as an analytical model for examining these processes.
George Salukvadze· International Journal of Res...· 0 citations
This study examines how a non-diasporic public in the Global South engages with a foreign election in which it holds no vote, no residence, and no direct material stake. Rather than asking how Indonesian netizens represent Zohran Mamdani, the first Muslim Mayor of New York City, it asks what talking about Mamdani does for these netizens as members of their own polity, and develops the concept of comparative civic imagination: the use of a foreign political figure as a discursive instrument for evaluating, criticising, and re-imagining one’s own democracy. The study applies qualitative Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis (CMDA) to public Indonesian-language discourse about Mamdani on platform X between 1 November 2025 and 30 June 2026, drawing on a purposively constructed corpus of 213 units—134 citizen-account units as the analytical core and 79 media-account units as contextual triangulation—recoded by comparative function and affective register rather than by stance toward the figure. The findings show that Indonesian netizens engage Mamdani through a comparative architecture organised by the vernacular frame “Mamdani Indonesia” (45% of citizen units) and enacted through three repertoires: analogical personification, institutional benchmarking, and counterfactual transposition. The discourse is animated by civic despair—crystallised in the idiom “Indonesia could never”—which operates as a participatory rather than an apathetic affect, while a domestic value-compatibility filter of doctrinal, sectarian, and purity tests renders the admired model discursively non-transferable, closing a recursive loop theorised here as a digitally networked spectre of comparisons. The article shifts the analysis of transnational digital engagement away from cosmopolitan and diasporic assumptions toward the vicarious engagement of non-diasporic publics, re-theorises despair as a mode of civic engagement, and recovers Benedict Anderson’s spectre of comparisons for platform-era political communication in the Global South.
M. Akbar, Wichitra Yasya· Multidisciplinary Indonesian...· 0 citations
In the present day, South Asian politics has seen a shift towards virtualization of political contestation, with algorithmic social media platforms emerging as the major terrain for the construction, contestation and subversion of democratic legitimacy. Drawing on the theory of cultural hegemony, Antonio Gramsci; the concept of public sphere, Jürgen Habermas; and subaltern counter-publics, Nancy Fraser, the study is qualitative and uses Norman Fairclough's Three-Dimensional Framework for Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to explore digital narratives from three high-stakes geopolitical crises: the Indian Farmers' Protests (2020-2024), Pakistan's Regime Change (2022), and the Bangladesh July Revolution (2024) to see how state apparatuses use digital architectures to impose hegemony by paternalistic othering, legal-rational framing, and computational propaganda. At the same time, the study explores the ways that the marginalized civic networks are able to invert these state-sponsored discourses by returning derogatory terms to their own usage, the deployment of somatic imagery, and through transnational connective action. The results show an extremely ambivalent situation, in which the digital public sphere in South Asia is being subjected to a process of ‘digital re-feudalization' by the state, even as digital political hegemonies are always fragile and susceptible to the resilient and decentralized contestation of digital counter-publics.
Ali Raza, Tayyaba Wakeel, Muhammad Khuram et al.· Journal of innovative resear...· 0 citations
The article provides a comprehensive socio-philosophical analysis of the macrostructural transition from clas-sical platform capitalism to digital technofeudalism and proposes a three-level positive program of algorithmic resistance based on the practices of deliberate “de-immunization”, counter-functioning, and the preservation of “cognitive anomaly”.
Anastasia V. Larina· Общество философия история к...· 0 citations
This study examines how the White House and CNN construct competing discourses of the Iran war through their headline narratives, and how those discourses reproduce or challenge hegemonic structures. Employing Fairclough's (1995) three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis, integrating micro-level transitivity and modality analysis drawn from Halliday's (1994) Systemic Functional Linguistics, meso-level discursive practice, and macro-level social practice, alongside Gramsci's (1971) conceptual framework of hegemony as an analytical instrument within the macro dimension, this study conducts a comparative analysis of twenty purposively selected headlines, ten from the White House and ten from CNN, published between March 1 and April 1, 2026, during Operation Epic Fury. The findings reveal that the White House systematically deploys material process, zero modality, nominalization, and intergenerational intertextuality to naturalize military aggression as moral common sense, while CNN progressively dismantles the conditions of that legitimacy through varied process types, verbal agency granted to Iran, and the domestication of conflict into middle-class economic reality, constituting a Gramscian war of position. Notably, this counter-hegemonic resistance is found to be driven not purely by ideological opposition but also by CNN's commercial and institutional self-interest. At the macro level, the discursive battle between these two insider institutions produces the conditions for an organic crisis, substantiated both discursively, through the White House's shift from persuasion to coercive labelling, and materially, through the documented divergence between its victory claims and independently assessed strategic outcomes.
Samuel Samuel, Resti Amalia· Journal of English Language...· 0 citations
The central orientation of this study revolves around the immanent politics of Dalit representation employed in mainstream Indian literary canon, analysing how hegemonic literary discourses construct and distort Dalit identity, making them Dalit
Other
, and frame them as vulnerable, uncouth and a ‘subject of abomination’ (Ambedkar, 1948/2017, p. i) with the help of subtle authoritarian approach that I call here ‘Brahmanic paternalistic benevolence’ and very adroitly normalize it using representational tactics and attempt to institutionalize caste hegemony, which gradually seep through in everyday practice. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s theory of representation and cultural identity, the study sets to critically examine the mechanism through which Dalit identity is formed, disseminated and regulated in the present time, deconstructing the tropes of Dalit stereotypes emerging from sacralized caste hegemony and coded in the mainstream canonical literatures. Using textual analysis of the select canonical texts, the study critically explores the epistemic violence embedded in mainstream literary depictions, highlighting the subversive narratives in Dalit literary aesthetics that reclaim agency and articulate a resistant identity. The study ultimately challenges the
etic
perspective used in mainstream canonical texts and necessitates the
emic
perspective of Dalit literary theorists and authors, which calls for a radical reimagining of Dalit representation, centring on Dalit resilience, assertion and agency.
Anand Kumar· Contemporary Voice of Dalit· 0 citations
