This survey of select historic black presses’ migration to the Internet clearly reveals their commitment to continue the struggle for black political, social, ultural, and economic survival and prosperity well into the digital age. What the online incarnations of the Afro American, Indianapolis Recorder, Charlotte Post, and Philadelphia Tribune newspapers represent, besides a corrective to a presumption of black technophobia, is African Americans’ robust technological participation in the nation’s postmodern public sphere or what Nancy Fraser more accurately sees as an agglomeration of many “counterpublics.”
If you like this blog, please click some ads.
These presses, in print and online, exemplify Fraser’s challenge to Marxist critic Jürgen “Habermas’s account of the bourgeois conception of the public sphere [that] stresses its claim to be open and accessible to all,” when women and men of racialized ethnicities of all classes were excluded on racial grounds (56–80). Moreover, they seem to confirm Houston Baker’s black revisionist notion of the Habermasian public sphere ideal. For Baker, the fact that blacks might find attractive or believable the notion of a public sphere, predicated on a system of property ownership and literacy, is ifficult at best. But, following Fraser, Baker sees the potential for transcending these limitations, specifically for black communities. Baker recognizes that frican Americans;
are drawn to the possibilities of structurally and affectively transforming the founding notion of the bourgeois public sphere into an expressive and empowering self-fashioning. Fully rational human beings with abundant cultural resources, black Americans have always situated their unique forms of expressive publicity in a complex set of relationships to other forms of American publicity (meaning here, paradoxically enough, the sense of publicity itself as authority). (Baker)
And it is the expressive, self-fashioning, and emancipatory potential of the Internet, at this still-nascent moment, that enables the historic black press to affect a structural transformation of publicity to disseminate widely black counterhegemonic interpretations of local and global events, thus bearing out Baker’s black public-sphere thesis. For example, as the Clinton/Lewinsky affair and the subsequent impeachment trial became scandalous fodder for newsprint and the airwaves, the white mainstream presses tended to portray the African American community as an essentialized, pro-Clinton bloc of political lemmings, pathetically dispossessed of critical consciousness. It is true that the presses’ online editions carried impeachment stories, but, as the Recorder demonstrates, this national story of political intrigue receded to the background as the paper’s “Top Stories” were local ones. The home page’s feature stories were “Madame Walker Center Honors Business” and “NNPA [Nation Negro Publishers’ Association] National Briefs,” as Amos Brown’s satirical engagement with the issue, discussed above, became one item among many in the 1998 year-end review of news. And though Brown’s discourse of equivalence between “The Radical Republican Lynching/Impeachment of President Clinton” and the historic acts of Ku Klux Klan terror against African Americans conveys a nuanced sense of many black people’s objection to the impeachment, Samuel F. Yette, columnist for the Philadelphia Tribune, puts a finer touch on the issue. In his article “Clinton’s Attack on Iraq Shows He Is Out of Control,” Yette gives voice to that independent segment of the black community that the mainstream press routinely puts under erasure in its essentializing discourse on blackness. Discussing Clinton’s strained credibility following the political fallout over the Lewinisky matter, Yette expresses this skepticism about Clinton’s ill-timed attack on Iraq:
He said also that he acted to protect ‘America’s vital interests.’ Being thousands of miles from the Persian Gulf, the president was hard put to explain how this nation’s vital interests were threatened. A master of Orwellian
News-speak, even as he made war, Mr. Clinton pledged to “stand strong against the enemies of peace.”
Even though Yette’s article bears the customary editorial disclaimer that accompanies controversial or polemical positions espoused by writers, the fact that the Tribune cybercast Yette’s views at all bears out Houston Baker’s views about the viability and legitimacy of a black public sphere. With the growing power and dominance of global media conglomerates, it is evident that the revolutionary digital public sphere developing in cyberspace represents the hope and promise for the ongoing survival of the independent black presses, established ones and upstarts alike.
Where established black cyberpresses such as the Post, the Recorder, the Afro-American, the Tribune, Ebony, and Jet (among others) provide a necessary link to the past and its lessons, newer ones such as the Capital Times, the Conduit, One Magazine, and even the journal Callaloo, became temporary autonomous zones or beacons lighting the pathways of progress to bright futures for black publishing online. As it stands, the black press presence in cyberspace is promising indeed; it remains to be seen, however, whether the Internet and this counterpublic will continue to coevolve in the new global information economy. Yet these examples represent a tiny fraction of online black presses to date, particularly, when Yahoo put the number at more than two hundred thousand in 1999. If the history of the black press is its prologue, despite the demise of the Capital Times, the Conduit, One Magazine, and other newer black-oriented journalistic websites, then we can be confident that the story of the black press in cyberspace will persist and be regenerative.
From : Everett, Anna. Digital DIaspora: A Race For Cyberspace. SUNY Press. 2009 (page : 105-108)
0 comments:
Post a Comment