Abstract
July’s edition of the Journal of Communication Inquiry is divided into three parts: original articles, book reviews, and invited essays. In the opening article, Rosemary Pennington uses the #MuslimWomensDay campaign as a case study to examine online (re)constructions of Muslim women’s identity. The goal of this campaign, which began at the end of Women’s History Month in 2017, was to make visible the stories and experiences of Muslim women. Pennington analyzed approximately 300 tweets to illustrate how contributors in Twitter used #MuslimWomensDay to “create a space where Muslim voices could be heard,” even as the stories of Muslims of color or lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Muslims were largely ignored. Pennington notes that while the hashtag continues to be used, it is difficult to translate that “energy into action against Islamophobia outside social media.”
In an article titled “‘Your English Is Suspect’: Language, Communication, and the Pathologization of Nigerian Cyber Identity Through the Stylistic Imprints of Nigerian E-Mail Scams,” Farooq A. Kperogi investigates the structural, grammatical, stylistic, and idiomatic characteristics of Nigerian e-mail scam solicitations and how they shape perceptions of Nigerians in the Anglophone world. Kperogi foregrounds the interconnections between language and identity, noting that “language is inexorably constitutive and reflective of identity.” Texts, such as e-mails, are a key site for the production, negotiation, and articulation of digital identities. Through a discourse analysis of 55 sample e-mails, Kperogi demonstrates how the version of English popularized by fraud e-mail solicitations, commonly known as “419,” both export Nigerian English beyond Nigeria and “construct, even constrain, Nigerian identity in the Anglophone global consciousness.”
In “‘What a Loser That Guy Was’: Norm Macdonald’s Humorous Critique of the Romantic/Warrior Narrative,” Nicholas T. Iannarino describes and interprets a humorous narrative about colorectal cancer shared by comedian Norm Macdonald in a stand-up special. Iannarino begins his essay by describing the importance of illness narratives—stories that focus on, or are inspired by, “life-altering experience of illness.” Iannarino analyzes a story Macdonald tells about his uncle in order to demonstrate that the effective use of humor encourages audiences to reject the contemporary Western perspective that cancer patients must “wage a battle” to survive their ailment. In the final analysis, Iannarino demonstrates that “humor narratives” can be a useful vehicle for health advocacy, public education, social activism, and policy change.
Next, in “The Ancestral Room of the State? Scotland and the United Kingdom on Jamie’s Great Britain,” Francesco Buscemi uses semiotic analysis to study the ways in which the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver represents Scotland vis-à-vis the United Kingdom in his food travelogue Jamie’s Great Britain. The larger question that drives this work is how popular food television negotiates, supports, or challenges national identity. Drawing on the theories of Benedict Anderson, Pierre Bourdieu, and Homi Bhabha as well as cultural studies, Buscemi argues that “the national food travelogue Jamie’s Great Britain stereotypes Scotland as a land of ancestral habits and people” and totally ignores the contributions of immigrants since the 1800s.
In the book review section, Cristina Mislan reviewed Digital, Political, Radical by Natalie Fenton. Mislan notes that the book begins not from technological affordance and promises but from the need to understand the political. The book, Mislan says, offers scholars and students of social movement media a more nuanced understanding of contemporary forms of collective action by refocusing our “critical lenses on a politics of transformation in the field of media and communication studies.”
Finally, in a review of TV Socialism, Marina Vujnovic describes how Anikó Imre examines televised entertainment genres during and after socialism in Eastern Europe to tell a “neglected” story about socialism. The fact that socialist television did not die with the socialist system itself demonstrates, as Vujnovic mentions, the enduring cultural power of television as an institution to continue to promote cultural, social, and even political values of systems beyond their expiration date.