Publications

Publication details [#63634]

Perrino, Sabina M. 2017. Recontextualizing racialized stories on YouTube. Narrative Inquiry 27 (2) : 261–285.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/ni

Annotation

When stories (re)appear in YouTube videos, they are recontextualized not only by their titling and editing, but especially by chains of online comments. This article explores how a Northern Italian politician’s racialized story, which was first recontextualized by a TV news reporter on a YouTube video, is further recontextualized for different ends by commenters on that video. This paper shows how these commenters negotiate and reframe the racial aspects of digital discourse and its sociocultural meanings through their various responses and across different temporal and spatial scales. By applying linguistic anthropological and sociolinguistic theories and narrative analytical tools to digital storytelling, this study emphasizes how racialized language is neither stable nor unidirectional, but is rather constantly negotiated discursively among various groups of virtual audience members. Besides investigating the pragmatics of narrative interaction in the digital realm, this article speaks to methodological challenges that surround the study of online storytelling.