Unpacking Black Narrative Commodities: Toward a Critical Race Media Literacy

• In Event: Marxism, Race, and Capital in the 21st Century

Abstract

Using the concept of “black narrative commodities”, the paper suggests that the biopolitical commodification of black pain and/or black visibility becomes a mechanism through which black lives are brought into a nationalist/capitalist framing. The paper outlines a critical race media literacy framework and uses popular media commodities to illustrate how black pain and visibility mask a nationalist agenda. The author suggests that critical media literacy absent a cogent and principled interrogation of the interplay between race, class, and the nation-State is incomplete.

Author

• Brian Lozenski, Macalester College