(Surface) Reading the Interface between the Naga Author Easterine Kire and Select YouTube Channels: A Netnographic Study
(Surface) Reading the Interface between the Naga Author Easterine Kire and Select YouTube Channels: A Netnographic Study

Summary/Abstract: The present study investigates 06 YouTube triads of communications on/by Easterine Kire (the Naga-Norwegian Anglophone author) on YouTube for writing back the Naga indigenous identity. The 06 triads, if examined and analysed, might reveal Kire’s performative roles in building trans-local bond with digital participants to shape Naga literary articulations and representations in terms of Naga indigeneity vis-a-vis to build a literary market for Naga Anglophone literature. Applying netnography, the study examines her cultural representations and individualizations as a jazz poet and an interviewee on the YouTube channels. The representations accumulate further significations as critical thinkers, publishers, bookstores, readers, and researchers respond (at various levels) to Kire within the culture groups. The study is unique as it uses netnography as a research tool to ‘surface read’ the significant but under-noticed interface between a Naga Anglophone novelist from a diasporic subject position, the YouTube owners, and the YouTube audience in the context of Naga indigenous cultural production and reception. Moreover, it might be used as a blueprint for researching on the most obscure under-noticed digital data on the most culturally suppressed problem areas amidst the most uncertain fieldwork plans (for example, during and after the Covid-19 pandemic).

• Details
• Contents