Politics of Identity: The Face of Islam in the International E-Media

Abstract

The portrayal of Islam in a hostile relationship with rationality, liberty, and tolerance, leads to a politics of identity were a marginalized community embattles to re-affirm and resist the tarnished face. The bigoted perception of Islam as a political, economic, and social threat reinforces the unfounded Islamophobia and needs production of counter-narrative by scholars and researchers believing in humanity and equality. This paper aims to explore the discursive construction of Islam through the use of E-media caricatures. Discourse historical approach (DHA) is used to analyze the discourse of 16 Emedia caricatures disseminated on the World Wide Web in the years 2017 and 2018. The analysis demonstrates the discursive strategies namely referential strategy, predication, argumentation and intensification used in the (mis)representation and (de)legitimization of the face of Islam in the E-Media. This study gives a deeper insight into the issue of the negative identity construction of Islam using caricatures