New media studies on Islam are focused on investigating the characteristics of Islamic discourse or Muslim practices in digital landscape. Since there is increasing visibility of knowledge production on Islam by non-Islamic, secular middlebrow spaces such as TED, it is significant to examine their way of communicating Islamic ideas to a global audience. By conducting a discourse analysis of TED Talks on Islam, this study explores the dominant discursive strategies of TED Talks on Islam. By doing so, this study introduces how a more empirically and context-oriented understanding of the concept of the postsecular would benefit considerably from examining the discursive features of the contemporary nexus of Islam, new media, popular culture, and storytelling. Three main discourse features are found: (1) emphasis on a Judeo-Christian framework, (2) use of awe-inducing, personalized storytelling, and (3) secular translation of Islamic themes. While this emerging online-mediated discourse on Islam informs about new storytelling strategies, the language used adopts a highly attenuated perception of Islamic themes, and a great deal of traditional Islamic interpretation is replaced with excessively individualistic assumptions that are often tailored to cater to Western secular liberal mindsets.
Published as part of the series of Routledge Studies in Chinese Translation, Liang Xia's A Discourse Analysis of News Translation in China explores news translation from English into Chinese in a Chinese government news agency. Noting that research on translated news published in newspapers in China has been scarce, the author aims to understand translated news discourse linguistically, culturally and ideologically. Taking Cankao Xiaoxi (CKXX) as the database-a best-selling Chinese language daily newspaper in which almost all the news are translated from foreign press-Liang sets out to
Much of the scholarly discussions on the nexus between secular worldview and discourse on Islam have depicted a rather homogeneous image of ‘postsecular Islam’ by overlooking the heterogeneity and changing nature of communications on Islam. In most cases, the postsecular rhetoric of minority sects in Islam, such as Shia Islam, is rarely mentioned. This study aims to offer a more empirical and context-oriented understanding of the emerging postsecular turn in the contemporary narratives of Shia Islam due to its encounter with secular ideologies, digital media, and popular culture. To do so, it examines dominant discursive features of a transnational Shia religious network – ‘Who is Hussain’. The analysis focuses on exploring new interpretations and representations of Shi’i messages online. Four main types of narrative features were found: a postsecular contextualization of Shi’i religious events, a secular call for action infused with Shi’i moral motivations, promoting postsecular humanitarian responses, and translating Shi’i religiosity into citizenry engagement. The language deployed by the Facebook page of this network to translate religious ideas denotes a high degree of malleability. This open hermeneutic margin, this study finds, allows the knowledge producers to develop a postsecular narrative of Shi’ism that has the potential to travel beyond the confines of religious boundaries by animating new debates internationally.
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