A deepened understanding of resistance in discourse requires that we look beyond both structuralist and agency-based theories of discourse and power. In support ofthis argument, the essay first critiques Bourdieu's structuralist and Giddens's agency -based theories of power and discourse. I t then offers a preliminary sketch of an alternative theory, which is founded on the concept of dueling structures of meaning, oppositional and interdependent in nature, that express social class relations of domination and opposition and provide speaking subjects with the latitude to select (within limits) one structurally generated set of meanings over another.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Drawing upon Jürgen Habermas's discourse‐based theoretical approach, this article argues that his thesis regarding the bourgeois public sphere needs to be redirected so as (1) to show how sources of communicative action may have dried up within the bourgeois public sphere and (2) to explore real emancipatory alternatives that spring up as oppositional voices of subaltern groups, oriented to understanding, and expressed in contexts wherein people's upward struggles against power and domination have not yet been completed. In support of the argument, a stereoscopic analysis is conducted that focuses on public sphere practices and counter‐practices – specifically those of The New York Times as exemplar participant of bourgeois publicness and the black‐owned and operated New York Amsterdam News as its oppositional counterpart.