At the Intersection of Journalism, Literature, and Blogging: Negotiating Resistance in Riverbend’s Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq

Abstract

The overlapping disciplines of literature and journalism have created what is commonly called ‘Literary Journalism’ which conjoined with blogging have manifested into a medium of expression that defies the limited boundaries of conventional journalism, traditional literature as well as mainstream news media. Baghdad Burning presents a pseudonymous account of an Iraqi female computer programmer in her twenties who accounts for the gruesome reality of what it means to be under war and occupation. She recounts a passionate, yet true-to-life experiences about intensifying power outages, travel restrictions, massive human rights violations, increasing fundamentalism, political conflicts, eroding gender rights, political turmoils, and persistent sectarian violence. The first part of the study examines the historical and political context of both narrative journalism and blogging on the local and global scale. The second part investigates Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophy of the ‘rhizome’, Brian Martin’s ‘backfire model’ and Jerry Jenkins’s conception of ‘participatory culture’in order to show that in a digital culture, the act of literary journalism, through blogging, is an act of resistance that goes beyond the originally intended goal of the author into uncontrollable, undesigned, and sometimes uncalled for global cultural and political flows that inevitably generate substantial social and political changes. In other words, the paper manifests that despite Riverbend’s assertion that her weblog does not promote political change, it does inspire new meanings, connections, and synergies between facts, news, information, statistics, numbers, current events, and professional reporting on the one hand, and thoughts, feelings, ideas, images, colors, lives, knowledge, experiences, symbolism, imagination, storytelling and amateur narratives on the other. As such, the study proceeds from an awareness that the intersection between journalism, blogging, and literature do not just transform contemporary media landscapes but they also garner new awareness that expands the parameters of both mainstream reporting and literature into newer and more progressive horizons.