Ghosts Are Not Illiterate: Self-Invisibilization in a Mediated Dalit Community

Significant scholarship has not examined the processes of invisibility among community discourse intervened by mediated communication. In particular, we know relatively little about the strategy of self-invisibilization among socially and politically oppressed communities, much less in the current Indian context, in which we find an institutional reaffirmation of social hierarchies and the aspiration for social order. Filling this gap, I attempt here to examine how mediated narrations are organically tied to a dialectical visibility–invisibility field. From this field, we may expect liminality and transformation. As a framework in which to conduct this evaluation, I introduce three contours of invisibilization—locality, access, and security. This framework aids in evaluating how institutional crime against a Dalit family in Boolgarhi village in India exposes marginalized communities’ communication amidst perceived injustice. Although technology and modern institutions are expected to empower marginalized communities, the systemic failure to support their discourse may result in a paradoxical situation in which these communities fall silent and stay invisible, living like ghosts that can understand and articulate, but are not seen or heard. I argue that any disruptive media story is routinely sutured back by a nexus of neo-authoritarian societies and institutions into the continuity of smooth order.