Narrative on Facebook: Questioning the Agency of the Postcolonial Subjects

Abstract

This thesis aims to answer the problem of how Facebook functions to re-construct the postcolonial identity by means of narrative in marking the tarnsition from colonized subjects to liberated beings if the agency of the 'self'is contested on the account of the massive reality of signs. Situating Facebook in a contemporary Indonesia, I use narrative as the means of access that integrated the textual, the materiality of the medium and the historical context in the dynamic process of reading and interpretation. The persistence of the narrative in virtual realm is significant not only because of its new digital character but also its ideological values that bring the agency of postcolonial subjects to crisis. The discussion about how the agency of the self should be re-fashioned in the multiplicity of identity that makes postcolonialsm discourse impossible to be oversimplified is central in my argument. My presupposition is that the agency of the self exists in the paradox of having a power to create the narrative as a mode of representation but being turned as a commodity at the same time. This thesis attempts to figure out the relation between subject - object - sign that gives meaning to postcolonial agency.