DOI: 10.18485/judig.2026.2.ch20 ISSN:

From Literary Memory to Platformed Culture: South Slavic Diaspora Identity and Algorithmic Marginalization in Canadian Multicultural Literature

Milica Jevtić, Tamara Vučenović, Miloš Stojanović, Danijela Nešić
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This paper examines Canadian multicultural literature in relation to diaspora marginalization, focusing on Joy Kogawa’s exploration of silence and erasure in Obasan (1981), Dionne Brand’s fragmented constructions of identity in A Map to the Door of No Return (2001), and M. G. Vassanji’s articulation of hybrid identity in The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003). These literary perspectives are then extended to the digital age through an analysis of South Slavic diaspora communities in Canada (Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian) and their forms of online cultural production and engagement. In the digital era, cultural marginalization is no longer solely produced through colonial discourse, patriarchy, or state violence, but is increasingly intensified by algorithmic regimes of visibility, self-representation, and surveillance. The paper demonstrates that digital platforms have transformed diaspora identity from print-based cultural memory into a participatory and continuously evolving system shaped by algorithmic logics. Therefore, marginalization occurs less through direct exclusion from literary production and more through language loss, reliance on dominant digital platforms, and the replacement of traditional publishing with informal online storytelling. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that digitization has not resulted in the democratization of the literary and linguistic sphere, but rather that algorithmic filtering has contributed to the marginalization of languages with lower economic capital, including South Slavic languages.

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