Borders in the Age of Interconnectedness: An intertextual Reading of Nic Stone’s Dear Martin, Dear Justyce and Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give

Abstract

This paper sets out to engage shared elements that reveal racial borders as an intertext in Dear Martin, Dear Justyce and The Hate U Give. The focus is to trace these textual connections and conversations, highlighting the intertextual dialogue that ironically reveals borders that continue to exist and influence experience in the United States at the age of networks and interconnectivity. The study problematizes that, though the United States is seen as a melting pot of cultures or a "new promised land", there still exists racial borders revealed across the texts, suggesting that the texts are responding to a common, historical, cultural and experiential contexts they are situated in. The paper assesses the different boundaries that still exist in the age of interconnectedness which brings about power struggle, uneasy conversation and discrepancies between the races. The thrust of this paper is to demonstrate that racial borders are still evident in the United States in the age of networks and collaboration, in spite of new trends like the "Black Lives Matter" and the "All Lives Matter". The study makes use of the theoretical backdrop of intertextuality. Stone (2017) will be interpreted in connection with Stone (2020) and Thomas (2017). This theoretical position is fundamental as interpretation becomes flexible when the text, the pre-text and the post-texts connected to it are placed side- by-side. The paper demonstrates how the texts form an ongoing dialogue, with each work building upon, responding to and reimagining the racial narrative in the age of connectivity.