Elusive Margins: Consuming Media, Ethnicity, and Culture

James S. Frideres is associate dean (research) of the Faculty of Social
Sciences, University of Calgary. He is the author of Native People in
Canada: Contemporary Conflicts and A World of Communities.

This short book focuses on how the “information society” deals with
ethnic identity. The authors claim that various, unspecified
multinational organizations use media marketing techniques to manipulate
the realities of life. Using Foucault’s and Habermas’s concept of
“life-world,” they try to show how subaltern discourses are swept
aside in favor of the various dominant discourses.

Written by and for postmodernists, the book is packed with jargon and
sentences that defy comprehension (e.g., “This mode of representation
of factual events turned to an exclusionary technique based on the
fragmentation of reports”). Even worse, the authors ignore a decade of
substantive research on the issue of how certain groups in society are
able to define reality in a way that acts in their favor and is accepted
by various communities as the world “really is.” In both style and
substance, Elusive Margins has little to offer students or general
readers.