Current revisitations of identities and achievements in US civil rights discourse have inspired pedagogically-oriented digital media projects. More importantly, they have also highlighted the need to rethink the role of Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis (CMDA) and its pedagogic applications in order to stimulate greater awareness of the effects of repurposing historical discourses. The case-studies investigated are the 2020 Pulitzer Prize winning 1619 Project – a podcast series whose account of Black America’s history conflicts with mainstream views – and the history section of BrainPOP, an animated educational site for primary school children, which monumentalizes relatively less well-known civil rights heroines.
