diasporas

This page looks at questions about the net and diasporas.

It covers -

• diasporas and digital nations

A note regarding online and offline microstates - the realm of hobbyists, scammers and kooks - is here.

     diasporas and digital nations

The Nautilus' Virtual Diasporas site comments that

Global diaspora communities are an increasingly important actor in international conflict and cooperation. Today information communication technologies bind transnational diaspora communities with their homeland, facilitate new and efficient economic networks in both the host and home countries, and increase identity and belonging to a greater transnational community. Yet other observers contend that virtual diaspora networks are an emerging source of global conflict as they facilitate transnational terrorist and criminal activity, finance wars in home states, and most importantly, cultivate divisive and fragmenting nationalism throughout the online diaspora community.

Phineas Baxandall's paper on Good Capital, Bad Capital: Dangers and Development in Digital Diasporas is a provocative analysis from the 2002 Nautilus workshop, which featured G. Pascal Zachary's paper Globalization from Below: diasporic capitalism and the more impressive paper by Guobin Yang on Information Technology, Virtual Chinese Diaspora, & Transnational Public Sphere.

Other perspectives feature in works such as Misty Bastian's 1999 Nationalism in a Virtual Space: Immigrant Nigerians on the Internet (PDF), the Virtual Nations: Nationalism & Diasporas site , Michael Fullilove's 2008 World wide webs: Diasporas and the international system (PDF) and Ananda Mitra's 'Virtual Commonality: Looking for India on the Internet' in Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety (London: Sage 1995) edited by Steve Jones, Madhavi Mallapragada's 'The Indian Diaspora in the USA and Around the Web' in Web.Studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 2001) edited by David Gauntlett and Building Diaspora: Filipino Cultural Community Formation On The Internet (New Brunswick: Rutgers Uni Press 2005) by Emily Ignacio.

Radhika Gajjala comments that in technologically mediated diasporic spaces

issues of voice and voicelessness as well as of marginalization, ventriloquizing and Othering based on gender, race, class, sexuality and geographical location emerge as some central concerns. … Some implicit and explicit questions are: What kind of migratory subjects emerge in transnational spaces and in digital diaspora, at the intersection of the local and the global? What regulatory fictions and theoretical frames shape and constrain manifestations of identity formations and communities online? What literacies are demanded in the performance of cyber-bodies? What bodies are allowed embodiment through technologies? Viewed at the intersection of cultures and communities of production, what kinds of bodies produce what kinds of technologies? What are the socio-cultural transformations demanded in the name of "technological literacy" and "development"? Exploring the ontology and epistemology of "cyberspace," some of these essays raise questions regarding the impossibility of "the subaltern's" access to the socio-economic globalization manifested in cyberspace.

Processes of globalization rely on a complex layering of discourses and daily practices related to information technology, digital media, lifestyles based on the celebration of globalizing consumer cultures as well as on the seemingly contradictory invoking of national culture (as defined through postcolonial bourgeoisie nation-building ideologies). Online discourses and material practices within such technological environments are a result of such complexly layered and nuanced practices in realspaces and are visibly manifested in the various online contexts. Even in these virtual environments, participants do not leave their bodies behind. Hence the virtual/real distinction sets up a false binary that cannot be substantiated when we analyze engagement with online environments.

Quite.

Other research includes Ananda Mitra's 'Virtual Commonality: Looking for India on the Internet' in Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety (London: Sage 1995) edited by Steve Jones and Madhavi Mallapragada's 'The Indian Diaspora in the USA and Around the Web' in Web.Studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 2001) edited by David Gauntlett.

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