Introduction
This book sets out to describe how the imagined community is being weakened in the age of new media. The argument offered here is that the new information and communication technology is increasingly challenging the imaginings of belongingness based on ethnicity, identity, and the nation-state that have been constructed largely through traditional media such as television, radio, and newspapers. Access to the new information and communication environment has increased peopleâs ability and willingness to express their opinions and be heard inside and outside their nations, far beyond anything witnessed before. These voices demonstrate a consciousness that confronts the imaginings of a nation and which the governments around the world are trying to reinforce through âmulticulturalism has failedâ debates in Europe to the assimilationist violence in the Middle East and North Africa and elsewhere. The aim of this book is to show how new media can work in a different way, namely, against the grain of national order, and, instead, creates a space that fosters counter-national dynamics and formations that are punctuating the imagined community. If we think of new technology as a tool, which is not only changing social relations, but also exposing existing ones that have until now been concealed, we are only writing a ârough first draftâ of history in this early twenty-first digital century.
The âimagined community,â as coined by Benedict Anderson (1983), is a community that rests on the idea that people share common traits and beliefs based on their ethnic and national ethos. It is imagined because people who have never met live according to the notion that they are united and alike, and, by definition, are different from people outside the ethnic group. The imagining does not imply that the nation-state is false or unreal, but rather, it refers to the popular processes shaped byâand in turn shapingâpolitical and cultural institutions. They produce a consciousness in which nations, national identities, and national homelands appear as natural. Owing to this imaginary element, nationalism has a strong social psychological dimension (Billig 1995). It is especially through traditional media that the nation-state has been able to present itself as a singular and coherent culture with related identities, by pitting symbols, speeches, and images that strengthen the identity of the Self against the identity of the Other. Therefore, the construction of the imagined community is also a by-product of the identification of âusâ and âthem.â
This âus-makingâ requires sharp boundaries in terms of nationalities between countries. In multicultural and diverse societies, such distinctions are made by using terms like âmajorityâ and âminority,â which serve to separate the dominant national group, who belong together, from the given minorities (Appadurai 2006; Thangaraj 2015). In accordance with these ethnic, religious, and gender lines, people are, in terms of their national identifications, demarcating themselves by differentiating themselves from others. It is the task of this book to analyse these rigid conceptions of identity, which are underpinning much of the discrimination, conflicts, and crises we see around the world, by proposing important aspects which contribute to commonalities across ethnic boundaries.
In order to capture such subtle and abstract procedures, the book turns to diasporic people and their online activities. Diasporas are intriguing to study as they pull ethnic identifications out of the space of the nation-state and move from one single nation to multiple entities (Anthias 1999; Ang 2001). Migrated people, in general, pose a threat to the homogeneous nation-state and âcall into question the idea that a people [must] have a land in order to be a peopleâ (Boyarin and Boyarin 1993, p. 718). The Kurdish diaspora makes a valuable case to study for a number of reasons. Kurds are among the largest stateless diasporas in the world (van Bruinessen 2000), whilst also being one of the most active diasporas in Europe (Baser 2011). Diasporic Kurds, victims of assimilationist policies and persecution in Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran, have been settled in Europe since 1960s, and are still a considerable community there. This means that a growing number of Kurds belonging to second, third, and fourth generations are born outside Kurdistan and live within two or more cultures. What implication does this have for Kurdish identity and belongingness? I argue that Kurdish diasporaâan increasing number of individuals who live within multiple cultures, speak multiple languages, and live through transnational practices (Portes et al. 1999)âare confronting the boundaries by which nations and majority groups define themselves.
Homi Bhabha (1994) has argued that the homogeneous period of the nationâs imagined community cannot eradicate the discontinuities that minorities and diasporas convey. However, the implications also work in the opposite way; the national narrative of a country challenges the displaced cultures and people and their homogeneous notions of constituting a people away from home. To phrase it differently, the narrated scripts that people carry with them are disputed by other national scripts. The idea of scripts as coined by Kwame Anthony Appiah (2005) is valuable as it helps us grasp how collective identities come with socially produced ideas of how certain types ought to conduct themselves if they want to stay put. Scripts suggest how to act if we happen to be, for example, Germans, Swedes, Kurds, Christians, or Jews (Appiah 2005). They are ânarratives that people use in shaping their projects and telling their life storiesâ (Appiah 2005, p. 22) to remain within their group, whether ethnic, religious, or gendered. Because diasporas are more mobile than people rooted in one nation, their scripts are more prone to be contested, negotiated, and rewritten. Such blurriness is even more enhanced when diasporas are involved in transnational practices. These transnational engagements consist of social and practical links and active networks and organizations that cross at least two geographically and internationally distinct places.
The disruptions of scripts become particularly evident and easier to observe when we look at the new communication environment onlineâa space where people gather from all over the world to interact. These articulations are important as they intermingle the more explicit âusâ and âthemâ from the offline environment. The Internet has therefore paved the way for nuances and contradictions that diverge from homogeneous narratives produced by the nation through traditional media.
Conjointly, these triangulated set of processesânew technology, diaspora, and transnationalismâcould be one of the most powerful instruments in terms of creating a momentum to understand the diaspora consciousness that exceeds what the nation-state and traditional media have allowed. Diasporic consciousness is an evolving element of such cross-border living. In his work, Paul Gilroy (1987, 1993) explains double consciousness as a specific consciousness among the African diaspora that is shaped into a multifaceted cultural and social intermingling between Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Such a diasporic consciousness challenges the everyday reproduction of ânational consciousness,â the latter being a way of life lived in the world of nations (Billig 1995). However, the redefinitions that diasporic Kurds are engaged in online, break from the duality of homeland-settlement country and move beyond both the national consciousness and the double consciousness. In order to discover these in-depth and latent contestations, I argue that only by qualitatively digging deep below the surface of migration movements and diasporic experiences, and into their daily conversations and doings, can we move beyond myopic viewpoints and look to the periphery to understand the world around us and where we are headed.
The approach pursued here has benefited greatly from critical interdisciplinary tools developed within post-colonial, media, and feminist studies. The purpose is to open up new perspectives by adopting an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, âeven perhaps, at the risk of hubris, post-disciplinaryâ (Morley 2000, p. 4). Nevertheless, by adopting a more complex tactic, specified later, this book attempts to offer a deeper understanding of âthe issues at stake in what I take to be one of the most central political questions confronting us, as we attempt to construct a viable cartography of the world in which we now liveâ (Morley 2000, p. 4).
Against this backdrop, the reason for this bookâs existence is twofold. Firstly, and in relation to scholarship in general, it aims to fill a gap in the literature on diaspora and new media. The complex nexus of diaspora, new media, and identity includes contestations and reconfigurations that to a great extent have gone unnoticed by researchers and policymakers. The analyses developed here address new tendencies among (Kurdish) diaspora by going well beyond first-hand sequels and instead looking into the messy, intense, and contradictory statements that inform important contemporary socialities. Following on from this, new light is shed on the Internet and how it is challenging the notion of national consciousness, a dynamic which diaspora and media studies to date have largely failed to acknowledge.
The second reason is related to the political debates in Europe given the migration and refugee crises in the aftermath of recent ethnic conflicts and civil wars in the Middle East and North Africa. With the increase in voluntary and (in particular) forced migration, ideas about identity, belonging, and home need to be reconsidered in order to rethink citizenship policies, which, in many contemporary societies, have come to define nationality in terms of its ethnic, rather than civic, meaning. Much of the rhetoric used in public speeches in Europe demonstrates a need to reimagine European societies by bolstering the view of âus and them,â which, in turn, has provided ample fuel to European nationalist and far-right movements. I will elaborate these two reasons further in the following two sections.
The Academic Default: A Critique
Two idioms can be identified within the academic writing on diaspora and new media. I argue that despite an important discourse that has been developed over the years, diaspora has remained trapped within the duality of homeland and the settlement country. Part of the problem lies with the difficulties of finding a suitable definition for a people who were forcibly displaced. Numerous accounts of the concept have emerged over the last decade, to the degree that the concept of diaspora itself has become a diaspora in an ocean of semantics (Brubaker 2005). While diaspora initially defined victim diasporas, such as Jews and Armenians displaced by persecution and war, it has more recently been used as a catch-all phrase to speak of (and for) all population movements (Cho 2007). Old, classical, and victim diaspora are intermixed with new, transnational, trade diaspora. That said, the issue at stake in the many disparate definitions is not so much about who is and who is not a diaspora, but rather, it involves the merging histories and realities of these different groups, which, in turn, overlook the existential question. As Gijsbert Oonk (2007) argues, the definition of diaspora cannot only be answered by making a comparison between different ethnic diasporas, often based on their ethnic origins, but, rather, it needs to be based on the causes of migration. The question is not simply about who travels, but when, how, and under what circumstances (Brah 1996).
The terms âold diasporaâ and ânew diasporaâ (Mishra 2007; Spivak et al. 1996) reflect the different historical conditions that created them. While I argue that an initial contextualized distinction is important, it can at the same time trap us in endless binaries, andâeven more problematicallyâit completely ignores the changing and fluid processes that identities and cultures undergo. If identity and culture are not universally fixed, which is the post-modern position often reiterated and recognized in diaspora studies, the identity of the old diaspora must also undergo changes in the modern and developed societies they are settled in. To complicate the discourse of diaspora further, I argue th...