Journal of Global Diaspora & Media - Textures of Diaspora and (Post-)Digitality: A Cultural Studies Approach, Jun 2022

In our article, we will address the question of the extent to which the phenomenon of the digital diaspora can also be transferred to internet communities. Drawing on Foucault’s concepts of heterotopia and heterochronia, we will not only refer to actual diaspora communities, but especially to those communities that make use of diaspora rhetoric and therefore also have a community-building effect. We deal with attempts to create communities that are, on the one hand, located beyond the ‘classical’ definition of diaspora, but, on the other hand, are designed against the background of the connotations of diaspora (extended diaspora). We will examine such an appropriation of the concept using several examples from the fields of video games and digital video. These pop cultural artefacts make use of the term ‘diaspora’ to create a feeling of community in the realm of the digital but without really cashing in on its original meaning.

African writers from the diaspora as much as from the continent have emphatically embraced the potential of new media technologies. A vast and tightly woven network of literary enthusiasts connects writers, scholars, publishers, journalists and readers, who often interact independently from western publishing houses. Digital diasporic literatures are thus created within multiple cyberplaces that are interlinked. My article focuses on ‘Hafiz’ (2014), a collaborative piece published on Twitter by Teju Cole. Thirty-five voices jointly tell a story, thereby conjuring the illusion of an event that simultaneously takes place in metropolises of Nigeria, South Africa, Europe, the United States and India. With regard to the performative collaboration displayed in ‘Hafiz’, my article discusses how Achille Mbembe’s conceptualization of Afropolitanism ([2010] 2021), the relational approach to digital diasporas by Candidatu and Koen, and concepts of digital literatures can be fruitful for the analysis of new media based literatures.

This article gives an overview of francophone African diasporic websites such as Africultures.com, africavivre.com and other digital magazines, networks and blogs that are present on different platforms. Taking recent novels, texts of literary criticism, reviews and comments as examples, I analyse in what way they share in discourse about diasporic and migratory identity positions of Afropéens (‘Afropeans’) (and differ therein from other readings of the same novels). Methodologically, I draw on Stephen Greenblatt’s concepts of self-fashioning and circulation of social energy as well as on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the production of social capital. With respect to socially preformed discursive formation of Black people as an ostensibly homogeneous minority in the twenty-first century France, I refer to Pap Ndiaye’s ground-breaking study La condition noire from 2009 which closely analyses the complex situation of the Black migrant and post-migrant population. I focus on two narrative texts which are widely perceived both in France and on an international level: First, the autobiographically inspired novel Le Ventre de l’Atlantique (The Belly of the Atlantic) by Fatou Diome and second, Marie Ndiaye’s narrative triptych Trois femmes puissantes (Three Strong Women). Studying remarks and comments of literary criticism concerning these texts on francophone African diasporic websites, I raise the following questions: What relevance do these narrated characters (still) have today? To what extent do they shape the discourse of Black migrants in France? What kind of interpretation of the colonial history and context do they offer? And which emancipatory moments and decolonial strategies create a new, proper symbolic capital and, thus, add to the Imagined Community of ‘Noirs en France’ (‘Black people in France’)?

This article revolves around the old question of whether politics and punk can or should be seen in terms of aesthetic by analysing Afropunk’s transnational digital imagined community, more specifically, its Instagram page. Afropunk is a fluid term that embraces everyone in a wide spectrum of Blackness feeling addressed by the defining phrase ‘the other Black experience’ and therefore considering themselves non-normative in any axis of discrimination in respect to ‘Black’ and ‘White’ (hetero)normativity. Instagram as a popular social-media platform is characterized by a focus on highly aestheticized images. Drawing on an understanding of media as practice, my article discusses Afropunk’s political use of aesthetics on Instagram in light of José Esteban Muñoz’s theories. Adopting a cultural studies’ approach that offers a conceptual meta-reflection on Afropunk’s Instagram use based on exemplary entries of 2020 and 2021, it argues that, for this distinctive community within the afro-diaspora, aesthetic works as a mode of articulating the politics of ‘disidentification’ (Muñoz 1999) and of sensing the ‘Brown commons’ (Muñoz 2009) that open up alternative ways of both facing the majoritarian society and enacting community beyond identitarian paradigms.

Since Gopinath coined the term ‘queer diaspora’ in 2002, many studies have reconsidered diaspora studies from sexual and gender perspectives. These approaches usually leverage the concept of ‘digital diaspora’, first developed by Brinkerhoff in 2009. This proves the relevance of online spaces for these queer communities. However, several scholars suggest that queer diasporans relate to their culture of origin in rather ambiguous terms. Apparently, estrangement and uprooting are frequent, even if these features would exclude queer individuals from orthodox definitions of diaspora. This calls for a re-contextualization of queer diaspora. The goal is to provide an analytic tool for understanding how founding narratives often conceptualize queer communities under the imagery of diaspora. To support this claim, this article goes back to the reflections on community, nostalgia and futurity by Marcel Proust, Jacquelyn Fields, José Esteban Muñoz, Wen Lui and Lidia García, among others. The viability of this theoretical apparatus is tested on a corpus of tweets. Social media constitutes an exceptional site for the dissemination of LGBT+ content and the subsequent formation of queer communities. The corpus favors literature written in Spanish, but considers the coexistence of other languages, mainly English.

Sibylle Berg’s novel GRM: Brainfuck (2019) deals with profound structural changes that are directly linked to the growing digitalization and datafication of our world. Together with a strong neo-liberalism, this has provoked severe grievances, which have in turn led to important migratory movements. Berg lays this situation out thanks to the characters of the novel – most of them are migrants or have a migrant background. They have experienced different kinds of discrimination and social exclusion that hinder their integration into the host society. The frustrated yearning of many migrants for recognition interestingly becomes apparent in the lack of opportunities for self-representation through digital media, which are described as powerful tools that reinforce and (re-)produce stigmatizing discourses. In addition, the novel shows how mass datafication allows the almost complete surveillance of all citizens. Nevertheless, the main characters in the novel try to resist this total control by choosing a different kind of digital diaspora, which means a retreat to an exclusively analogue life – an impossible endeavour.

The novel Vor der Zunahme der Zeichen (2016) by Senthuran Varatharajah is a conversation on Facebook of two characters, both of whom are heirs of the diaspora (from Sri Lanka and from Kosovo) in Germany. It experiments with various forms to break free from multiple limits and imposed cultural assignments and also presents diverse manifestations of the relationship between the current diasporic condition and the postdigital. Therefore, it serves as an intriguing exponent for the exploration of this relationship. First, the representation of the diasporic condition is reassessed once it has been modified by the impact of these new, postdigital practices. And second, the role of digital media and of postdigital practices is especially relevant to the aesthetic representation of the diaspora, reaching beyond a traditional notion of the diasporic condition. For this reason, the function of select postdigital characteristics will be explored as component elements of a new diasporic poetics.

This is a commentary to the Special Issue ‘Textures of Diaspora and (Post-) Digitality: A Cultural Studies Approach’, edited by Shola Adenekan, Julia Borst and Linda Maeding. The commentary reflects on digital diaspora as a travelling concept, and considers the analytic scope of the terms post-migration, post-digital and post-global for digital diasporas studies. I argue digital diaspora studies can be situated in the following continuums: universal-particular, decentring–recentering, global–local, inclusion and exclusion as well as media-centrism and non-media-centrism. Future scholarship may listen better to the sounds of digital diasporas and attend to the implications of digital platformization.