Description
How is the Internet transforming the relationships between citizens and states? What happens to politics when international migration is coupled with digital media, making it easy for people to be politically active in a nation from outside its borders? In Nation as Network, Victoria Bernal creatively combines media studies, ethnography, and African studies to explore this new political paradigm through a striking analysis of how Eritreans in diaspora have used the Internet to shape the course of Eritrean history. Bernal argues that Benedict Anderson's famous concept of nations as "imagined communities" must now be rethought because diasporas and information technologies have transformed the ways nations are sustained and challenged. She traces the development of Eritrean diaspora websites over two turbulent decades that saw the Eritrean state grow ever more tyrannical. Through Eritreans' own words in posts and debates, she reveals how new subjectivities are formed and political action is galvanized online. She suggests that "infopolitics"-struggles over the management of information-make politics in the twenty-first century distinct, and she analyzes the innovative ways Eritreans deploy the Internet to support and subvert state power. Nation as Network is a unique and compelling work that advances our understanding of the political significance of digital media.
About the Author
Victoria Bernal is associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Cultivating Workers: Peasants and Capitalism in a Sudanese Village, coeditor of Theorizing NGOs: States, Feminisms, and Neoliberalism; and editor of Contemporary Cultures, Global Connections: Anthropology for the 21st Century.
Reviews
"Bernal insightfully delves into the role the new media-especially the Internet-has been playing in the precipitation of transformations of the meanings of nation, citizenship, and sovereignty in an age of transnational migration and globalization. Unlike most other studies that conceive of the Internet as a technological product, she conceptualizes the Internet as a cultural one, and, more important, she underscores the transformative power with which it facilitates social change." (Gaim Kibreab, London South Bank University)"
Book Information
ISBN 9780226144818
Author Victoria Bernal
Format Paperback
Page Count 208
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Weight(grams) 425g
Dimensions(mm) 23mm * 17mm * 1mm
About the Author
Victoria Bernal is associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Cultivating Workers: Peasants and Capitalism in a Sudanese Village, coeditor of Theorizing NGOs: States, Feminisms, and Neoliberalism; and editor of Contemporary Cultures, Global Connections: Anthropology for the 21st Century.
Reviews
"Bernal insightfully delves into the role the new media-especially the Internet-has been playing in the precipitation of transformations of the meanings of nation, citizenship, and sovereignty in an age of transnational migration and globalization. Unlike most other studies that conceive of the Internet as a technological product, she conceptualizes the Internet as a cultural one, and, more important, she underscores the transformative power with which it facilitates social change." (Gaim Kibreab, London South Bank University)"
Book Information
ISBN 9780226144818
Author Victoria Bernal
Format Paperback
Page Count 208
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Weight(grams) 425g
Dimensions(mm) 23mm * 17mm * 1mm
