Digital Diasporas: Beyond the Buzzword: Towards a Relational Understanding of Mobility and Connectivity

Abstract

This chapter proposes a critical intervention in digital diaspora studies by foregrounding a relational approach that is inspired by feminist and postcolonial theory. This innovative framework allows us to grasp contemporary human mobility as shaped by and constitutive of an unevenly interconnected world. Relational implies taking into account different perspectives and methodologies on diaspora studies which defy ossified notions of ‘here’ and ‘there’, and of ethnic absolutism but sees diaspora as a continuum that needs to be critically scrutinized in its different manifestations. This holds also for the notion of digital diaspora. Recent buzzwords including ‘the connected migrant’, ‘digital diaspora’, ‘online diaspora’ and ‘e-diasporas’ commonly champion agency, particularly of non-white communities hailing from the Global South. This perspective risks glossing over the ways in which everyday offline and online contexts are steeped in intersecting gendered, racial, classed, generational and geo-political power relations. We provide a genealogy of digital diasporas scholarship in order to counter this lack of critical attention for power differences and material, social and emotional contexts. We will do so by combining media and non-media centric paradigm shifts in internet studies with the several turns and takes in critical digital diaspora studies.