Nation as Network
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A01=Victoria Bernal
activism
african studies
Author_Victoria Bernal
belonging
Category=JBCT
Category=JBSL
citizens
citizenship
cyberspace
diaspora
digital media
displacement
emigration
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
eritreans
ethnography
government
history
imagined communities
immigration
infopolitics
international
internet
migration
nation
nonfiction
offshore
political engagement
politics
public sphere
sociology
sovereignty
state power
virtual
war memorial
websites
Product details
- ISBN 9780226144788
- Weight: 425g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 19 Aug 2014
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
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.
