<nettime-ann> Cyberframing Nigerian Nationhood

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

.
Diaspora and Imagined Nationality
USA-Africa Dialogue and Cyberframing Nigerian Nationhood
by Koleade Odutola

2012 • $30.00 • 204 pp • paper • ISBN: 978-1-59460-926-8 • LCCN  
2011020491

When Africans dialogue with citizens of the United States of America,  
the continent in its parts through the perspectives of nationals  
engage each other in conversations. The conversations flow like  
streams in many directions yielding fruits of different sorts. It is  
possible for a systematic observer-researcher to fish out important  
themes and ideas. This book, Diaspora and Imagined Nationality: USA- 
Africa Dialogue and Cyberframing Nigerian Nationhood, traces the  
hegemony of Western ideas in postings and conversations online. In the  
process it frames Nigeria’s presence online as a postcolonial nation  
(or nation space) through various communicative activities of citizens  
at home and in the diaspora. These communicative activities and  
political activism have led to a wide range of scholarly  
interrogations and interventions in media, communication, and  
migration studies against the backdrop of globalization,  
democratization, and modernization theories. It has been amply  
documented that communication and social interaction produce ideas  
that can be evaluated along the lines of deliberative democracy. These  
approaches have produced outcomes without the benefit of the complex  
debates, dialogues, and disagreements that come with popular  
participation and creation of  variegated knowledge by a collective.  
As part of the conclusion, the study posits that the concept of  
nationhood is not fixed but is a symbolic construct that evolves  
through unstructured conversations, sharing, and intense debates.
This book navigates the unstructured virtual terrain of dialogues,  
debates, and seas of information available online. One of the  
objectives of this book is to bring together the multiple voices and  
transitions of individuals who left their home-countries to new host- 
communities by attending to one of the fruits of this technology- 
driven mode of communication and knowledge production. Diaspora and  
Imagined Nationality does not pretend to be a universal representation  
of all Nigerians in the diaspora; it instead focuses on what a small  
group of intellectuals of African descent and their friends talk and  
gripe about, and how these themes affect the larger collective.
This book is part of the African World Series, edited by Toyin Falola,  
Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor in History, University  
of Texas at Austin.
http://www.cap-press.com/books/isbn/9781594609268/Diaspora+and+Imagined+Nationality




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