Product Overview
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.
