Building diaspora: Filipino community formation on the Internet

Abstract

The dramatic growth of the Internet in recent years has provided opportunities for a host of relationships and communities-forged across great distances and even time-that would have seemed unimaginable only a short while ago. In Building Diaspora, Emily Noelle Ignacio explores how Filipinos have used these subtle, cyber, but very real social connections to construct and reinforce a sense of national, ethnic, and racial identity with distant others. Through an extensive analysis of newsgroup debates, listserves, and website postings, she illustrates the significant ways that computer-mediated communication has contributed to solidifying what can credibly be called a Filipino diaspora. Lively cyber-discussions on topics including Eurocentrism, Orientalism, patriarchy, gender issues, language, and mail-order-brides have helped Filipinos better understand and articulate their postcolonial situation as well as their relationship with other national and ethnic communities around the world. Significant attention is given to the complicated history of Philippine-American relations, including the ways Filipinos are racialized as a result of their political and economic subjugation to U.S. interests. As Filipinos and many other ethnic groups continue to migrate globally, Building Diaspora makes an important contribution to our changing understanding of homeland. The author makes the powerful argument that while home is being further removed from geographic place, it is being increasingly territorialized in space. Our notions of identity are growing more ephemeral, but they are becoming no less intricate or meaningful.