Diasporic nationalism and the media

Abstract

• Drawing on empirical research in London, this article explores how young Korean, Japanese and Chinese women make sense of transnational lives and the media, and paradoxical consequences for identities. It argues that the tendency to celebrate transnational mobility is often separated from mundane reality and obscures actual conditions and experiences of social exclusion. It further argues that the ethnic media arise at the heart of the paradox of transnational experience, as electronic mediation intensified by the Internet provides a necessary condition for the possibility of diasporic nationalism. Diasporic nationalism emerges as reactionary ethno-nationalism within global knowledge diasporas of people who appear to be bilingual cross-cultural negotiators moving regularly between different cultures and participating in exchanges across national borders. Diasporic nationalism becomes particularly potent and perhaps more salient through transnational flows and movement, nationalizing both transnational spaces and the Internet’s simultaneously dis-embedding and re-embedding capacities in forming a partial yet unending connection with home. •