Fragmented Belonging and Diasporic Return in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing

The African diaspora, also referred to as the African Black diaspora, is the voluntary and involuntary movement of Africans and their descendants to various parts of the world. Even though voluntary widespread African diasporas occurred during precolonizing periods, the Arabic slave trade (7th to 18th centuries) and the transatlantic slave trade (16th to 19th centuries) are largely recognized as phases of involuntary movement with an estimated combined 30 million Africans dispersed across the African continent and globally. Today, the largest populations of people descended from Africans forcibly removed from Africa reside in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States, with millions more in other countries. Such vast movement of a people across time and space has meant that those who are part of the African diaspora have suffered similar problems and disadvantages. The legacy of slavery, especially in relation to racism and colonialism, has garnered attention across the scholarly disciplines of history, ethnic, cultural, and religious studies. Likewise, African and Black diasporan responses to colonial oppression have manifested in multiple curricula in literature, music, philosophy, politics, civilization, customs, and so forth, designed for and by African diasporans in their efforts to unite all people of African descent, building on their cultural identity and resisting racist ideology and colonial rule.

This essay examines the groundbreaking scholarship of historian Gerald Horne, focusing particularly on what I term the thesis: the argument that white supremacy and anticommunism were the major forces shaping post-World II life and politics in the United States, with significant implications for African-descended and colonized people globally. Locked in a Manichean struggle with the Soviet Union for global supremacy, U.S. cold warriors, he argues, realized that legal or Jim Crow segregation was the Achilles heel for Washington's propaganda campaign to win the hearts and minds of people throughout the emerging As a result, U.S. government officials brutally suppressed W. E. B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Claudia Jones, Paul Robeson, William L. Patterson, Ferdinand Smith, and other African American leftists who pursued an antiracist, anti-imperialist, proletarian internationalist agenda. Simultaneously, the U.S. ruling class acquiesced to civil rights reforms for African Americans and other people of color out of fear that legal racial segregation would invalidate the U.S. claim to being the leader of the democratic free world. The postwar suppression of the left created an ideological vacuum in African American communities. Various forms of narrow nationalism, embraced by black nationalists and anticommunist liberals, filled this gap, with the latter achieving political hegemony within African American communities in the 1950s. Anticommunism and white supremacy, Horne concludes, profoundly shaped the trajectory of freedom movements across the African Diaspora. The Cold War, then, represented a rupture in African American life and political advancement. This argument runs through many of Horne's works. (1) Certainly, Home was not the first person to advance this argument. African American leftists during the McCarthy period were keenly aware of the connections between anticommunism and opposition to legal racial segregation. (2) Brenda Gayle Plummer, Carol Anderson, Nikhal Pal Singh, Penny Von Eschen, Kevin Gaines, Mary Dudziak and other scholars have offered perspectives that brilliantly explicate this relationship. (3) However, none have looked at the Cold War's impact on black life in the United States and across the African Diaspora as closely as Gerald Home. Indeed, it is hardly an overstatement to argue that his voluminous scholarship represents the most insightful work on the Black-Red encounter during the Cold and the transnational links between postwar African American freedom struggles and those in the Third World. (4) His work speaks directly to the continuing debates on the black-red encounter, as well the Red Scare's impact on postwar black freedom movements. (5) Above all, his scholarship has important implications for appreciating the impact of the Global Cold War on the African Diaspora worldwide. (6) Without question, his work will profoundly shape future interpretations of African American history and African Diaspora Studies, and many of the senior and junior researchers in these fields have acknowledged the debt they owe to Horne? (7) Given space limitations, I have decided to discuss five works: Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963 (1986); Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (2000); Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (1995); Cold in a Hot Zone: The United States Confronts Labor and Independence Struggles in the British West Indies (2007); and The End of Empires: African Americans and India (2008). These were chosen because 1 believe they effectively capture the thrust and key interventions of the Horne thesis in several historiographical trends. THE RED SCARE AND THE POSTWAR BLACK FREEDOM MOVEMENT In Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War; Horne posits what would become a major argument in this and several other works. …

Learning From the Past and Working in the Present to Create an Antiracist Future for Academic Medicine.

Centreing the corporeal experiences and material significance of bodies lays bare the border as a site for social reproduction. Utilizing critical discourse analyses on three mediatized encounters – Abdi Nor Iftin, Amadou Diallo, and Ahmed Mohammed – between African immigrancy to the United States and that nation-state's surveillance of bodies discloses a key contradiction within those encounters: a mésalliance that positions Africans as an archetype of human capital and simultaneously a critical threat to the national psyche. This essay argues that African immigrants expose this contradiction, raising questions on Blackness, sexuality, identity, immigration, anti-colonialism, and the afterlife of slavery. This dynamic not only reveals how contingent U.S. citizenship can be, while also “calling the bluff” of its exceptionalism and the underlying social contract of global neoliberalism, but also grounds Blackness transnationally as a way to avoid reproducing the racialized “sorting” that occurs before, during, and after face-to-face encounters.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has sparked the world order that has been socially constructed since World War II and brought racism's realities back to light in modern society. Coming right after the Covid-19 pandemic, the war has challenged western diplomacy as an avenue for resolving border disputes in the contemporary world. The sovereignty of nations has been tested by the war, with the EU security threatened. The war has led to the forced migration of Ukrainians and Ukraine residents. African immigrants who fled Ukraine at the start of the war faced inhumane challenges and violations of their human rights in their attempt to cross Ukraine's border points to safety, unlike their white counterparts. This paper analyses four Africans’ experiences in their attempt to cross the Ukraine border to safety using biographical method. Additionally, the paper reviews ten media footages of first-hand experiences by African immigrants at the Ukraine border points as people fled to safety between 24th February 2022 and 30th April 2022. The paper uses qualitative method to analyze the experiences and narratives of African immigrants from international media and deconstructs their experiences using the theory of race and ethnicity. The Africans' experiences are analyzed into typologies and deconstructed to illuminate the African immigrants’ experiences of historic, structural and systemic racism during global crisis. The objective of the interviews is to gather experiences and gather empirical evidence of racism experiences that took place at the Ukrainian border points. This paper highlights the conversation of human rights violations and social injustices against Africans in times of crisis and raises the questions of inequality and injustice treatment towards African immigrants during crisis in Europe.

This paper has three objectives. First, we establish that although Spain has attempted to distance itself from its role in the sub-saharan African slave trade and the significance blackness plays within its borders, there exists a significant population of people of African descent from Latin America living in Spain. Second, we show Black people are living what Sadiyah Hartmann refers to as the afterlife of slavery in Latin America. We claim it is worthwhile to take into account that Afro-Latin Americans are fleeing to the country that is largely responsible for them being in Latin America and the conditions of the colonial legacy that is pushing them out of Latin America. Third, we examine the meaning of blackness in Spain today through historical and ethnographic analysis that show that Afro-Latin Americans are also living a social death in Spain. Much of the data we provide in this paper is based on semi-structured interviews the authors have conducted in Spain, that is, semi-structured interviews of twenty-five Afro-Lastin American people who have lived in Spain. Our research, as it focuses on people of African descent from Latin America living in Spain, intentionally centers the voices, research and experiences of Black people. Resumen Este papel tiene tres objetivos. En primer lugar, establecemos que, aunque España ha intentado distanciarse de su papel en el comercio de esclavos del África subsahariana y la importancia que tiene la negritud dentro de sus fronteras, existe una importante población de afrodescendientes de América Latina que vive en España. En segundo lugar, mostramos que los negros están viviendo lo que Sadiyah Hartmann llama el más allá de la esclavitud en América Latina. Decimos que vale la pena tomar en cuenta que los afrolatinoamericanos están huyendo al país que es en gran parte responsable de que estén en América Latina y las condiciones del legado colonial que los está empujando fuera de América Latina. En tercer lugar, examinamos el significado de la negritud en la España actual a través de análisis históricos y etnográficos que muestran que los afrolatinoamericanos también están viviendo una muerte social en España. Gran parte de los datos que proporcionamos en este artículo se basan en entrevistas semiestructuradas que los autores han realizado en España, es decir, entrevistas semiestructuradas a veinticinco personas afrolatinoamericanas que han vivido en España. Nuestra investigación, al centrarse en personas afrodescendientes de América Latina que viven en España, centra intencionalmente las voces, investigaciones y experiencias de las personas negras.

The First World Festival of Negro Arts (FESMAN) was decidedly a product of African independence, reflecting cultural and political aspirations of an emergent world order. It was also decidedly a product of the jet age. While air travel seems commonplace today, the commercial jet airliner was still a novel sign of futurity in 1966. Early stages of commercial jet travel often followed colonial routes into Africa, a postwar extension of Europe’s imperial era. FESMAN offered the opportunity to reimagine air travel for the service of the international community built around independence-era Africa and the African diaspora. This essay examines the trope of air travel as a vital symbol of modernity invoked by FESMAN’s organizers and participants. For example, many American visitors to the festival noted both the speed with which Pan Am jets shuttled them to the once-prohibitively remote continent as well as the shining international architecture of the newly built airport. The trope of air travel is perhaps most beautifully elaborated in American filmmaker William Greaves’ lyrical documentary, The First World Festival of Negro Arts. The film strategically employed the marvel of air travel and its potential as a medium for facilitating the global networks proposed by the festival. Focusing on Greaves’ film and American observations, this essay will explore the ways in which FESMAN proposed a global blackness for the jet age.

The King in Lima: Simulacra, Ritual, and Rule in Seventeenth-Century Peru

The Racial Equity Consciousness Database (RECD) initiative aims to address systemic racism by providing a comprehensive platform for accessing resources dedicated to advancing racial equity. In response to the pervasive nature of systemic racism across various sectors, RECD collaborates with institutions such as the United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent (UNPFPAD) to establish a centralized database. This initiative recognizes the need to address racial disparities across social systems including education, healthcare, housing, and criminal justice. Systemic racism, defined as the institutionalization of inequity within society's fundamental structures, underscores the necessity of a collective effort to combat it. The goal of this paper is to outline the methodology employed in creating RECD and aligning its resources with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). By systematically categorizing and organizing racial equity resources, RECD seeks to empower communities to confront systemic racism effectively. The objectives of this database planning process include efficiently identifying and assessing racial equity resources available in Pittsburgh and beyond, to create a solution-based approach for achieving racial equity. Additionally, this paper aims to highlight the significance of representation at the United Nations Permanent Forum for People of African Descent and articulate the intended impact of aligning resources with United Nations goals. Through this initiative, RECD endeavors to foster collaboration, raise awareness, and facilitate meaningful social change towards achieving racial equity globally.

Theorizing about race has long occupied a peculiar position within the Western academy. For one, racial knowledge remains scattered across several academic disciplines, often as an unmarked signifier attached to some other concern, e.g., racial identity as a dimension of identity formation or racial inequality as a form of social inequality. Despite the ubiquity of race as a topic across multiple academic disciplines, theory itself has been similarly distributed, such that theorizing race has not been central to the theoretical concerns of Western social theory. This organization of knowledge has created significant blind spots concerning the ongoing problem of systemic racism, in particular, the centrality of systemic racism within colonialism and imperialism, as well as within its own discourses and practices. For another, Western theorizing about race has ignored the significance of resisting systemic racism, instead choosing to explain prevailing racial orders. In contrast, Indigenous peoples, people of African descent, Latinx populations, Asians, and similarly subordinated groups have theorized about reforming, transforming, dismantling, or abolishing systemic racism. Critical analytical work on race, racism, and anti-racism generated outside the parameters of Western social theory, especially when done by scholars of color, shows a strong predilection to change racial hierarchies, not defend them. Yet traditionally, this work rarely makes it into the journals, graduate syllabi, monographs, and thematic conferences that reproduce the canon of Western social theory. While there are many explanations for why this happened, the focus in this chapter is on the trajectory of critical race theory (CRT) within academia. Quite simply, critical race theory is a body of knowledge that uses theoretical tools to criticize the social and political practices of systemic racism. The term "critical race theory" appeared in conjunction with CRT as a specific discourse that was advanced by legal scholars in the academy in the 1990s. Yet the idea of critical race theory as an analysis of and opposition to systemic racism has a much longer history and reach than the specific case of CRT as an academic discourse. Critical race theory is a broader, historically situated way of theorizing and resisting systemic racism that has taken various forms both inside and outside the academy.

This essay explores the discursive production of black captivity across the African diaspora in the afterlife of slavery. I take as my objects of analysis the contemporary anti-trafficking and anti-slavery movements, features of the increasing hegemony of human rights discourse for formulating problems of social justice and their remedies. I argue that configuring black captivity – in this case, the experiences of Nigerian women migrants to Western Europe – through these hegemonic discourses extend, rather than ameliorate, the global structural antagonism of anti-blackness.

Racial discrimination persists as a feature of American life. In his 1881 essay, “The Color Line,” Frederick Douglass describes the enduring strain of racial prejudice which he characterized as a “moral disorder” that “creates the conditions necessary to its own existence and fortifies itself by refusing all contradiction” (p. 567). W.E.B. Du Bois decried this moral disorder in The Souls of Black Folk where he famously asserted “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line" (n.p.). Despite the progress achieved through successive American racial justice movements (Abolitionism, Civil Rights Movement, Black Power Movement), the problematics of the color-line remain a defining feature of the American experience. The murder of George Floyd at the hands of law enforcement in the summer of 2020 triggered mass outrage across the the world over the accretion of racially motivated acts of police brutality directed against individuals of African descent. Regardless of movements for social change, the U.S. has maintained an institutionalized and systemic structure of racial inequality – a society characterized by structural racism. Structural systemic racism is “a system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity” (Aspen Institute, n.p.). Structural racism is maintained through institutions. Libraries, as educational and cultural institutions, have been implicated in their role in maintaining structural racism in American society (ALA 2020). In the aftermath of the Floyd protests, the United Nations (U.N.) investigated police brutality and issued a report describing global human rights violations directed against people of African descent; they found systemic racism flourishing in a culture of denial (Office of High Commissioner, United Nations Human Rights 2021). They made several recommendations to create transformative change: (1) ceasing denial of racism, (2) confronting past racist legacies, (3) dismantling systemically racist structures, and (4) attaining reparatory justice. Library and Information Science associations have preemptively taken the first step recommended by the U.N., ceasing denial, and have issued various public statements admitting to their role in perpetuating racism (ALA 2020, PLA 2020); further actions leading to reparatory justice appear not to have been rigorously pursued. At the personal and individual library level, more sustained work has been done. Within this context, a project to capture how LIS has promoted racial justice was conceived. Antiracist Library and Information Science: Racial Justice and Community (2023), a volume of critical, scholarly and reflective perspectives on the theory, practice and progress made towards the actualization of antiracism, edited by Kimberly Black and Bharat Mehra was published (Emerald Publishing). The volume consists of twenty chapters describing the theoretical foundations of antiracism in LIS, a discussion of the manifestations of racism in LIS and communities and strategies for actualizing an antiracist LIS. Contributors to the volume consist of noted and emerging LIS educators and scholars, librarians, and students who have a stake in the enterprise of racial justice. The editors and contributors to this volume would like to convene a public conversation about antiracism in LIS through a panel presentation and discussion. The goal of this panel is to discuss the ideas presented in the book: Confrontation of past legacies – discussion of theoretical and philosophical foundations of antiracism in LIS Cessation of denial – discussion of the manifestations of racism in libraries, LIS associations and the profession itself Dismantling structures/pursuit of racial justice – conversation about strategies for achieving antiracism in LIS The panel will consist of brief talks by authors about their chapters and breakout sessions designed to explore issues and develop solutions related to anti-racism in LIS. The 90-minute session is organized as follows: Introduction Discussion of Selected Chapters Nicole A. Cooke & Lucy Santos Green - “Shutting Down the Tent Revival: The Call for Inclusive Leadership in LIS” LaVerne Gray – “Unearthing Racism in the Soil: Developing Collective Anti-racist Consciousness in a Library and Information Science Classroom” Mónica Colón-Aguirre – “Publishing While Latina: My Journey as an LIS Scholar in Search of the Academic Stool’s Third Leg” Anders Tobiason – “Engaging Antiracist Conversations: Foregrounding Twitter Feeds in Library Guides as a Way to Critically Promote Discussions of Racial Justice” Jennifer Elisa Chapman – “Slave Cases and Ingrained Racism in Legal Information Infrastructures” Shalonda Capers – “With Head and Heart: Exploring Autoethnographic Antiracist Research in Pediatric Cancer Communities” Baheya S. Jaber – “Immigrants in Alabama: Community-engaged Scholarship as a Lens for Racial Justice” Bharat Mehra [co-authors Laurie Bonnici and Steven L. MacCall not on panel] – “Collegiality as a Weapon to Maintain Status Quo in a White-privileged and Entrenched LIS Academy" Breakout Discussion Sessions Debrief/Conclusion By the conclusion of the panel, participants should walk away with a clearer understanding of how systemic racism is manifested in LIS as well effective strategies to support and enact antiracist practices in LIS.

Reviewed by: Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings Wilma King Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. By Clarence E. Walker. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 2009. "I want to posit in this book a new myth of origin of the United States," writes the author Clarence E. Walker, who suggests that "at the moment of its creation the nation was not a white racial space but a mixed race one" (2). Rather than positioning George and Martha Washington as "founding parents" of the United States, the author suggests that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings replace them. Walker makes his case for the "new myth" in Mongrel Nation, a slim two-part volume containing the essays "Sexuality," and "Character and History, or 'Chloroform in Print.'" Walker acknowledges that his proposition will disturb some readers. Nevertheless, he focuses sharply on the Jefferson-Hemings nexus to answer questions about national identity, racial provenance, and who owns history. An 1802 story in the Richmond Recorder by James Thompson Callender claimed that Jefferson had fathered children with Hemings. "Interracial sex was normative," says Walker (27) yet such a charge against Jefferson, president of the United States, was "news." Besides, he had published disparaging remarks about people of African descent, especially women, in Query XIV of his Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), causing Jefferson's defenders to believe he would never become intimate with a black woman. As a result, the "news" prompted members of Jefferson's family, his admirers, and some historians to vigorously dispute Callender's charge. Jefferson's defenders remain vigilant, and their attitude is, in Walker's view, "representative of a congenital racial tension in American society" (2). [End Page 175] A brief review of the scholarship about Jefferson and Hemings spanning nearly fifty years calls attention to the continuous debate in which Annette Gordon-Reed's Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997) and the 1998 DNA evidence linking Jefferson to a Hemings offspring are integral. Given the body of existing literature, one must ask what will Mongrel Nation contribute? Briefly, Mongrel Nation takes the thirty-eight-year-long Jefferson-Hemings relationship out of the "closet" and places it within a global context. The United States was part of a larger colonial settler society or plantation complex in which creolization, primarily by exploiting enslaved women, occurred. It is against this historical backdrop that Walker asks, why did intimacy between blacks and whites create angst in the United States? In actuality, it is not solely the intimacy but the resulting "mongrel nation" that has been disturbing. Whiteness, rather than an impossible mixture thereof, defined and was the criteria for American citizenship. Children resulting from white-black relationships prompted fractionized calculations or mathematical blood analyses that relegated non-whites to an outsider status in the "racial state." Mixtures threatened the creation of a "pure" republic. Within this context, Jefferson's ideas about colonizing blacks outside the United States are understandable. Writing or theorizing about people of African descent was one thing, but living with or loving them was another matter. How was that possible? Was it ambivalence about blacks that created a racial and sexual amnesia? Did that amnesia create a canonical master narrative of the United States distinguished by "unblemished whiteness?" The answer may be found in Walker's alternative readings and discussions of who Americans are as a nation. Had another Virginia planter, for example George Wythe or John Wayles rather than the esteemed Thomas Jefferson, been accused of intimacy with an enslaved woman would the results have been the same? Obviously, the answer is no, but answers to more edgy questions give pause. For example, do readers know with certainty that Sally Hemings was phenotypically black? How did she identify herself? There is no extant description of her skin color, hair texture, or facial features to determine that they were clearly Caucasoid or Negroid. Even so, one must ask if she and her half-sister, Martha Wayles, Thomas Jefferson's wife, bore a striking resemblance. Could Jefferson, a forty-one-year-old widower, have subjected Sally's identity to the mathematics of blood as he once...

Thomas Coke, the father of Methodist missions, promoted new preaching opportunities for Methodist missions around the world while navigating racist colonial systems. Coke advocated for his missionaries to have access to preach to enslaved Africans on plantations; preached emancipation to slaveholders in America; called upon George Washington to end enslavement; and helped to found the Colony of Sierra Leone for free Blacks. Coke grew in his mission theology from an earlier approach to saving souls to integral mission with concern for education and the well-being of the whole person. The article makes the case that while Coke had a complex relationship with British colonialism and worked within racist systems, he was an abolitionist and worked for the eventual emancipation of Africans and people of African descent.

What strikes me about the habits of the people who spend so much time on the Net—well, it’s so new that we don't know what will come next—is in fact precisely how niche in character it is. You ask people what nets they are on, and they’re all so specialised! The Argentines on the Argentine Net and so forth. And it’s particularly the Argentines who are not in Argentina. (Anderson, in Gower, par. 5) The preceding quotation, taken from his 1996 interview with Eric Gower, sees Benedict Anderson reflecting on the formation of imagined, transnational communities on the Internet. Anderson is, of course, famous for his work on how nationalism, as an “imagined community,” gets constructed through the shared consumption of print media (6-7, 26-27); although its readers will never all see each other face to face, people consuming a newspaper or novel in a shared language perceive themselves as members of a collective. In this more recent interview, Anderson recognised the specific groupings of people in online communities: Argentines who find themselves outside of Argentina link up online in an imagined diaspora community. Over the course of the last decade and a half since Anderson spoke about Argentinian migrants and diaspora communities, we have witnessed an exponential growth of new forms of digital communication, including social networking sites (e.g. Facebook), Weblogs, micro-blogging (e.g. Twitter), and video-sharing sites (e.g. YouTube). Alongside these new means of communication, our current epoch of globalisation is also characterised by migration flows across, and between, all continents. In his book Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai recognised that “the twin forces of mass migration and electronic mediation” have altered the ways the imagination operates. Furthermore, these two pillars, human motion and digital mediation, are in constant “flux” (44). The circulation of people and digitally mediatised content proceeds across and beyond boundaries of the nation-state and provides ground for alternative community and identity formations. Appadurai’s intervention has resulted in increasing awareness of local, transnational, and global networking flows of people, ideas, and culturally hybrid artefacts. In this article, we analyse the various innovative tactics taken up by migrant youth to imagine digital diasporas. Inspired by scholars such as Appadurai, Avtar Brah and Paul Gilroy, we tease out—from a postcolonial perspective—how digital diasporas have evolved over time from a more traditional understanding as constituted either by a vertical relationship to a distant homeland or a horizontal connection to the scattered transnational community (see Safran, Cohen) to move towards a notion of “hypertextual diaspora.” With hypertextual diaspora, these central axes which constitute the understanding of diaspora are reshuffled in favour of more rhizomatic formations where affiliations, locations, and spaces are constantly destabilised and renegotiated. Needless to say, diasporas are not homogeneous and resist generalisation, but in this article we highlight common ways in which young migrant Internet users renew the practices around diaspora connections. Drawing from research on various migrant populations around the globe, we distinguish three common strategies: (1) the forging of transnational public spheres, based on maintaining virtual social relations by people scattered across the globe; (2) new forms of digital diasporic youth branding; and (3) the cultural production of innovative hypertexts in the context of more rhizomatic digital diaspora formations. Before turning to discuss these three strategies, the potential of a postcolonial framework to recognise multiple intersections of diaspora and digital mediation is elaborated. Hypertext as a Postcolonial Figuration Postcolonial scholars, Appadurai, Gilroy, and Brah among others, have been attentive to diasporic experiences, but they have paid little attention to the specificity of digitally mediated diaspora experiences. As Maria Fernández observes, postcolonial studies have been “notoriously absent from electronic media practice, theory, and criticism” (59). Our exploration of what happens when diasporic youth go online is a first step towards addressing this gap. Conceptually, this is clearly an urgent need since diasporas and the digital inform each other in the most profound and dynamic of ways: “the Internet virtually recreates all those sites which have metaphorically been eroded by living in the diaspora” (Ponzanesi, “Diasporic Narratives” 396). Writings on the Internet tend to favour either the “gold-rush” mentality, seeing the Web as a great equaliser and bringer of neoliberal progress for all, or the more pessimistic/technophobic approach, claiming that technologically determined spaces are exclusionary, white by default, masculine-oriented, and heteronormative (Everett 30, Van Doorn and Van Zoonen 261). For example, the recent study by Ito et al. shows that young people are not interested in merely performing a fiction in a parallel online world; rather, the Internet gets embedded in their everyday reality (Ito et al. 19-24). Real-life commercial incentives, power hierarchies, and hegemonies also get extended to the digital realm (Schäfer 167-74). Online interaction remains pre-structured, based on programmers’ decisions and value-laden algorithms: “people do not need a passport to travel in cyberspace but they certainly do need to play by the rules in order to function electronically” (Ponzanesi, “Diasporic Narratives” 405). We began our article with a statement by Benedict Anderson, stressing how people in the Argentinian diaspora find their space on the Internet. Online avenues increasingly allow users to traverse and add hyperlinks to their personal websites in the forms of profile pages, the publishing of preferences, and possibilities of participating in and affiliating with interest-based communities. Online journals, social networking sites, streaming audio/video pages, and online forums are all dynamic hypertexts based on Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) coding. HTML is the protocol of documents that refer to each other, constituting the backbone of the Web; every text that you find on the Internet is connected to a web of other texts through hyperlinks. These links are in essence at equal distance from each other. As well as being a technological device, hypertext is also a metaphor to think with. Figuratively speaking, hypertext can be understood as a non-hierarchical and a-centred modality. Hypertext incorporates multiplicity; different pathways are possible simultaneously, as it has “multiple entryways and exits” and it “connects any point to any other point” (Landow 58-61). Feminist theorist Donna Haraway recognised the dynamic character of hypertext: “the metaphor of hypertext insists on making connections as practice.” However, she adds, “the trope does not suggest which connections make sense for which purposes and which patches we might want to follow or avoid.” We can begin to see the value of approaching the Internet from the perspective of hypertext to make an “inquiry into which connections matter, why, and for whom” (128-30). Postcolonial scholar Jaishree K. Odin theorised how hypertextual webs might benefit subjects “living at the borders.” She describes how subaltern subjects, by weaving their own hypertextual path, can express their multivocality and negotiate cultural differences. She connects the figure of hypertext with that of the postcolonial: The hypertextual and the postcolonial are thus part of the changing topology that maps the constantly shifting, interpenetrating, and folding relations that bodies and texts experience in information culture. Both discourses are characterised by multivocality, multilinearity, openendedness, active encounter, and traversal. (599) These conceptions of cyberspace and its hypertextual foundations coalesce with understandings of “in-between”, “third”, and “diaspora media space” as set out by postcolonial theorists such as Bhabha and Brah. Bhabha elaborates on diaspora as a space where different experiences can be articulated: “These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood—singular or communal—that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation (4). (Dis-)located between the local and the global, Brah adds: “diaspora space is the point at which boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, of belonging and otherness, of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ are contested” (205). As youths who were born in the diaspora have begun to manifest themselves online, digital diasporas have evolved from transnational public spheres to differential hypertexts. First, we describe how transnational public spheres form one dimension of the mediation of diasporic experiences. Subsequently, we focus on diasporic forms of youth branding and hypertext aesthetics to show how digitally mediated practices can go beyond and transgress traditional formations of diasporas as vertically connected to a homeland and horizontally distributed in the creation of transnational public spheres. Digital Diasporas as Diasporic Public Spheres Mass migration and digital mediation have led to a situation where relationships are maintained over large geographical distances, beyond national boundaries. The Internet is used to create transnational imagined audiences formed by dispersed people, which Appadurai describes as “diasporic public spheres”. He observes that, as digital media “increasingly link producers and audiences across national boundaries, and as these audiences themselves start new conversations between those who move and those who stay, we find a growing number of diasporic public spheres” (22). Media and communication researchers have paid a lot of attention to this transnational dimension of the networking of dispersed people (see Brinke