Identities in a ‘fragmegrated’ world: black cyber-communities and the French integration system

Abstract

The advent of the Internet has allowed many scattered communities across the world to rediscover and share a common identity that was believed lost. It has also led to the reconstruction of identities by way of new representations, which are constantly being formulated, nourished, and maintained. The Africans of the diaspora, in particular, created multiple websites for community exchanges in the form of discussion groups, online forums, interactive newspapers, blogs, and various media tools such as online television, radio, and newspapers that are being used as shared spaces at national or even continental levels. However, these shared spaces do not have the stability of national, cultural or racial spaces. They appear to be the receptacles of contradictory identities, concurrently manifesting globalizing and localizing dynamics. These spaces represent a ‘fragmegration’ (Rosenau 2003), where people struggle to reconcile the tensions resulting from their perceived Africanity and their belonging to a global world; the tensions between common cultural heritages and new identities; and the tensions between a shared experience of colonization and different expressions of colonialism in different parts of Africa – and therefore different conceptions of what it means to be African today. The objective of this paper is to show how these seemingly irreconcilable contradictions manifested themselves on the French African diaspora's online forums.