New Online Ethnicities and the Politics of Representation

Abstract

The paper interrogates the literature on online cultural and religious identities through a critical engagement of Stuart Hall's work on new ethnicity and regimes of representation. It suggests that this literature conflates Hall's notion of ‘new ethnicity’ with one that argues that online cultural and religious identities are ‘new’ because of transnational and global processes, the pervasiveness of computer-mediated communication and the global mobility of immigrants. Thus, current research on online ethnic and religious identities underestimates the complexity of Hall's concept and to highlight this complexity we ponder the extent to which new online ethnicities – as expressed in the current literature – reflect, construct or renegotiate so-called offline ethnicities. The paper concludes that online ethnic subjectivities, while providing alternative representations to counteract the dominant racist discourse within host societies, still reflect mimic essentialist voices.