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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 792

Part of Session 185: Superdiversity and digital literacy practices (Other abstracts in this session)

Digital media, superdiversity and the construction of cultural identity: colonial and post-colonial encounters

Authors: Fabricio, Branca Falabella
Submitted by: Fabricio, Branca Falabella (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

The contemporary experiences of mobility, multiplicity, and time have been reconstructing the traditional perception of social, cultural e linguistic diversity in terms of a general idea of superdiversity (Vertotec 2007), characterized by the increase in the contact with “otherness” and a myriad of alterities – a phenomenon related to intense migration flows, face-to-face contacts and virtual encounters with distinct nationalities, ethnicities, languages and religions. In hiperdiverse environments, moving subjects and subjectivities participate in varied groups, social networks and communities, engaging in interactions whose far-reaching scope, beyond a single communicative event, foregrounds the idea of relocation related not only to geographical processes (migrant communities),  but also to sociocultural discursive ones (i.e., transglobal circulation of texts and semiotic signs). In no other context is this situation more flagrant than on the web, a scenario where multicultural actors can connect to each other anytime, from any place in the world in a common “territory”. The latter is discontinuous and unpredictable since there is no guarantee concerning who, or how many, our interlocutors will be; neither can we establish precise boundaries as to their linguistic, cultural and identity characteristics. Nevertheless, encounters of all kinds occur in the so-called cyberspace.

Taking into account the inextricability of digital media and sense-making, the present work gives visibility to a specific kind of contact: media texts travelling transculturally on the web and affecting the construction of meanings about social life and the involved interactants. Its purpose is to analyse the multisemiotic construction of Brazilian cultural identity on the contemporary communication landscape. Therefore, this study investigates multimodal textual practices, focusing on 1) text trajectories, i.e., the intertextual chains media texts enter into (Blommaert 2005, 2010); 2) the orders of indexicality orienting the communication process under scrutiny; and, 3) their impact upon the fabrication of cultural identities and alterities. Principles of Post-colonial Critique and Linguistic Anthropology are used to investigate data generated by virtual ethnography (Hine 2000; Wittel  2000) on a Portuguese weblog congregating Brazilian immigrants and Portuguese participants. The analysis shows how interactants engage in an ambivalent movement involving both (re)production and challenge of cultural stereotypes. The path detected indicates that, although colonial discourses are recycled, its transcultural “journey” promotes textual frictions that inaugurate new post-colonial identity possibilities.

References:

Blommaert, Jan (2005). Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Blommaert, Jan (2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Hine, Christine (2000). Virtual ethnography. London:Sage.

Vertotec, Steven (2007). Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies 30, 1024-1054.

Wittel, Andreas (2000). Ethnography on the Move: From Field to Net to Internet [23 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 1(1), Art. 21. Available at http://nbnresolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0001213.