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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Click me / text me / flash me: re-shaping transnational realities in diasporic space
| Panel |
73. New Social Spaces. Mobility and technology in Africa
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| Paper ID | 149 |
| Author(s) |
Binaisa, Irene Naluwembe
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | This paper seeks to explore transnational practices amongst the Ugandan ‘diaspora’ with a focus on the Internet and mobile communication technologies as a key site of expression in today’s world. The proliferation of new forms of communication technologies and the lowering of their cost base has increased access across social economic classes as well as infrastructure challenged parts of the world, such as in Africa. The pervasive reach of these new communication technologies is one factor that has brought migrant relationships into the spotlight. What were once discreet bounded communities are in some respects accessible to ‘outsiders’ through a click of a mouse button. Migrants from Uganda although not the biggest group from the African continent are characterised by the diversity of the ‘community’s’ composition and range of trajectories. Small pre-independence migration flows led by elite cadres of students were swelled by the refugee flows of the 70s and 80s. The mid 80s onwards gave way to more diverse flows, which encompassed asylum seekers, economic migrants, undocumented migrants, students and family re-unification, responding to changing migration regime patterns and opportunities.
This paper will examine how these migrants and their descendants continually subvert classifications based on the modern nation state such as: country of origin - Uganda, continent – Africa, country of domicile – UK, USA, Norway etc; category – migrant, refugee, citizen, etc – markers and boundaries based on this model. Whilst simultaneously embracing new technologies that give access to shifting positionalities, engendering transnational space and re-shaping border realities. In following these traces, networks and paths terms such as ‘community’ are inscribed, abandoned, re-inscribed across this diasporic space constantly in the making. The fluidity and boundary crossing abilities of these technologies utilised to engage, trade, exchange and interact not only with people, but with goods, services, news, cultural artefacts to name but some examples.
Taking a multi-sited ethnographic approach the fieldwork informing this paper has been undertaken whilst territorially based in the UK and to a limited extent in Uganda. Internet based research has encompassed a wide range of phenomena including websites, newsgroups, ‘cultural’ sites, magazine sites, blogs, etc. I have also incorporated data and links gathered from personal narratives of Ugandan migrants and their descendants. What emerges is a complex nuanced picture as to how migrants and their descendants engage within and across space in transnational practices, what can be termed transnational realities, and their impact on ‘identity’, ‘community’, and ‘belonging’.
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