Journal articles on the topic 'Nigerian Personal narratives'

The decision to migrate for (ostensibly) educational purposes, is often accompanied by psycho-social feelings of fear, sadness, guilt, pride, happiness and courage. In this report, which is part of a larger study concerning Nigerian student migration to China, five Nigerian university students discuss their motivations for leaving home and studying in China. Students were interviewed on several occasions either on the campus of their university in Guangdong province, China, or in another convenient location near the campus. Narratives were transcribed and examined for commonalities in terms of reasons given for leaving Nigeria, and affective psycho-social feelings surrounding students’ decisions. Narratives are presented in first person accounts and coded for categorical content and episodic form. Episodic form is then graphed, not for quantitative analysis, but to show the positive, neutral and negative affective emotion, displayed during discussions on specific topics. Results reveal a high degree of pride in personal ability, and in the industriousness of kin. They also reveal happiness and a sense of satisfaction by participants in moving their lives forward, and being able to help family members in Nigeria. However, there were also feelings of sadness, anger and frustration at Nigeria’s poor economy, which participants believe is the result of government ineptitude and corruption. This study is limited in that it only considers male Nigerian migrants of the Igbo tribe, studying in Guangdong province. Future researchers are advised to widen the geographical area, include other Nigerian tribal members, and women.

In response to the global outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, different religious-immune conspiracy theories emerged to explain the increasing scary situation in Nigeria. Emerging multifarious narratives of the contagion, which are embedded in peculiar Nigerian socio-religiosity and religious economy, reconstructed the discourses into two complexities: corona disease is an invention of the devil and other dark evil forces, and corona disease is a sign of the end of times. The obvious fabrications escalated uncertainties surrounding the pandemic as well as generated anxiety and fears among potential believers who sermonize spiritual vigilance for the ‘final battle and journey’. Drawing insights from critical discourse analysis, moral panic and frame theory, this study explores discursive means through which the pandemic is represented and reconstructed as long-awaited ‘doomsday’ warning in Nigerian online communities. Findings reveal instances of varying descriptive names, lexical derivations and discursive frames that reflect counter belief and quasi-religious ideologies. The study argues that complex religious doctrines rooted in antichrist or mark of the beast view, socio-religious ideologies of dominionism and overcommernism, cultural and personal linguistic processes have all contributed in shaping and institutionalizing the viral ‘apocalyptic’ world-view of the outbreak.

AbstractSince 2012, the influx of affordable smartphones to urban Nigeria has revolutionized how young people take, store and circulate photographs. Crucially, this ever-expanding digital archive provides urban youth with a means to communicate new ideas of self, allowing a marginalized group to display fortunes that often belie their difficult realities. Through gestures and poses, fashion and style, the companionship of others, or the use of particular backdrops and locations, these photographs contain certain semiotics that allude to the subject owning the means for success in urban Nigeria. Similarly, as youth constantly store photographs of themselves on their handsets alongside those of celebrities, patrons and friends, coveted commodities and aspirational memes, they construct personal narratives that place them at the centre of global flows and networks. With the ability to constantly retake, update and propagate photographs, the discrepancies between in- and off-frame identities become ambiguous. This article explores how young people in Calabar, south-eastern Nigeria, use digital photographs on their mobile phones to cultivate new visions of themselves. Arguing that these photographs not only represent superlative aspirations but are also integral to social becoming, the discussion examines how digital images allow youth to reposition themselves within (and beyond) Nigerian society. Ephemerality is central: digital photographs can be easily circulated and retain some permanence on social media, yet these immaterial objects can easily be lost from handsets. In thinking about the futures of African youth and African photography, this article therefore interrogates the tensions of private and public archives.

AbstractTaslim Elias's scholarship on the impact of English common law on the growth of African customary law illustrates the intersectionality negotiated between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, universal and subaltern laws. His intellectual portrait is also useful as a heuristic device to excise the doctrines, strategies, imageries, and narratives of progress elaborated about ‘Africa’ and ‘law’. Elias decried the contempt and ignorance exhibited by colonial masters towards native customs and laws; he also vilified judicially crafted ‘repugnancy’ and ‘public policy’ doctrines as instruments of colonial policy to prevent British justice from looking both ways, by ensuring that British standards were the ‘objective’ criteria of abrogation and change. Yet he nonetheless saw these doctrines and English law as a unifying force in the emergence of a unified Nigerian legal system. This article argues that this paradox in Elias's work and his struggle against the asserted dualism between English law and African customary law must be situated in the context of the rise of an African legal consciousness or juridical Negritude, home to various political projects of nation-building, African cultural liberation, and development which strategically intersected in their unstable relationship to law and Western culture. This signals a turn to ‘hybridity’ in legal discourse and Elias's professional trajectory seeking to develop a uniform common law for Nigeria as a way to explicate the workings of this relationship, and how African law is inscribed in the interplay of cultural forces constantly (re)negotiating the boundaries of their engagement with one another. This, in turn, reveals a complex picture of mediating between the simultaneous participation of Third World intellectuals in various struggles and personal or ideological projects within African humanism, which an analysis structured around the stability of centres/peripheries conventionally distorts.

En la migración de población africana hacia el Estado español cobra importancia desde hace décadas la llegada de personas vinculadas a la trata de personas. Entre ellas, las mujeres procedentes de Nigeria siguen teniendo protagonismo en las cifras que hablan del fenómeno, mayormente con fines de explotación sexual. Partiendo del hecho de que una de las características fundamentales de la trata nigeriana es el nivel de control que se ejerce sobre el accionar narrativo de las jóvenes, hemos desarrollado en este trabajo una metodología que ha pretendido tanto acompañar la construcción de narrativas, como localizar las formas de agencia derivadas de ello. Los tres tipos detectados de confrontación tanto de los silencios como de las historias impuestas han tenido como objetivos: la identificación como víctima de trata y el consiguiente acceso a sistemas de protección; la co-construcción de conocimiento académico; y la participación protagónica en el diálogo social sobre la trata.

Este artículo es resultado del proyecto de investigación “Trata de personas, salud integral y cuidados: mujeres transfronterizas en tránsito de Marruecos hacia Andalucía” de la Universidad Pablo de Olavide durante el año 2014. En Europa y, concretamente en España, la trata de mujeres de origen nigeriano cada vez más jóvenes e incluso menores, con fines de explotación- en este caso - sexual, es una realidad creciente. La investigación, desde un enfoque cualitativo y sustentado en observaciones, entrevistas y talleres de producción de Narrativas Creativas, analiza las condiciones en origen que inciden en la trata, prestando especial atención al papel de la educación formal y; por otro lado, presenta una experiencia de educación entre iguales. Los resultados nos arrojan que en la trata nigeriana hay condiciones de vulnerabilidad múltiple en origen donde la falta de formación es un factor esencial. Por otro lado, se destaca el potencial que tiene la sensibilización entre pares como acción para crear reflexión transformadora.

The essay traces the changing manifestations of trauma in Nigerian prose, focusing on Ken Saro-Wiwa’s autobiography A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary. The autobiography lies at a crucial nexus in the drift of trauma in narrative, an era during which trauma ceases to adopt pre-historical forms and is officially assembled into terrorist weaponry. Trauma in A Month and a Day results from state terrorism—it is transparently political, and is thereby a link between the archetypes of trauma that precede it and the sub-state terrorism that comes in its wake. The essay concludes that Saro-Wiwa’s diary is a milestone on the route from personal trauma to the trauma of state terrorism in Nigerian testimony.

Social media has emerged as a robust medium for discourses on sexuality given its capacity to challenge mainstream narratives and empower personal views on self-expression. In Nigeria, the growing interest in homosexual expressions through online platforms is yet to receive significant research attention, although scholars are hinting at the influences of social media. The present study examines social media as a relatively novel platform for discourses on homosexuality in Nigeria. It attempts to ascertain users’ willingness to express opinion, directions of opinion, and factors affecting opinion formation. Within the purview of social integration paradigms, the study reviews current perspectives in global homosexuality narratives. Using descriptive and hermeneutic analysis, it examines data from 323 Facebook users selected through snowball sampling technique as well as 300 comments purposively selected from “verified” Instagram accounts. The study finds significant willingness to express opinions, propelled by “rising interest in the topic.” Within a persisting climate of negative opinion, the study locates subsisting influences of socio-cultural institutions on opinion formation. It discusses the implications of the influences of the institutions and political propaganda, which nourish heterosexism and negative bias against homosexuality.

Written and directed by Marzia Jamili, a Hazara refugee now living in Sweden, Unimaginable Dreams is an auto-ethnographic essay film that traces Marzia’s last days in Athens, Greece. Blending documentary and fiction, Marzia casts her best friends to recreate magically real versions of her dearest memories of Athens as she delivers a cutting address to Afghanistan, in which she tells the sea about her broken homeland. This film project seeks to demonstrate the possibilities of collaborative filmmaking as a methodology, particularly in response to the limitations of etic observational approaches in migration research and the lack of refugee voices in public discourse. Through reenactment and Marzia’s epistolary narrative, Unimaginable Dreams resurfaces notions of belonging and citizenship within the imagination, weaving together oneiric and real geographies situated in the past and future. Facing perpetual displacement and public erasure, the film medium offers a declarative space of visibility in Athens, where its maker articulates rights and desires denied by the state. Unimaginable Dreams is the first production by the Melissa Network's Film Club, a collaborative program cofounded by Brittany Nugent and Dove Barbanel that challenges hegemonic representations of migrant women by empowering members to reclaim the gaze and create narratives of their own. A creative group of women from Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Kenya, Nigeria and Ethiopia share diverse perspectives to analyze their favorite movies, learn filmmaking skills and collaborate on original productions that add urgent personal nuance and depth to migration storytelling.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, is a contemporary Nigerian writer. I choose her work Dear Ijeawele, Or, A Feminist Manifesto In Fifteen Suggestions, as it gives suggestion for parenting in a feminist manner. A series of personal letter accommodated in a book are refreshing take on parenting and can be studied as an initial guide to understand feminism as an ideology. My main focus with this paper is to focus on two different kinds of parenting suggested by her and by Lois Gould, from her short story The story of X, where she creates a narrative revolving around gender-neutral parenting, and how these two can be read together to give a refreshing take on parenting, which is radical in nature because it dissects the norms.

Purpose Crime in public places is an increasing concern for the police, users of public places and the general public at large. Significantly, users of public transport facilities consistently perceive their risks from crime to be considerably higher, hurting levels of patronage. The aim of this study is to examine concerns for personal safety and measures that could improve sense of personal safety in a Nigerian public transport facility. This study further examines whether respondents’ perceptions determine frequent use of this public place. Explanatory factors are personal safety and place improvements concerns ratings. Design/methodology/approach The study adopted a case study. The selection of this was accomplished using carefully defined criteria in previous studies. The research process consists of three steps the on-site assessment, objective insecurity assessment and subjective insecurity survey. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected. Quantitative data were explored using mean ranking, percentages and correlation, whereas qualitative information was analysed using narrative techniques of reporting. To define the major determinants of the frequent use of this public place, a multiple ordinary least squares regression was constructed for variables in the correlation model. Findings Results show that places within the site are not designed to meet crime prevention through environmental design strategies, as 625 crimes were documented with thefts well above other listed crimes. Respondents exhibited a significant level of concern for their safety across all the factors enumerated while the most important improvements concern was enhancements to lighting. Generally, findings suggest that there is still much to be done to improve elements of surveillance, access control, territoriality, image management and activity support on the site. Regression model shows that efforts to enhance perceived safety of users would have major significance on the frequent use of this facility. Practical implications Policies on public place developments should be mainly in terms of tackling the environmental design of car parks and the effects of darkness at night time. This should involve improvement of lighting and the installation of CCTV, security camera as well as constant maintenance of bushes, vegetation, plants, trees and other elements of the landscape. Furthermore, the aesthetics of the site has to be attractive to users. The site and its closest surroundings have to be well-maintained and cared for. Besides, place lines and private areas must be defined with plants, pavement treatments, short walls or fences. Originality/value Previous studies on safety and security of public transport places, particularly rail facility, have mainly concentrated on the relations between fear of crime, perceived safety and place improvement concerns. To the best of authors’ knowledge, no study till date has explored how they correlate to the patronage of the transport facility, particularly in the sub-Saharan nations. This study contributes to existing literature having revealed perceived personal safety and transport place improvements concerns to be another important dimension of rail transport patronage in the Nigerian context.

Contemporary African travel writing produces interesting possibilities redefining the directions of the genre. One of these promises manifests in how the crisis of nationhood and belonging impacts subjects’ navigation of sites of travel. African travel narratives by women foreground fractured intimacies encumbering journeys, especially when subjects travel «home». Such texts extensively grapple with the complexities of negotiating the personal and the collective in a bid to unravel belonging. This article examines two travelogues by African women: Leah Chishugi’s A Long Way from Paradise: Surviving the Rwandan Genocide and Noo Saro-Wiwa’s Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria as explorations of how reading precarities of nationhood through embodied travel re-imagines private journeys as a means to tease out public anxieties of nationhood and belonging. In the process of narrating precarious journeys, African women complicate the travelogue into a political statement of belonging and its paradoxes.

Contemporary African travel writing produces interesting possibilities redefining the directions of the genre. One of these promises manifests in how the crisis of nationhood and belonging impacts subjects’ navigation of sites of travel. African travel narratives by women foreground fractured intimacies encumbering journeys, especially when subjects travel «home». Such texts extensively grapple with the complexities of negotiating the personal and the collective in a bid to unravel belonging. This article examines two travelogues by African women: Leah Chishugi’s A Long Way from Paradise: Surviving the Rwandan Genocide and Noo Saro-Wiwa’s Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria as explorations of how reading precarities of nationhood through embodied travel re-imagines private journeys as a means to tease out public anxieties of nationhood and belonging. In the process of narrating precarious journeys, African women complicate the travelogue into a political statement of belonging and its paradoxes.

AbstractThis study explored the role of church leaders in addressing climate change with a focus on Catholic, Anglican, and Pentecostal churches in Nigeria. The study adopted a semistructured face-to-face interview with 30 church leaders drawn from the selected denominations (i.e., 10 church leaders from each denomination). These participants were spread across five states in five geopolitical zones in Nigeria. A descriptive narrative approach was employed in the thematic organization and analysis of data. Findings showed that while all the participants across the three denominations—Catholic, Anglican, and Pentecostal churches—agreed to have heard of climate change, their perceptions of the causes of the phenomenon were narrow and varied along religious denominational lines. More Catholic participants expressed belief in anthropogenic climate change than did Anglicans and Pentecostals. Awareness creation, charity for disaster victims, and prayer were identified by the participants as the roles churches can play in addressing climate change. Although climate change action was generally poor among participants, Catholics engaged more in organizational action than did Anglicans and Pentecostals. In contrast, climate change actions were more on a personal level than on the organizational/church level within Pentecostal churches. The implications of the findings for the Church/church leaders, policy, and future research are discussed.

This work is an analysis of public procurement and the role integrity and ethics plays in enhancing effectiveness and efficiency of the procurement system. The paper situates that though public procurement is a worldwide exercise where government spends public funds for the procurement of goods works and services, for the good of the people, inefficiencies has trailed the procurement system in most developing countries of Africa. Some of these countries have taken some steps to reform the sector, but there are still noticeable challenges and obstacles to a full maximization of the goals of a good procurement system. One of the major challenges, identified has been that of a dearth of integrity and ethical consciousness on the part of procurement professionals and stakeholders alike. It is essential that public procurement professional and stake holders adhere to a well-defined and established code of ethics. Ethics are the principles which defines behaviours as right, good and appropriate. Employees in public service are expected to uphold certain core values and any attempt to pursue personal interest using conduct that are not consistent with the proper discharge of the employee’s duties is a breach of the public trust. In the public sector where procurement is funded by public expenditure, it is imperative that procurement operates with integrity, transparency and professionalism. In most African countries, Nigeria, Uganda, Tanzania to mention a few, the ethos of an efficient system devoid of unethical behaviours by professionals has been far from achieved. The procurement systems have therefore been plagued by integrity and ethical issues leading to unwholesome and undesirable situations. A review of related literatures to these topics was carried out with a view to carry out a contextual analysis in addressing the specific issues under study. This work is therefore significant as it tried to apply ethics to a fundamental aspect of governance which is the procurement of goods, services and works for the ultimate benefits of the populace.

Abstract Explaining and Understanding are considered mutually exclusive in political research. In this view, Explaining involves making observations as an outsider, with emphasis on causal laws, generalizations, and predictions. Conversely, Understanding occurs from the inside, with emphasis on meaning-making. This research note addresses Explaining, Understanding, and the related concept of reflexivity in multi-method/mixed-method research involving fieldwork. Rather than taking for granted the dichotomy between Explaining and Understanding that stems from Cartesian anxiety, I argue for the non-mutually exclusive alternative of ‘explanatory understanding’ and propose analyticism as the appropriate methodological path. An analyticist methodology involves creating a model that is a general account of a phenomenon, which is then used in case-specific analytical narratives to reveal departures from the model. Since understanding requires adequate explanation, explanatory understanding helps us better make sense of the world. Therefore, Explaining and Understanding are not merely oppositional stances between identifying causes and making sense. We cannot identify causes without making sense, and making sense involves a degree of causal inference. Explanatory understanding also necessitates reflexivity, which I conceptualize as methodological and personal positionality. I apply these arguments to my study of post-election violence in West Africa, drawing on fieldwork experience in Ghana, Nigeria, and Côte d’Ivoire.

Date rape (DR) is a serious but under-recognized public health problem that affects female university undergraduates. The burden of the problem in Nigerian universities is, however, yet to be fully investigated. The study was designed to explore the physical and psycho-social experiences of DR female survivors at the University of Ibadan. The study was qualitative in nature and involved eight consenting DR survivors. A pre-tested In-Depth Interview (IDI) guide that included questions relating to survivors’ personal profile, context of DR experienced, factors that promoted survivors’ vulnerability, reported adverse health consequences, help-seeking behaviors, and effects of the rape episode on dating relationship was used to facilitate the conduct of the narrative interview. The interviews were conducted in accordance to the protocol approved by the Joint University of Ibadan and University College Hospital Ethics Review Committee, and were taped-recorded and subjected to content analysis. Participants’ mean age was 17.3 ± 2.3 years. All the participants were teenagers when they were first raped. Coercive and deceptive means were used to perpetrate the act of rape. Participants’ use of verbal appeals, crying, and physical resistance to prevent being raped proved abortive. The experienced adverse physical health consequences included vaginal bleeding and injury. Major psycho-social effects of the experienced DR included self-blame, depression, hatred for men, and suicidal feelings. DR experiences occurred mainly in isolated settings, and most participants could not seek for medical help and other forms of care due to fear of being stigmatized. Some of the DR survivors continued their dating relationships when apologies were tendered by the perpetrators. DR is a traumatic experience, which is characterized by physical and psycho-social adverse effects. DR survivors, however, rarely seek for help as a result of the fear of being stigmatized. Multiple behavioral change interventions are needed to address the phenomenon.

When Bamileke women in urban Cameroon give birth, older women often recall the ‘troubles’, the period between 1955 and 1974 when the UPC (Union des Populations du Cameroun) waged a battle of national independence, as a way of teaching their daughters about the hazards of reproduction and threats to Bamileke integrity as a people (Feldman-Savelsberget al.). Slightly to the north-west, in the Nigerian city of Kano, Igbo talk constantly about their memories of the Biafran war, using them to forge a sense of Igbo ethnic distinctiveness that reinforces patterns of patron-client relations critical to the maintenance of transregional connections (Smith), while further to the south many Yoruba are reassessing the meaning of the old practice of pawning children (Renne). Meanwhile in Botswana, where the AIDS epidemic exacts a high death toll, members of an Apostolic church create distinctive practices of remembering what caused a person's death. In so doing, they counter the attenuation of care and support that often occurs when people interpret death as due to illnesses transmitted through blood and improper sexual relations (Klaits). By contrast in a Samburu community in Kenya, the cultural practice ofntotoi, a complex board game, reproduces a male-dominated history of kinship, while systematically erasing a female narrative of adulterous births and forced infanticide. And among rural Beng in Côte d'Ivoire, beliefs and practices that structure infant care serve as an indirect critique of the violence of French colonialism and of its aftermath that continues to interfere in Beng lives in the form of high rates of infant mortality (Gottlieb). As these examples taken from this volume indicate, the papers gathered together in this special issue examine the complex and often contradictory ways in which the reproduction of memories shapes the social and biological reproduction of people.

This narrative review provides a comprehensive summary of the implications of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on orthodontic treatment and a review of treatment protocols recommended for control of spread of this infection, using currently available data and literature. Relevant sources of information were searched using electronic databases including PubMed and Google Scholar and current reports from major health bodies such as Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, World Health Organization, Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, and major national orthodontic associations. The SARS-CoV-2 virus may be transmitted through direct or indirect contact with infected people through infected secretions such as saliva and respiratory secretions or through their respiratory droplets. Aerosol generating procedures often carried out in the orthodontic clinic can become a source of its spread as well as cross-infection. The asymptomatic patients and patients in their incubation period are also carriers of SARS-CoV-2 and can be infectious. Elective orthodontic treatment should be delayed until there has been sufficient reduction in COVID-19 transmission rates from community transmission to cluster cases or according to official recommendations at national, sub-national or local level while urgent or emergency interventions that are vital for preserving a person's oral functioning, managing severe pain or securing quality of life should be provided. Treatment advice should be delivered remotely first when possible, and where necessary, in-person treatment can be performed in a well-prepared operatory following the necessary precautions and infection prevention and control (IPAC) protocol.

AbstractIn this study, I examine narratives of belonging through a corpus of digital diasporic discourse. The corpus is based on a Nigerian online discussion forum; its users primarily consist of both local Nigerians and members of the globally dispersed Nigerian diaspora. The study sets out by providing a working definition of narratives of belonging couched in the sociolinguistic tradition of approaching narrative structures. This includes aspects of personal narration, structural features, and reference to concepts that are salient in the construction of belonging. From this preliminary definition, retrieval strategies are developed to identify narratives of belonging in a large-scale dataset through a combination of manual and automated searches. The dataset of narratives is then analyzed, both in terms of structural features such as length and variation in narrative complexity, as well as linguistic properties, such as code-switching and the use of toponyms. Finally, these analyses are used to identify emerging topic strands and recurring themes in these narratives of belonging. It can be argued that such codifications of the diasporic experience are created and reinforced through individuated stories. Narratives of belonging, in other words, systematically contribute to the identity work performed in and by a digital diasporic community.

oday’s Christians in the age of secularism and other kinds of ideologies struggle to make their impacts felt as they assiduously labour to plant the gospel in the hearts and minds of many. Amid their struggles and worries, they are often confronted with other challenges both from within and outside. The aim of this research was to assess the Roman Catholic Church and her struggle in the midst of other Churches often tagged ‘Pentecostals’ in the areas of fundamentalism and religious freedom in Africa and most especially in Nigeria. Pentecostal theology was aligned with Evangelism in their emphasis on the reliability of the Bible and the great need for the spiritual transformation of the individual’s life with faith in Jesus Christ. They emphasise personal experience and work of the Holy Spirit and therefore see themselves as a selected few, who are holy, spiritual and better than others. Some of them even claim to have the monopoly of the Holy Spirit. This researcher was one scholar who holds the view that there was no church more Pentecostal than the Catholic Church which has survived for more than 2000 years under the influence and direction of the Holy Spirit. But for the sake of this research, there was the categorisation of the Church into Catholicism and Pentecostalism. Here, the researcher focused on the challenges to faith witness and evangelisation posed by the rise of Pentecostalism in Africa and particularly in Nigeria. This research adopts a combination of socio-historical and narrative approaches. The data gathering technique was the main source made up of books, unpublished materials, journal articles and Internet materials.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The research has relevance to Church History, Dogmatic Theology and Practical Theology. While from the interdisciplinary perspective, the work has relevance in Psychology and other fields in the Social Sciences. The research does not call for a change in traditional discourse, but rather to build on the existing status quo.

Chinua Achebe’s fourth novel, A Man of the People, portrays a wider range of significant female figures than any other fictional narrative by Achebe. The leading female characters defy literary marginalization because the text humanizes their personal predicaments and validates their choices. As a result, their collective voice is as important to the novel’s themes as the male voice expressed through the two protagonists, Odili Samalu and Chief Nanga. Achebe’s novel suggests that its unnamed post-independent African nation will not fulfil its potential without the tangible evolution of women’s self-ownership and leadership roles. What unifies the roles of leading female characters in the novel, such as Eunice, Mama, Elsie, and Edna, is their ability to seize possession, financially and emotionally, of fundamental elements of their own lives. The opposition between women’s aspirations in A Man of the People and the daunting familial and communal restrictions imposed on women mirrors colonial and postcolonial pressures placed on the newly independent African nation. While the nation may have transitioned politically from a colonial entity to an independent state, the female population is pressured to remain dependent and subject to the norms of patriarchy, a far more primal colonial order than that of Western capitalist domination. Even in the post-independence context, most women exist in a state of collective vassalage: they play subordinate and dependent roles in a post-colony stratified by (among other things) gender. In this context, one of A Man of the People’s notable achievements is to dramatize women’s fashioning of independent economic and social realities despite structures that sustain female subjugation. The novel’s theme of female self-possession is shared in the work of two Igbo and Nigerian-born female authors, Flora Nwapa and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Additional West African authors are considered as well.

This article explores how fat women protesting challenges norms of womanhood, the place of women in society, and who has the power to have their say in public spaces. We use the term fat as a political reclamation; Fat Studies scholars and fat activists prefer the term fat, over the normative term “overweight” and the pathologising term “obese/obesity” (Lee and Pausé para 3). Who is and who isn’t fat, we suggest, is best left to self-determination, although it is generally accepted by fat activists that the term is most appropriately adopted by individuals who are unable to buy clothes in any store they choose. Using a tweet from conservative commentator Ann Coulter as a leaping-off point, we examine the narratives around women in the public sphere and explore how fat bodies might transgress further the norms set by society. The public representations of women in politics and protest are then are set in the context of ‘activist wisdom’ (Maddison and Scalmer) from two sides of the globe. Activist wisdom gives preference to the lived knowledge and experience of activists as tools to understand social movements. It seeks to draw theoretical implications from the practical actions of those on the ground. In centring the experiences of ourselves and other activists, we hope to expand existing understandings of body politics, gender, and political power in this piece. It is important in researching social movements to look both at the representations of protest and protestors in all forms of media as this is the ‘public face’ of movements, but also to examine the reflections of the individuals who collectively put their weight behind bringing social change.A few days after the 45th President of the United States was elected, people around the world spilled into the streets and participated in protests; precursors to the Women’s March which would take place the following January. Pictures of such marches were shared via social media, demonstrating the worldwide protest against the racism, misogyny, and overall oppressiveness, of the newly elected leader. Not everyone was supportive of these protests though; one such conservative commentator, Ann Coulter, shared this tweet: Image1: A tweet from Ann Coulter; the tweet contains a picture of a group of protestors, holding signs protesting Trump, white supremacy, and for the rights of immigrants. In front of the group, holding a megaphone is a woman. Below the picture, the text reads, “Without fat girls, there would be no protests”.Coulter continued on with two more tweets, sharing pictures of other girls protesting and suggesting that the protestors needed a diet programme. Kivan Bay (“Without Fat Girls”) suggested that perhaps Coulter was implying that skinny girls do not have time to protest because they are too busy doing skinny girl things, like buying jackets or trying on sweaters. Or perhaps Coulter was arguing that fat girls are too visible, too loud, and too big, to be taken seriously in their protests. These tweets provide a point of illustration for how fat women protesting challenge norms of womanhood, the place of women in society, and who has the power to have their say in public spaces While Coulter’s tweet was most likely intended as a hostile personal attack on political grounds, we find it useful in its foregrounding of gender, bodies and protest which we consider in this article, beginning with a review of fat girls’ role in social justice movements.Across the world, we can point to fat women who engage in activism related to body politics and more. Australian fat filmmaker and activist Kelli Jean Drinkwater makes documentaries, such as Aquaporko! and Nothing to Lose, that queer fat embodiment and confronts body norms. Newly elected Ontario MPP Jill Andrew has been fighting for equal rights for queer people and fat people in Canada for decades. Nigerian Latasha Ngwube founded About That Curvy Life, Africa’s leading body positive and empowerment site, and has organised plus-size fashion show events at Heineken Lagos Fashion and Design Week in Nigeria in 2016 and the Glitz Africa Fashion Week in Ghana in 2017. Fat women have been putting their bodies on the line for the rights of others to live, work, and love. American Heather Heyer was protesting the hate that white nationalists represent and the danger they posed to her friends, family, and neighbours when she died at a rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina in late 2017 (Caron). When Heyer was killed by one of those white nationalists, they declared that she was fat, and therefore her body size was lauded loudly as justification for her death (Bay, “How Nazis Use”; Spangler).Fat women protesting is not new. For example, the Fat Underground was a group of “radical fat feminist women”, who split off from the more conservative NAAFA (National Association to Aid Fat Americans) in the 1970s (Simic 18). The group educated the public about weight science, harassed weight-loss companies, and disrupted academic seminars on obesity. The Fat Underground made their first public appearance at a Women’s Equality Day in Los Angeles, taking over the stage at the public event to accuse the medical profession of murdering Cass Elliot, the lead singer of the folk music group, The Mamas and the Papas (Dean and Buss). In 1973, the Fat Underground produced the Fat Liberation Manifesto. This Manifesto began by declaring that they believed “that fat people are full entitled to human respect and recognition” (Freespirit and Aldebaran 341).Women have long been disavowed, or discouraged, from participating in the public sphere (Ginzberg; van Acker) or seen as “intruders or outsiders to the tough world of politics” (van Acker 118). The feminist slogan the personal is political was intended to shed light on the role that women needed to play in the public spheres of education, employment, and government (Caha 22). Across the world, the acceptance of women within the public sphere has been varied due to cultural, political, and religious, preferences and restrictions (Agenda Feminist Media Collective). Limited acceptance of women in the public sphere has historically been granted by those ‘anointed’ by a male family member or patron (Fountaine 47).Anti-feminists are quick to disavow women being in public spaces, preferring to assign them the role as helpmeet to male political elite. As Schlafly (in Rowland 30) notes: “A Positive Woman cannot defeat a man in a wrestling or boxing match, but she can motivate him, inspire him, encourage him, teach him, restrain him, reward him, and have power over him that he can never achieve over her with all his muscle.” This idea of women working behind the scenes has been very strong in New Zealand where the ‘sternly worded’ letter is favoured over street protest. An acceptable route for women’s activism was working within existing political institutions (Grey), with activity being ‘hidden’ inside government offices such as the Ministry of Women’s Affairs (Schuster, 23). But women’s movement organisations that engage in even the mildest form of disruptive protest are decried (Grey; van Acker).One way women have been accepted into public space is as the moral guardians or change agents of the entire political realm (Bliss; Ginzberg; van Acker; Ledwith). From the early suffrage movements both political actors and media representations highlighted women were more principled and conciliatory than men, and in many cases had a moral compass based on restraint. Cartoons showed women in the suffrage movement ‘sweeping up’ and ‘cleaning house’ (Sheppard 123). Groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union were celebrated for protesting against the demon drink and anti-pornography campaigners like Patricia Bartlett were seen as acceptable voices of moral reason (Moynihan). And as Cunnison and Stageman (in Ledwith 193) note, women bring a “culture of femininity to trade unions … an alternative culture, derived from the particularity of their lives as women and experiences of caring and subordination”. This role of moral guardian often derived from women as ‘mothers’, responsible for the physical and moral well-being of the nation.The body itself has been a sight of protest for women including fights for bodily autonomy in their medical decisions, reproductive justice, and to live lives free from physical and sexual abuse, have long been met with criticisms of being unladylike or inappropriate. Early examples decried in NZ include the women’s clothing movement which formed part of the suffrage movement. In the second half of the 20th century it was the freedom trash can protests that started the myth of ‘women burning their bras’ which defied acceptable feminine norms (Sawer and Grey). Recent examples of women protesting for body rights include #MeToo and Time’s Up. Both movements protest the lack of bodily autonomy women can assert when men believe they are entitled to women’s bodies for their entertainment, enjoyment, and pleasure. And both movements have received considerable backlash by those who suggest it is a witch hunt that might ensnare otherwise innocent men, or those who are worried that the real victims are white men who are being left behind (see Garber; Haussegger). Women who advocate for bodily autonomy, including access to contraception and abortion, are often held up as morally irresponsible. As Archdeacon Bullock (cited in Smyth 55) asserted, “A woman should pay for her fun.”Many individuals believe that the stigma and discrimination fat people face are the consequences they sow from their own behaviours (Crandall 892); that fat people are fat because they have made poor decisions, being too indulgent with food and too lazy to exercise (Crandall 883). Therefore, fat people, like women, should have to pay for their fun. Fat women find themselves at this intersection, and are often judged more harshly for their weight than fat men (Tiggemann and Rothblum). Examining Coulter’s tweet with this perspective in mind, it can easily be read as an attempt to put fat girl protestors back into their place. It can also be read as a warning. Don’t go making too much noise or you may be labelled as fat. Presenting troublesome women as fat has a long history within political art and depictions. Marianne (the symbol of the French Republic) was depicted as fat and ugly; she also reinforced an anti-suffragist position (Chenut 441). These images are effective because of our societal views on fatness (Kyrölä). Fatness is undesirable, unworthy of love and attention, and a representation of poor character, lack of willpower, and an absence of discipline (Murray 14; Pausé, “Rebel Heart” para 1).Fat women who protest transgress rules around body size, gender norms, and the appropriate place for women in society. Take as an example the experiences of one of the authors of this piece, Sandra Grey, who was thrust in to political limelight nationally with the Campaign for MMP (Grey and Fitzsimmons) and when elected as the President of the New Zealand Tertiary Education Union in 2011. Sandra is a trade union activist who breaches too many norms set for the “good woman protestor,” as well as the norms for being a “good fat woman”. She looms large on a stage – literally – and holds enough power in public protest to make a crowd of 7,000 people “jump to left”, chant, sing, and march. In response, some perceive Sandra less as a tactical and strategic leader of the union movement, and more as the “jolly fat woman” who entertains, MCs, and leads public events. Though even in this role, she has been criticised for being too loud, too much, too big.These criticisms are loudest when Sandra is alongside other fat female bodies. When posting on social media photos with fellow trade union members the comments often note the need of the group to “go on a diet”. The collective fatness also brings comments about “not wanting to fuck any of that group of fat cows”. There is something politically and socially dangerous about fat women en masse. This was behind the responses to Sandra’s first public appearance as the President of TEU when one of the male union members remarked “Clearly you have to be a fat dyke to run this union.” The four top elected and appointed positions in the TEU have been women for eight years now and both their fatness and perceived sexuality present as a threat in a once male-dominated space. Even when not numerically dominant, unions are public spaces dominated by a “masculine culture … underpinned by the undervaluation of ‘women’s worth’ and notions of womanhood ‘defined in domesticity’” (Cockburn in Kirton 273-4). Sandra’s experiences in public space show that the derision and methods of putting fat girls back in their place varies dependent on whether the challenge to power is posed by a single fat body with positional power and a group of fat bodies with collective power.Fat Girls Are the FutureOn the other side of the world, Tara Vilhjálmsdóttir is protesting to change the law in Iceland. Tara believes that fat people should be protected against discrimination in public and private settings. Using social media such as Facebook and Instagram, Tara takes her message, and her activism, to her thousands of followers (Keller, 434; Pausé, “Rebel Heart”). And through mainstream media, she pushes back on fatphobia rhetoric and applies pressure on the government to classify weight as a protected status under the law.After a lifetime of living “under the oppression of diet culture,” Tara began her activism in 2010 (Vilhjálmsdóttir). She had suffered real harm from diet culture, developing an eating disorder as a teen and being told through her treatment for it that her fears as a fat woman – that she had no future, that fat people experienced discrimination and stigma – were unfounded. But Tara’s lived experiences demonstrated fat stigma and discrimination were real.In 2012, she co-founded the Icelandic Association for Body Respect, which promotes body positivity and fights weight stigma in Iceland. The group uses a mixture of real life and online tools; organising petitions, running campaigns against the Icelandic version of The Biggest Loser, and campaigning for weight to be a protected class in the Icelandic constitution. The Association has increased the visibility of the dangers of diet culture and the harm of fat stigma. They laid the groundwork that led to changing the human rights policy for the city of Reykjavík; fat people cannot be discriminated against in employment settings within government jobs. As the city is one of the largest employers in the country, this was a large step forward for fat rights.Tara does receive her fair share of hate messages; she’s shared that she’s amazed at the lengths people will go to misunderstand what she is saying (Vilhjálmsdóttir). “This isn’t about hurt feelings; I’m not insulted [by fat stigma]. It’s about [fat stigma] affecting the livelihood of fat people and the structural discrimination they face” (Vilhjálmsdóttir). She collects the hateful comments she receives online through screenshots and shares them in an album on her page. She believes it is important to keep a repository to demonstrate to others that the hatred towards fat people is real. But the hate she receives only fuels her work more. As does the encouragement she receives from people, both in Iceland and abroad. And she is not alone; fat activists across the world are using Web 2.0 tools to change the conversation around fatness and demand civil rights for fat people (Pausé, “Rebel Heart”; Pausé, “Live to Tell").Using Web 2.0 tools as a way to protest and engage in activism is an example of oppositional technologics; a “political praxis of resistance being woven into low-tech, amateur, hybrid, alternative subcultural feminist networks” (Garrison 151). Fat activists use social media to engage in anti-assimilationist activism and build communities of practice online in ways that would not be possible in real life (Pausé, “Express Yourself” 1). This is especially useful for those whose protests sit at the intersections of oppressions (Keller 435; Pausé, “Rebel Heart” para 19). Online protests have the ability to travel the globe quickly, providing opportunities for connections between protests and spreading protests across the globe, such as SlutWalks in 2011-2012 (Schuster 19). And online spaces open up unlimited venues for women to participate more freely in protest than other forms (Harris 479; Schuster 16; Garrison 162).Whether online or offline, women are represented as dangerous in the political sphere when they act without male champions breaching norms of femininity, when their involvement challenges the role of woman as moral guardians, and when they make the body the site of protest. Women must ‘do politics’ politely, with utmost control, and of course caringly; that is they must play their ‘designated roles’. Whether or not you fit the gendered norms of political life affects how your protest is perceived through the media (van Acker). Coulter’s tweet loudly proclaimed that the fat ‘girls’ protesting the election of the 45th President of the United States were unworthy, out of control, and not worthy of attention (ironic, then, as her tweet caused considerable conversation about protest, fatness, and the reasons not to like the President-Elect). What the Coulter tweet demonstrates is that fat women are perceived as doubly-problematic in public space, both as fat and as women. They do not do politics in a way that is befitting womanhood – they are too visible and loud; they are not moral guardians of conservative values; and, their bodies challenge masculine power.ReferencesAgenda Feminist Media Collective. “Women in Society: Public Debate.” Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity 10 (1991): 31-44.Bay, Kivan. “How Nazis Use Fat to Excuse Violence.” Medium, 7 Feb. 2018. 1 May 2018 <https://medium.com/@kivabay/how-nazis-use-fat-to-excuse-violence-b7da7d18fea8>.———. “Without Fat Girls, There Would Be No Protests.” Bullshit.ist, 13 Nov. 2016. 16 May 2018 <https://bullshit.ist/without-fat-girls-there-would-be-no-protests-e66690de539a>.Bliss, Katherine Elaine. Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City. Penn State Press, 2010.Caha, Omer. 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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 Brinkerhoff, Alonso and Oiarzabal). We focus here on three examples from three different continents. Most famously, media ethnographers Daniel Miller and Don Slater focused on the Trinidadian diaspora. They describe how “de Rumshop Lime”, a collective online chat room, is used by young people at home and abroad to “lime”, meaning to chat and hang out. Describing the users of the chat, “the webmaster [a Trini living away] proudly proclaimed them to have come from 40 different countries” (though massively dominated by North America) (88). Writing about people in the Greek diaspora, communication researcher Myria Georgiou traced how its mediation evolved from letters, word of mouth, and bulletins to satellite television, telephone, and the Internet (147). From the introduction of the Web, globally dispersed people went online to get in contact with each other. Meanwhile, feminist film scholar Anna Everett draws on the case of Naijanet, the virtual community of “Nigerians Living Abroad”. She shows how Nigerians living in the diaspora from the 1990s onwards connected in global transnational communities, forging “new black public spheres” (35). These studies point at how diasporic people have turned to the Internet to establish and maintain social relations, give and receive support, and share general concerns. Establishing transnational communicative networks allows users to imagine shared audiences of fellow diasporians. Diasporic imagination, however, goes beyond singular notions of this more traditional idea of the transnational public sphere, as it “has nowadays acquired a great figurative flexibility which mostly refers to practices of transgression and hybridisation” (Ponzanesi, “Diasporic Subjects” 208). Below we recognise another dimension of digital diasporas: the articulation of diasporic attachment for branding oneself. Mocro and Nikkei: Diasporic Attachments as a Way to Brand Oneself In this section, we consider how hybrid cultural practices are carried out over geographical distances. Across spaces on the Web, young migrants express new forms of belonging in their dealing with the oppositional motivations of continuity and change. The generational specificity of this experience can be drawn out on the basis of the distinction between “roots” and “routes” made by Paul Gilroy. In his seminal book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Gilroy writes about black populations on both sides of the Atlantic. The double consciousness of migrant subjects is reflected by affiliating roots and routes as part of a complex cultural identification (19 and 190). As two sides of the same coin, roots refer to the stable and continuing elements of identities, while routes refer to disruption and change. Gilroy criticises those who are “more interested in the relationship of identity to roots and rootedness than in seeing identity as a process of movement and mediation which is more appropriately approached via the homonym routes” (19). He stresses the importance of not just focusing on one of either roots or routes but argues for an examination of their interplay. Forming a response to discrimination and exclusion, young migrants in online networks turn to more positive experiences such as identification with one’s heritage inspired by generational specific cultural affiliations. Here, we focus on two examples that cross two continents, showing routed online attachments to “be(com)ing Mocro”, and “be(coming) Nikkei”. Figure 1. “Leipe Mocro Flavour” music video (Ali B) The first example, being and becoming “Mocro”, refers to a local, bi-national consciousness. The term Mocro originated on the streets of the Netherlands during the late 1990s and is now commonly understood as a Dutch honorary nickname for youths with Moroccan roots living in the Netherlands and Belgium. A 2003 song, Leipe mocro flavour (“Crazy Mocro Flavour”) by Moroccan-Dutch rapper Ali B, familiarised a larger group of people with the label (see Figure 1). Ali B’s song is exemplary for a wider community of youngsters who have come to identify themselves as Mocros. One example is the Marokkanen met Brainz – Hyves (Mo), a community page within the Dutch social networking site Hyves. On this page, 2,200 youths who identify as Mocro get together to push against common stereotypes of Moroccan-Dutch boys as troublemakers and thieves and Islamic Moroccan-Dutch girls as veiled carriers of backward traditions (Leurs, forthcoming). Its description reads, “I assume that this Hyves will be the largest [Mocro community]. Because logically Moroccans have brains” (our translation): What can you find here? Discussions about politics, religion, current affairs, history, love and relationships. News about Moroccan/Arabic Parties. And whatever you want to tell others. Use your brains. Second, “Nikkei” directs our attention to Japanese migrants and their descendants. The Discover Nikkei website, set up by the Japanese American National Museum, provides a revealing description of being and becoming Nikkei: As Nikkei communities form in Japan and throughout the world, the process of community formation reveals the ongoing fluidity of Nikkei populations, the evasive nature of Nikkei identity, and the transnational dimensions of their community formations and what it means to be Nikkei. (Japanese American National Museum) This site was set up by the Japanese American National Museum for Nikkei in the global diaspora to connect and share stories. Nikkei youths of course also connect elsewhere. In her ethnographic online study, Shana Aoyama found that the social networking site Hi5 is taken up in Peru by young people of Japanese heritage as an avenue for identity exploration. She found group confirmation based on the performance of Nikkei-ness, as well as expressions of individuality. She writes, “instead of heading in one specific direction, the Internet use of Nikkei creates a starburst shape of identity construction and negotiation” (119). Mocro-ness and Nikkei-ness are common collective identification markers that are not just straightforward nationalisms. They refer back to different homelands, while simultaneously they also clearly mark one’s situation of being routed outside of this homeland. Mocro stems from postcolonial migratory flows from the Global South to the West. Nikkei-ness relates to the interesting case of the Japanese diaspora, which is little accounted for, although there are many Japanese communities present in North and South America from before the Second World War. The context of Peru is revealing, as it was the first South American country to accept Japanese migrants. It now hosts the second largest South American Japanese diaspora after Brazil (Lama), and Peru’s former president, Alberto Fujimoro, is also of Japanese origin. We can see how the importance of the nation-state gets blurred as diasporic youth, through cultural hybridisation of youth culture and ethnic ties, initiates subcultures and offers resistance to mainstream western cultural forms. Digital spaces are used to exert youthful diaspora branding. Networked branding includes expressing cultural identities that are communal and individual but also both local and global, illustrative of how “by virtue of being global the Internet can gift people back their sense of themselves as special and particular” (Miller and Slater 115). In the next section, we set out how youthful diaspora branding is part of a larger, more rhizomatic formation of multivocal hypertext aesthetics. Hypertext Aesthetics In this section, we set out how an in-between, or “liminal”, position, in postcolonial theory terms, can be a source of differential and multivocal cultural production. Appadurai, Bhabha, and Gilroy recognise that liminal positions increasingly leave their mark on the global and local flows of cultural objects, such as food, cinema, music, and fashion. Here, our focus is on how migrant youths turn to hypertextual forms of cultural production for a differential expression of digital diasporas. Hypertexts are textual fields made up of hyperlinks. Odin states that travelling through cyberspace by clicking and forging hypertext links is a form of multivocal digital diaspora aesthetics: The perpetual negotiation of difference that the border subject engages in creates a new space that demands its own aesthetic. This new aesthetic, which I term “hypertext” or “postcolonial,” represents the need to switch from the linear, univocal, closed, authoritative aesthetic involving passive encounters characterising the performance of the same to that of non-linear, multivocal, open, non-hierarchical aesthetic involving active encounters that are marked by repetition of the same with and in difference. (Cited in Landow 356-7) On their profile pages, migrant youth digitally author themselves in distinct ways by linking up to various sites. They craft their personal hypertext. These hypertexts display multivocal diaspora aesthetics which are personal and specific; they display personal intersections of affiliations that are not easily generalisable. In several Dutch-language online spaces, subjects from Dutch-Moroccan backgrounds have taken up the label Mocro as an identity marker. Across social networking sites such as Hyves and Facebook, the term gets included in nicknames and community pages. Think of nicknames such as “My own Mocro styly”, “Mocro-licious”, “Mocro-chick”. The term Mocro itself is often already multilayered, as it is often combined with age, gender, sexual preference, religion, sport, music, and generationally specific cultural affiliations. Furthermore, youths connect to a variety of groups ranging from feminist interests (“Women in Charge”), Dutch nationalism (“I Love Holland”), ethnic affiliations (“The Moroccan Kitchen”) to clothing (the brand H&M), and global junk food (McDonalds). These diverse affiliations—that are advertised online simultaneously—add nuance to the typical, one-dimensional stereotype about migrant youth, integration, and Islam in the context of Europe and Netherlands (Leurs, forthcoming). On the online social networking site Hi5, Nikkei youths in Peru, just like any other teenagers, express their individuality by decorating their personal profile page with texts, audio, photos, and videos. Besides personal information such as age, gender, and school information, Aoyama found that “a starburst” of diverse affiliations is published, including those that signal Japanese-ness such as the Hello Kitty brand, anime videos, Kanji writing, kimonos, and celebrities. Also Nikkei hyperlink to elements that can be identified as “Latino” and “Chino” (Chinese) (104-10). Furthermore, users can show their multiple affiliations by joining different “groups” (after which a hyperlink to the group community appears on the profile page). Aoyama writes “these groups stretch across a large and varied scope of topics, including that of national, racial/ethnic, and cultural identities” (2). These examples illustrate how digital diasporas encompass personalised multivocal hypertexts. With the widely accepted adagio “you are what you link” (Adamic and Adar), hypertextual webs can be understood as productions that reveal how diasporic youths choose to express themselves as individuals through complex sets of non-homogeneous identifications. Migrant youth connects to ethnic origin and global networks in eclectic and creative ways. The concept of “digital diaspora” therefore encapsulates both material and virtual (dis)connections that are identifiable through common traits, strategies, and aesthetics. Yet these hypertextual connections are also highly personalised and unique, offering a testimony to the fluid negotiations and intersections between the local and the global, the rooted and the diasporic. Conclusions In this article, we have argued that migrant youths render digital diasporas more complex by including branding and hypertextual aesthetics in transnational public spheres. Digital diasporas may no longer be understood simply in terms of their vertical relations to a homeland or place of origin or as horizontally connected to a clearly marked transnational community; rather, they must also be seen as engaging in rhizomatic digital practices, which reshuffle traditional understandings of origin and belonging. Contemporary youthful digital diasporas are therefore far more complex in their engagement with digital media than most existing theory allows: connections are hybridised, and affiliations are turned into practices of diasporic branding and becoming. There is a generational specificity to multivocal diaspora aesthetics; this specificity lies in the ways migrant youths show communal recognition and express their individuality through hypertext which combines affiliation to their national/ethnic “roots” with an embrace of other youth subcultures, many of them transnational. 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