Diasporas in the New Media Age: Identity, Politics, and Community

9 Maintaining Transnational Identity

151 9 Maintaining Transnational Identity A Content Analysis of Web Pages Constructed by Second-Generation Caribbeans dwaine plaza In 2000 there were an estimated 451million Internet users worldwide, which represented 7.4 percent of the world’s population.1 By 2006 the number of users had jumped to one and a half billion, or approximately 25percent of the world’s population. The growth in Internet use between 2000 and 2006 has been especially dramatic in certain parts of the world. In Latin America and the Caribbean there has been an enormous 370 percent growth in the number of Internet users.2 It is with this increase of the Internet as a communication and information medium worldwide that this study endeavors to explore how second-generation Caribbean-origin migrants living in the international diaspora construct and use Web pages as a symbolic bridge that connects familiar Creole cultural values and practices with the feelings of object loss and cultural mourning. As social constructions, Web pages capture more than a moment in time. Unlike a still photograph, a Web page is a visual image that is growing and changing as the Webmaster adds or deletes images, text, sound, or hot links. Web pages like photographs can denote a certain apparent truth, provide documentary evidence, or tell the Web surfer a little about the individual or group who constructed and maintains it (Becker 1995).The connotative meanings of the Web page emerge from the social and historical contexts 152 d i a s p o r a s i n t h e n e w m e d i a a g e under which it was constructed, particularly in situations where the conventions are like road signs; just as we have learned to recognize the meaning of road sign symbols almost instantaneously, we have learned over the short period of time in which the Web has existed to decode the denotative and connotative content of Web pages. In the past two decades there has been much scholarship on ethnic and cultural identities. Scholars like Anzaldúa (1995), Hall (1996), Rosaldo (1989), and Nagel (1994), working within a postmodern framework, theorize identity as hybrid, dynamic, fluid, and multilayered. They argue against essentialist notions of identity as fixed and bounded. Given that members of the Caribbean international diaspora live in a world of high modernity, they have created their own world that is reflected in music, fusion of language , food choices, styles of dress, and other markers of authentic transnational identity. Scholars like Maira (1999), vertovec (2001), and Waters (1990) have pointed out that although the work of postmodernists has contributed significantly to dismantling essentialist notions of identity, it runs the risk of homogenizing the notion of hybridity and neglects to capture the complex view of the lived experiences of American, Canadian, or British Caribbeans. Furthermore, cultural critics often neglect to take into account the diverse experiences of the second generation, particularly in terms of social class or ethnicity. Second-generation Indo-Caribbeans, for example, position themselves very differently from African Caribbeans in diaspora primarily because they are racialized in different ways. African-origin Caribbeans tend to elicit negative images in the consciousness of the dominant population, whereas Indian-origin Caribbeans are regarded as closer to the model minority (Plaza 2006). It is these sorts of ethnic differences and cultural fusions that we hope to explore in the Web pages that are constructed by second-generation Caribbeans living in the international diaspora. Despite my desire to examine how all second-generation Caribbean men and women in the international diaspora are constructing Web pages, this paper will focus attention only on the activities of Caribbean student organizations based at university and college campuses in North America and Great Britain.3 Caribbean-origin university students, who are mainly second generation,4 are used for this research because they are the generation most likely to be comfortable with sending e-mails, downloading music, doing research on the Internet, surfing in cyberspace, participating in blogs, or maintaining their own Web sites. The Caribbean second generation is also likely to be living on the “hyphen”5 and caught between two worlds while m a i n ta i n i n g t r a n s n a t i o n a l i d e n t i t y 153 growing up in the international diaspora (Waters 1999;Kasinitz et al. 2002...