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

18 Basque Diaspora Digital Nationalism

338 18 Basque Diaspora Digital Nationalism Designing “Banal” Identity pedro j. oiarzabal The Basque diaspora Webscape encompasses Web sites authored or commissioned by Basques in the homeland as well as in the diaspora. My interest lies within the framework of the Web landscape established by the Basque diaspora institutional Web sites, which create a common networked set of online discourses across geographical, political, and linguistic barriers. The study presented here draws on previous larger research, where I conducted quantitative, qualitative, and comparative analyses on the online and off-line dimensions of the Basque institutional diaspora in order to better understand its discourses on Basque identity, culture, and nation (see Oiarzabal 2006, forthcoming; and Oiarzabal and Oiarzabal 2005). In relation to the present work, I applied a discursive or rhetorical analysis to ninety Basque diaspora sites from sixteen countries as of July–August 2005,which I complemented by studying new Web sites that have been created since then. Particularly, I focused on the sites’ textual, graphic, and multimedia content (575graphics, thousands of texts, and dozens of songs), while also taking into account the structure (i.e., the number of pages, navigation options, or hierarchical order of pages). Therefore, in this essay I present the results of the analysis carried out on the multimedia character of the Basque institutional diaspora online. I b a s q u e d i a s p o r a d i g i ta l n a t i o n a l i s m 339 address the Basque diaspora’s construction of a Basque nationalist discourse and its own self-representations by examining its institutional sites’ audiovisual and graphic content. In what ways does the Basque institutional diaspora’s utilization of the Internet help to foster an online digital nationalism ? What is the image that the Basque diaspora portrays online? And what does the Basque diaspora attempt to express and promote? As of December 2005, the Basque diaspora had engendered 189 associations—club federations, euskal etxeak (community-based social clubs), and cultural, educational, political, and business organizations1 —in twentytwo countries.2 More than half of those associations (98) were online in sixteen countries with a Basque institutional presence as of November 2005.3 By June 2007, the Basque institutional diaspora increased by 10 new associations in two new countries, China and Cuba. At that time, 120, or nearly 61percent of diaspora associations, had a presence on the Internet in nineteen, or nearly 80 percent, of the countries.4 The Basque diaspora presence on the Internet and particularly on the Web is a phenomenon that is still undoubtedly unfolding. Although it is not wise to prognosticate about any future trends of the Basque diaspora presence on the Web, evidence shows an increasing tendency for articulating an online presence. For example, from the beginning of 2004 to the end of 2005, 13new diaspora institutional Web sites were created, and from October 2005to June 2007 another 30 (23sites and 7 blogs or photoblogs , mostly built by Basque-Argentinean dance groups), the majority of which are Basque clubs, or euskal etxeak, and mainly from Argentina. These associations, each explicitly self-defined as Basque, materialize strong group self-awareness, sustained over a considerable period of time (Douglass and Bilbao 1975;Molina and Oiarzabal 2009). Diaspora communities are formed by emigrants who share a collective identity in their homeland, where socioeconomic or political conditions or both forced them to leave, or who for other reasons chose to settle in another country. Collectively and associatively, some of them attempt to preserve or develop cultural, religious, and even political expressions of their identity, reflecting different degrees of assimilation into their host societies. Diaspora associations create transnational networks that maintain varying degrees of personal , institutional, cultural, social, economic, political, and business ties with the homeland and with other countries where there is a Basque presence : a globe-spanning network of attachments and allegiances. The Basque Country is a region situated at the Spanish-Franco border of the western Pyrenees. The Basque historical homeland territories are divided into three main political administrative areas—the Basque Autonomous 340 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 Community (bac), or Euskadi; the Foral Community of Navarre in the Spanish state; and three Basque provinces, or Iparralde, in the French state— with a total combined population of...