ABSTRACT
Because of the spread of global capitalism and innovations in transportation, telecommunications, and technology, as well as changes in citizenship and immigration laws, scholarship on immigration, especially diaspora, has necessarily changed. These changes have made it apparent that scholars cannot adequately capture the experiences of immigrants or understand the effects of structural changes on immigrants if scholars insist upon “home and host country frameworks” (Purkayastha 2009: 95). For example, because members of the diaspora, some belonging to one family (like my own) are scattered all over the world, they have to simultaneously grapple with specific social, political, and economic forces within their host country, their home country, as well as negotiate the interrelationship between various host countries and/or their home country. Some scholars argue that the evolution of global capitalism and communications technologies
have produced a new community of transmigrants “whose daily lives depend on multiple and constant interconnections across international borders and whose public identities are configured in relationships to more than one nation-state” (emphasis mine: Glick-Schiller et al. 1995: 48). Others choose to examine the identities of diasporic members through the lens of “flexible citizenship” and/or “cosmopolitanism” (Ong 1999; Camroux 2008). These scholars consider ethnic identity a sense of belongingness that “involves not a hypothetical transnationalism but rather a kind of ‘long-distance nationals’ and/or ‘binary nationalisms’ that allow the diasporic individual to be both here and there simultaneously” (Camroux 2008: 24). Regardless of the theoretical approach or concepts scholars use to describe this community, it is clear that more research needs to be conducted to better understand and address the effects of globalization on diasporic communities. In recent years, because of the growing use of the internet to communicate-via email, social
forums, videocalling, and videoconferencing-scholars from various disciplines have chosen to study, not only the impact of these mediums on various communities around the world (see, for example, Miller and Slater 2001), but also the use of these mediums in forming and/or maintaining communities (Nakamura 2002; Bernal 2005; Ignacio 2005; Mitra 2006; Helland 2007; Ó Dochartaigh; 2009; Figer and Ynion 2010; Tynes 2011).
