| My dissertation is an ethnography of the ways in which transnational news circulation among Ivoirians during crisis reconfigures the nation and national community. Following the Christmas Eve Coup of 1999, Cote d'Ivoire entered into "The Ivoirian Crisis." As the crisis has escalated, transnational news networks have assumed urgency as a key site for "Ivoirians learning politics" in a new era of instability, and as a battleground on which the nation is negotiated through its representation.; This ethnography is based on sixteen months of fieldwork conducted between 1998--2001 in Cote d'Ivoire and Washington D.C. I tracked news exchange routes between Ivoirians living in D.C. and their friends and families in Cote d'Ivoire through a combination of news media (Ivoirian and international print, radio, television, and Internet news sources) and personal communication networks (letters, cell phones, fax, e-mail, Internet chat rooms, and meetings with visiting Ivoirian religious and political dignitaries).; Through an analysis of news circulation about "home," crisis, family, and politics among wide networks of Ivoirians, I trace a transnational discourse that is deeply nationalistic. I illustrate how gender and class continue to serve as significant filters through which power is reproduced in the "new moment" of crisis news, and examine concepts of territoriality among members of la communite ivoirienne to contend that it is often the very translocality of a national community that can produce its citizens' sense of rootedness in a national territory.; Building on theories of diaspora, the anthropology of public culture, and theories of nationalism and transnationalism, this dissertation (1) extends theories of diaspora to incorporate inhabitants of contemporary Africa, re-introducing the continent back into studies of the African diaspora; (2) introduces new ways to conceptualize units of belonging simultaneously within and beyond the nation through flows of transnational cultural production, and (3) responds to the call for ethnographic work on media engagement as an integral part of public cultural practice. My research adds to academic debates on the role of transnational public culture in relation to nation-states and joins a new generation of ethnographies to track transnational processes between an African nation and its recent diaspora. |
