Connectivity, contestation, and cultural production: an analysis of Dominican online identity formation

In this paper, I employ thematic analysis of text data from a web forum to highlight the prevalent debates and themes that emerge in online discussions of Dominican identity. I find that these spaces can be arenas for identity contestation where what I refer to as traditionalist understandings of race and culture clash with non-traditionalist perspectives. When this happens, users rely on a number of strategies to rouse cultural memory, evoke racialised emotions, and establish cultural legitimacy. Forum participants create digital imagined communities where they can perform and share the particularities of their culture, while producing new conditions of cultural legitimacy and belonging. As technological innovation provides new platforms where diasporic and non-diasporic members of a nation can come together, it is important to continue to explore the role of online spaces as sites of cultural production.

Duke Scholars

Author Pamela Zabala