Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Informal Reflections on Farooq Kperogi's NIGERIA'S DIGITAL DIASPORA

Congratulations to our brother-in-law. 

Talcott Parsons theorized that spatial mobility leads to weakened extended family cohesion. I tested this hypothesis in my undergraduate thesis and found it wanting. All the migrants that I interviewed in the distant cities reported that they still kept in touch with their Town Improvement Unions and paid their dues just as Victor Chikezie Uchendu theorized. I found Friedrich Engels more persuasive in the conclusion that the family remains strong even after the emergence of private property and the state.

My supervisor and internal examiner, Professor Nukunya, thundered across the table: 'Who are you to disagree with Parsons?' I humbly answered that his theory lacked internal consistency, was not empirically tenable, and was inefficacious policy-wise. I escaped with A- for the thesis. 

When I presented a paper from the thesis at Ekpoma University as a Youth Corper, Jerry Dibua, Bona Chizea, Wilson Ogbomo, and other angry young men told me that it was the reference to Engels that saved me from being lumped together with bourgeois sociologists like Parsons.

Biko

On Tuesday, 29 June 2021, 11:56:52 GMT-4, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:

Reflections on Farooq Kperogi's Nigeria's Digital Diaspora

 

 

By Moses Ochonu

 

 

The book does a great job of mapping the digital media-enabled engagement and activism of diaspora Nigerians with the affairs of their Nigerian homeland

 

It challenges the idea that diaspora equals displacement and alienation, and posits new media forms as instruments and platforms of connecting diaspora and home and mitigating alienation.

 

More crucially, what Kperogi demonstrates in this book is that exile and emigration, far from diminishing sociopolitical activism and engagement with Nigeria, actually intensify such engagements. The proliferation of online discursive spaces is a catalyst for this phenomenon.

 

This book does a fantastic job of documenting and theorizing this illuminating convergence of diaspora engagement and new media technologies.

 

Exile, Kperogi argues, is a catalyst for intense engagement in the age of new media, in ways that were not the case in earlier diasporic generations and iterations.

 

And yet, for me, the most enduring contribution of this book is not Kperogi's compelling analysis of the various forms that this diasporic engagement takes, or the insights from his well-chosen case studies, notably Saharareporters.com.

 

Rather, for me, the most insightful contention in the study is the argument that, as active and consistent as this diasporic media activism is, it is 1) defined and shaped by changing political dynamics in Nigeria; 2) it is influenced by and has in turn influenced the ways in which traditional media in Nigeria has copied or adapted some of the earlier innovations of diaspora digital media; and 3) the diasporic digital media landscape has fragmented along some of the same primordial, ideological, and partisan contours as the media landscape of Nigeria.

 

The implication of this argument is profound. In plain terms, it means that there is nothing fundamentally unique, special, or transcendental about diasporic digital citizenship, and that it is not a stand-alone phenomenon divorced from media cultures and activist fads in Nigeria. 

 

Kperogi shows that while some diaspora media formations have pioneered certain forms of informational activism, have in some cases set the reportorial agenda and pushed the boundaries of investigative journalism, and have demonstrated new possibilities of engagement, diasporic new media activism is as vulnerable to the same pull and push pressures of pecuniary, identity, political considerations as its home-based counterpart. 

 

Moreover, as Kperogi shows, the diaspora new media landscape is symbiotically connected to, and in some cases dependent on, terrestrial media infrastructures in Nigeria, and vice versa.

 

Now that Professor Kperogi has given us the conceptual and theoretical tools for understanding the new media-engagements of diaspora Nigerians, I want to raise a few questions and directions for complementary future research in this subfield of the convergence of media and diaspora studies.

 

I want to posit that if there is a theory of diaspora media activism and engagement as Farooq has eloquently demonstrated, then there needs to be another theory and another conceptual postulation for diaspora apathy and disengagement.

 

Not all diaspora citizens are engaged with Nigeria or are active in Nigeria's growing digital space. As available and ubiquitous as new media platforms have become, individual choice and agency constrain the extent to which diaspora Nigerians engage with Nigeria online, if they engage at all. 

 

Some diasporic individuals self-consciously alienate themselves from the affairs of Nigeria. It is a personal choice for many of them, and the reasons may vary from individual to individual. One of such reasons is mental self-insulation.

 

 

These individual diaspora Nigerians not only do not engage with events in Nigeria, they do not keep up with those events and have since mentally and in some cases physically disengaged from Nigeria. 

 

I don't want to be crude about it, but some of us have encountered fellow diaspora Nigerians who asked if Godswill Akpabio and Gabriel Suswam are still governors of Akwa Ibom and Benue respectively, or if John Utaka still plays for the Super Eagles!

 

The only engagement these individuals undertake is at the familial level of checking up on relatives and arranging remittances. These are significant engagements, of course, but they do not require the intellectual energies and sustained emotional investment of online Nigeria-centered activism.

 

What I am signaling is the limit of Nigeria's digital diasporic engagement, the reality of diasporic apathy, indifference, and self-alienation, and the need for a complementary theory of diaspora disengagement.

 

Like diaspora engagement, diaspora disengagement is elaborated through accompanying new media narratives of dystopia, lamentations around dysfunction, and cynicism. 

 

In other words, like the activism and engagement that Kperogi has convincingly demonstrated, this phenomenon of diasporic apathy and self-alienation is also articulated in, and enabled by, the growing democratization of new media technologies. 

--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAAHJfPoa3EBAr4TYi5_%3DX0Mj2qULiGw%2BvObSzi5%3DwW5rMZ3%3DjA%40mail.gmail.com.