“We are going to our Portuguese homeland!”
French Luso-descendants’ diasporic Facebook conarrations of vacation return trips to Portugal
This article combines the study of online narratives as social practices and the linguistic anthropological study of imagined communities, to examine a set of non-canonical narrative practices in a Facebook group for the Portuguese diaspora in France. Instead of reports of individual members’ past experiences, these narratives function as invitations to other group members to co-tell typical, shared experiences. Specifically, we investigate how group members share vacation trips to Portugal with each other in ways that produce a sense of collective and simultaneous experience. They accomplish this through deictically-based narrative strategies that shift the social, spatial, and temporal perspectives of narrating and narrated frames in ways that link the following: individual I’s with collective we’s, one-time events with timeless event types, and co-presence online with co-presence on vacation. Through these strategies, participants connect Facebook narrations of vacations to the larger social project of diasporic longing for and return to Portugal.
Article outline
- Interactional approaches to narrative as social practice
- Narrating nationalism
- Narrating the ethnonational we’s on Facebook
- The Portuguese diaspora in France, offline and online
- Diasporic Facebook group: Tu sais que tu viens du Portugal Quand/ You know you come from Portugal when
- Posting about vacation trips to Portugal
- Creating collectivities and simultaneities
- Anticipating departure
- Simultaneity
- Narrating shared Return to France
- Conclusion
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Acknowledgements
-
Notes
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References
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