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Storytelling in the Digital World
Edited by Anna De Fina and Sabina M. Perrino
[Benjamins Current Topics 104] 2019
► pp. 79–103

“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.

Keywords: narrative, Facebook, heritage tourism, diaspora, Portuguese descent, France, roots tourism, imagined community, nationalism, deictics
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
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 June 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.104.05sim
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