Translocalizing the space of old Nubia in digital narrative: Resemiotized chronotopes as markers of identity

Abstract

Digitality is closely related to and expressed within analogicity, offering a sense of intersectional continuity between the online and offline realms. However, this poses a theoretical and conceptual challenge, particularly when addressing the heterogenous notion of contemporary diaspora as a phenomenon of online/offline and past/present co-constituency. To this end, this article advances a semio-chronotopic approach to reclaiming indigenous identities. It aims at decentring the concept of spatial dispersal by situating diaspora within a temporal continuum. The article investigates the Nubian Facebook* page Al Nuba Café in this concern. Deployment of the notion of resemiotization enables us to analyse narrative networks of Nubian diaspora as mediatized through digital space. It is found that Nubian online narrative shows a chronotopic condition of coeval alignment in which the two identity events before and after the displacement are kept conflated. The posts are found to blur the boundaries between the spatiotemporal there-and-then of the story and of the here-and-now of the storytelling world. The study concludes that Nubian digital tellings of diaspora are organized within a continuum of specific chronotopes that vacillate between past and present, spatial yearning and temporal nostalgia, statehood and diaspora, roots and routes, delineating an umbrella chronotope of the changing same. This semio-chronotopic conceptualisation of Nubian diaspora acknowledges the centrality of translocal temporality in its manifestation. Accordingly, the study argues that while space is considered the primary measure of diaspora in the analogue contexts, digital context emphasizes a rather the temporal dimension which dynamically participates in the reproduction of translocal diaspora experiences.

Keywords

• chronotopes
• digital narrative
• hybrid identity
• resemiotization
• translocal diaspora