Zonians in cyberspace: The imagining of individual, community and nation on the Panama‐L listserve

Abstract

This paper traces the ways the diasporic (albeit relatively privileged) identities of Zonians are positioned as part of a larger Panamanian national discourse on the Panama‐L listserve. The paper looks at modern, postmodern and postcolonial theoretical debates on space, nation, identity and authenticity in order to focus on the articulation and performance of these ideas in cyberspace. Critical and performance ethnography is utilized to study the text‐based, imagined community created on the Panama‐L listserve. In the movement from theory about identity and nation within the frame of social action to the articulation of such in cyberspace, I hope to find the connections and disjunctures between the “account”; of identity as it occurs in discourse and the accounting for as a product of theorizing about identity in the larger frame of (the end of) nationalism and the democracies of cyberspaces

Key concepts:

• computer mediated communication
• critical ethnography
• cyberspace
• diaspora
• identity
• internet
• Panama
• performance ethnography
• Zonians