ABSTRACT
University of Chicago (www.uchicago.edu), I argued, was very different, in that they both had strong locational identities; when you clicked on them, you felt like you were going there, to the very place they referenced – not simply in as much as it referenced a place, like the campus of the university in Hyde Park, or the island of Sri Lanka, but in that it made you experience the dense, lived worlds of those locations. Then, I drew a parallel between these contrasting website styles, in relation to ‘locational identity’ and the representations of nations and quasi-nations in web space, taking ‘Sri Lanka’ and ‘Tamil Eelam’ as contrasting examples. Undergirding my analysis of these contrasting styles, which I will elaborate on below, was another prior, analytical distinction between ‘nation’ and ‘country’ that helped keep the effects of the ‘diaspora’ in view. By country I mean that densely lived zone that is demarcated by an official map and that is governed by a state, or a quasistate, whereas a nation can be an imagined community that has densities all over the globe (Ismail 2001). A diaspora, in a sense, is the difference between the two. The advantage of this formulation is that it allows for the imagined community of the nation to be kept categorically distinct from the territorial claims of a state or putative state. In the case of contested countries, of course, there is an added layer of complexity: for example, in Sri Lanka there are at least two countries within one island – one official, Sri Lanka, and one quasi-official, Tamil Eelam – as well as two diasporic nations, Sinhala and Tamil. Returning now to the invocation of ‘Sri Lanka’ and ‘Tamil Eelam’, taking
both as representing ‘nations’ and ‘countries’, I found that ‘locational identities’ were apparent from both competing positions. Some sites invoked ‘Sri Lanka’ as a ‘country’, from within, and others as a ‘nation’ from both within and without. Similarly, ‘Tamil Eelam’ was invoked by sites such as www.sangam.org, which is a regional association of diasporic groups, namely Tamils of Sri Lankan origin in New York and New Jersey. Such websites are dense with the lived details of community life coincident with their imagined community. Another set of sites, such as www.tamilnet.com, position their imagined communities globally, invoking the sense of a distributed ‘nation’ but referring to, of course, news and opinion about a located and imagined ‘country’, Tamil Eelam. Nevertheless, in this early account of nations and web space (since the World Wide Web was really only three years old when that paper was written) one startling discontinuity appeared in the space and name of www.eelam.com. Eelam.com had, at the time, no locational identity in the sense of lived detail – it was only focused on a map, Eelam, the disputed country claimed by the LTTE in the North East of Sri Lanka. It was, in effect, an imaginary country, not in Chatterjee’s sense of a creative imagining (1993: xx), but in a virtual sense of being imagined in cyberspace, which gave Anderson’s account of imaginings in print capitalism another dimension. Again, one must underline, this empty space of eelam.com was not simply another diasporic imagining of what Anderson himself might have called ‘long distance’ nationalism. Rather, I argued that there was a confluence, or a
co-constitution, if you like, between a country-less nation like Tamil Eelam and the ability of cyberspace to produce websites like www.fedex.com that did not and need not have locational identities. The web did not simply reflect the imaginings of communities – it served as a mode of imagination as well. I take this as an important insight, which is fundamental to the argument of this chapter. The ways in which communities imagine are, of course, shaped in other
ways. In the case of Tamil Eelam, the ceasefire agreements of 2002 between the government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE fundamentally changed the way it was imagined through the 1990s; as a quasi-government was set up in the north-east by the LTTE, the imagination of the distributed nation of Tamil Eelam became embedded in a lived country which was hitherto an empty map. As forms of govenmentality emerged in Tamil Eelam, such as a judicial service and police force, the map of Tamil Eelam became increasingly lived, and this change was reflected in web space. While these changes made my old argument about eelam.com less relevant to the present, they also focused attention on my current concern, namely the play between national communities in a given country, or space – or in other words, what has been called, ‘communalism’. This is, of course, a difficult and vexed category, and therefore before I move to an inquiry into the relationship between ‘web space’ and ‘communalism’ I will have to provide a theoretical elaboration of it, in my own terms.
