ABSTRACT
Chapter 5, ‘(Re)imagining the nation: Facebook, the #ImStaying movement and cultural citizenship’, explores the conversations on a public Facebook group as expressions of cultural citizenship. Through the exploration of the #ImStaying Facebook group, the chapter makes a case for social media as facilitative of the formation of collective publics. Exploring Facebook as a type of networked public, the chapter uses the concepts of imagined communities and cultural citizenship to analyse how this particular group creates pathways of communication which result in the formation of a virtual community, mobilised through expressions of sentiment. The concept of cultural citizenship refers to the ways in which individual citizens experience their social context and how they relate to others as they seek a sense of belonging. This case study reveals the internet as a site of sociocultural and political agency. But while the Facebook group discursively calls public formations into being, it simultaneously nostalgically elevates relationships imbued with historical power dimensions, ignoring continued power dynamics. The cultural politics of #ImStaying raises critical questions about power, articulating a particular version of South African belonging in which apartheid memories are whitewashed and recast as nostalgia, and critical-political analysis is silenced.
