The Diary Weblog and the Travelling Tales of Diasporic Tourists

As has been commonly recognised, the Internet enables a transcendence of physical and national boundaries and therefore constitutes an ideal place for forging diasporic connections. There is no denying that the Internet has the potential to greatly affect how diasporic identities and senses of belonging are formed; the question is how, and in what online context? This article investigates a cluster of Asian American diary bloggers connected to a web-ring whose aim is to foster diasporic connections. More specifically, this article performs a discourse analysis of the tales of travelling to the ancestral homeland circulating within this cluster. I argue that the ancestral homes produced in these blogs are above all shaped by the real and imagined audience of fellow Asian American diary bloggers and the geographical and discursive place from which the ancestral home is imagined, i.e. the US. The diasporic imagination here emerges as locally situated.