Cyberspace and cultural memory: case studies in Brazil, Mozambique and Portugal

Abstract

The wide geographic dispersion of “Lusophone” space has hindered systematic studies on how this “imagined community” is defined, taking as a starting point the different national communities that comprise it. The “Identity Narratives and Social Memory” research project aimed at analysing the (re)making of “Lusophone” identity in cyberspace and how blogs contribute to a transnational cultural memory. This research program was structured according to four methodological axes: the analysis of virtual narratives in the cyberspace (mapping of the cyberspace in eight Portuguese-speaking countries and doing in-depth analysis of fifteen case studies); the analysis of oral narratives of people with experiences of migration in more than one Lusophone country, using auto-biographical semi-structured interviews; the review of the negotiations of identity in cross-cultural contexts using focus groups; and finally the analysis of social representations of history through a transnational survey. In this paper we will focus on the results of empirical case studies about the discussion of ‘Lusophone identity’ in Brazilian, Mozambican and Portuguese cyberspace.