In this modern age of extremes.

In this modern age of extremes, squeezed between globalization and nationalism, mobile capital and immobile labor, corporate media and DVD art, digital diasporas have originate to signify a challenge to state boundaries, clos communities, fixed identities and territorialized notions of civilization and cultural production. Digitality arouses interactivity, networking, immediacy, presence and engagement. Diaspora implies migration, hybridity, "flexible citizenship," nomadic agricultures [1] Combined, they constitute the platform for those transnational/national imaginaries where, as Patricia Zimmermann and John Hess have newly argued, "digitality invokes [Dziga] Vetrov summoning the possibilities of technology and collage to make us papal court differently, to alter social and visual relations." [2] Or, as Margot Lovejoy has place it, the new technologies create a potential for "interaction and communication, a kind of inclusivity which encourages global exchange between the sides of which fresh insights can unroll through experimentation with diversity and difference." [3] Digital diasporas, thus, could make possible just discovered kinds of art forms and novel kinds of political communities based upon linkages and layerings--radical openings and historical sediments that were previously hard to imagine and on the same level less put into practice.

further what about loneliness? That ghastly loneliness, inherent in being neither-here-nor-there, associateed but with no one to talk to, assimilated moreover not accepted, mobile but with no to one's home to return to: the loneliness of an immigrant, refugee perennial foreigner that does not (cannot) vanish in this digital age on the other hand instead only grows stronger and always more difficult to articulate. And what about foreign-ness, that foreign-ness of a foreigner, that does not transcend hatred if it were not that instead, as Julia Kristeva notes, one time transplanted onto a foreign soil, "becomes crystallized as incorrupt ostracism," fueling fundamentalism and manufacturing its have others? [4] And what about inter-passivity, that by-product of cyberspace which, according to Slavoj Zizek, calms us into a fantasy that we are doing something while standing still, that we are caring for the world while clicking forward the mouse: that absurd state of an on-line existence where "subject is incessantly--frenetically even--active while displacing onto another the fu ndamental passivity of his or her being?" [5] Where can we store these not-so-pleasant residues of digital diasporas whose emancipatory political and aesthetic potential is les than certain? to what degree can we theorize them without, a priori, closing the multiple possibilities that digitality be seens to offer? How can we ruminate upon them without further fetishizing the technology that has, one as well as the other symbolically and literally, brought these of recent origin diasporas into existence? [6]

Here, I would like to indicate that personal homepages--the pages of ordinary emitters made for their ordinary compatriots and ordinary neighbors--may be the points of articulation of just similar loneliness, foreign-ness and inter-passivity. Personal homepages of Bosnian refugee described upon the following pages, lack the aesthetic and political interest of Zimmermann's and Hess's examples, notwithstanding they illuminate a relationship between digitality and solitude, diaspora and isolation, which may be the flip side of now fashionable upbeat renderings of cultural liquefys and voluntary and involuntary moves of people. With their self-conscious displays of daydreams about domestic and foreign suddenly stars, sport heroes and fashion gauges mementos and souvenirs, transparent desire for travel around the world and on a level more transparent nostalgia for the household that (perhaps) never was, these pages are frequently testimonies to the otherwise unspoken losse and discontinuities that stand at the heart of diasporic civilizations Something between a shop for human contact and a self-written praise they resemble mausoleums, built in the late 1970 in parts of Serbia by means of Serbs working in Germany, that contained family photographs, living range furniture, television sets and other household paraphernalia in an obvious effort to call attention to themselves and inhibit after-life loneliness. "Hello, my name is. .," "Click here, and launch me an email," and everything that stands in between these customary narratives and invitations may thus be seen as paradoxical attempts at self-preservation in the face of incongruities and disruptions that go hand-in-hand with the spread of digital (and not merely digital) diasporas.

A abode of the Refugee

As abjection from polity, says British political theorist Michael Dillon, refugee "call into question the foundational underpinnings the pair of the community from which they have been expell and the community into which they inquire for to be received." [7] Their advent shatters the basis of all political--and not just political--associations on exposing the degree to which the late fantasy of being together, based about the identity of people, state and territory, be pendents on expulsion of difference. "The refugee is a scandal for philosophy, and specifically for epistemology," explains Dillon, "in that the refugee recalls the radical instability of meaning and the incalculability of the human. The refugee is a scandal for politics also, however, in that the advent of the refugee is always a reproach to the formation of the political order or subjectivity that necessarily gives rise to the refugee" [8] At the heart of this destabilizing power that the refugee has onward his or her environment, stands the universal of ho me: