Victoria Bernal

• Professor (Full) at University of California, Irvine

This chapter explores the legacies of political violence, the workings of state power in mobilizing identities around collective suffering, and the effects of political culture that reside in people even after they have left the time and space of war. I interrogate the silence on Eritrean diaspora websites regarding personal suffering related to th...

This article explores questions of decolonization, in part through analyzing Belgium’s Africa Museum. Bernal considers the role of academia and knowledge production, as well as the technological developments that may create new concentrations of power faster than decolonial projects can dismantle established hierarchies. She concludes that decoloni...

Nations are generally understood to be territorial while the internet is commonly thought of as extraterritorial. The political activities of Eritreans in diaspora help to complicate both those assumptions. Exploring the diverse and shifting ways that Eritreans in diaspora have used websites to participate in national politics from outside the coun...

This article explores the legacies of political violence, the workings of state power in mobilizing identities around collective suffering, and the effects of political culture that reside in people even after they have left the time and space of war. I interrogate the silence on Eritrean diaspora websites regarding personal suffering related to th...

Theorizing NGOs examines how the rise of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) has transformed the conditions of women's lives and of feminist organizing. Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal suggest that we can understand the proliferation of NGOs through a focus on the NGO as a unified form despite the enormous variation and diversity contained wit...

Websites created and sustained by Eritreans in diaspora over the past two decades stand as one of the most significant initiatives undertaken independently of the state. Because of the Eritrean state's domination of public life and orchestration of political expression and practice, the online public sphere created by the diaspora has no offline co...

This article analyses a war memorial established on a website by Eritreans in diaspora as an example of how diasporas are transforming the ways national politics are conducted and understood. Establishing a war memorial is normally the prerogative and responsibility of the state. In performing this task the Eritrean diaspora makes visible the failu...

Parody possesses a kind of power that realist critique sometimes lacks. I explore why humor is sometimes used as a medium for addressing tragic circumstances and why parody in particular may be especially suited to communicating about dictatorship. The research presented here draws on a long-term project on Eritrean politics and on websites devoted...

The ways that Eritreans in diaspora are engaged with cyberspace reveal some of the ways that transnational migration, coupled with new technologies of communication, is transforming political participation. The Internet may be the quintessential media for diasporas because it so easily bridges distance and dispersal. But it would be wrong to see th...

(T)he government . decided to reorganize their lands into a large agricultural project which the government itself, with all its power and authority would supervise. Suddenly they found their village alive with land surveyors, engi- neers, and inspectors. While Evans-Pritchard was conducting his now-famous studies of the Azande and the Nuer in sout...

ABSTRACT Many scholars have seen globalization and transnationalism as ushering in a postnational era. The new nation of Eritrea serves as an example suggesting that transnationalism does not only operate in opposition to nationalism but can also work to reinforce it. Eritreans in diaspora helped to liberate Eritrea from Ethiopia and continue to pa...

Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors. David Scott and Charles Hirschkind, eds. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. 355 pp.

Abstract In this article I analyse the Eritrean diaspora and its use of cyberspace to theorize the ways transnationalism and new media are associated with the rise of new forms of community, public spheres and sites of cultural production. The struggle for national independence coincided with the rise of the Internet and the Eritrean diaspora has b...

For Eritreans in diaspora, identities are deterritorialized, one's most pressing communication may be with far-flung strangers in cyberspace, and one's political engagement is centered on a distant homeland. Eritrean experiences, thus, seem to bring together various qualities that scholars have been grappling with in trying to chart the implication...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Northeast African Studies 8.3 (2001) 129-154 Contradictions of Liberation and Development in Eritrea Victoria Bernal University of California, Irvine Any "peace" involves a reworking of power relations, not just between nations or parts of nations, but between women and men. Liz Kell...

For the villagers of Wad al-Abbas in northern Sudan, transnational migration has generated new understandings of what it means to be a Muslim. From the mid-1970s through the 1980s, Wad al-Abbas's incorporation into the global economy was mediated primarily by Saudi Arabia. The Saudi kingdom exerted influence on Sudan at the national level by pressu...

This article takes as its starting point the debate over whether or not peasants operate according to capitalist rationality. I argue that neither the assumption that peasants operate according to noncapitalist principles, nor the assumption that peasant households operate like capitalist enterprises can account for the behavior of peasants. The an...

Have women in third-world societies been made second-class citizens by colonialism, incorporation into the capitalist world economy, and class formation? Or are women relegated to less prestigious and less economically rewarding roles by patriarchal ideologies and practices the origins of which lie in indigenous cultures? Much of the anthropologica...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Northwestern University, 1985. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 384-394). Photocopy.