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<p>At the heart of "American Realities, Diasporic Dreams" lies the following question:
How and why do people generate longings for diasporic experience, and what might this
have to do with nationally-specific affective and political economies of race, gender,
and age? This dissertation focuses on the women of Girlfriend Tours International
(GFT), a regionally and socio-economically diverse group of Americans, who are also
members of the virtual community at www.Jamaicans.com. By completing online research
in their web-community, and multi-sited ethnographic research in multiple cities throughout
the U.S. and Jamaica, I investigate how this group of African-American women makes
sense of the paradoxical nature of their hyphenated-identities, as they explore the
contentious relationship between "Blackness" and "Americanness." </p><p>This dissertation
examines how these African-American women use travel and the Internet to cope with
their experiences of racism and sexism in the United States, while pursuing "happiness"
and social belonging within (virtual and territorial) diasporic relationships. Ironically,
the "success" of their diasporic dreams and travels is predicated on how well they
leverage their national privilege as (African) American citizens in Jamaica. Therefore,
I argue that these African-American women establish a complex concept of happiness,
one that can only be fulfilled by moving--both virtually and actually--across national
borders. In other words, these women require American economic, national, and social
capital in order to travel to Jamaica, but simultaneously need the spiritual connection
to Jamaica and its people in order to remain hopeful and happy within the national
borders of the U.S. Their pursuit of happiness, therefore, raises critical questions
that encourage scholars to rethink how we ethnographically document diasporic longings,
and how we imagine their relationships to early 21st century notions of the "American
Dream."</p>
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