Roy, B. (2025). Born without a country: discourses of non-state actors in Tibetan diasporic media in India. Asian Ethnicity, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/14631369.2025.2523843
Abstract
Diasporic media play a critical role in forming a collective consciousness and identity among the scattered diasporic populace that finds itself culturally, politically, and socially alienated in its adopted home. Diasporic media thus strive to maintain self-representation and cultural identification of the diasporic community and help connect with the extended diaspora, transforming them into dynamic media producers and becoming active and autonomous agents. Media studies researchers have seldom delved into the study of diasporic media, particularly such as those of the Tibetan non-state actors, who have been uprooted from their homeland by Communist China, which seeks to negate the historical, religious, cultural, social, and political Identity of the Tibetan people and assimilate them within its monolithic structure. This study engages in critical discourse analysis of three Tibetan media outlets in exile in India as three distinct case studies. In doing so, it seeks to answer the following critical questions: How do diasporic media help the Tibetan diaspora keep in touch with their original culture while negotiating with the mainstream society of their adopted country? Second, given that the majority of Tibetans now living in India were not born in Tibet and have not visited Tibet, how do diasporic media discourses strengthen the self-representation of these generations of Tibetan diaspora and whether they allow for Tibetan youths to present alternative interpretations that may be different and even critical of the dominant ‘official’ narrative forms? Finally, what are the implications of these discourses in the transnational identity of Tibetan nationalism, diasporic identity politics, and ultimately, the peculiarities of diasporic media, which is creating a unique place for itself within media ecosystems in the present intensively globalized world, though rarely studied through a communication studies perspective? The researcher employing the Universalism-Particularism continuum perspective argues that the idea of the Tibetan homeland is not merely a symbolic entity for the diasporic Tibetan community for cultural and social negotiation in a foreign land but a concrete collective consciousness as discourses in diasporic media successfully help recreate peculiar national imagination which binds the scattered non-Tibet born Tibetan youths to the ‘politics of homeland’ and to ‘ethos’ of being Tibetan.
Keywords: Diasporic media, Democracy-in-exile, Tibetan identity, Tibetan media-in-exile, non-state actors
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