“We are going to our Portuguese homeland!”
French Luso-descendants’ diasporic Facebook
conarrations of vacation return trips to Portugal
Isabelle Simões Marques and Michèle Koven
Universidade Aberta & CLUNL-FCSH-Universidade Nova de Lisboa /
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
is article combines the study of online narratives as social practices and the
linguistic anthropological study of imagined communities, to examine a set
of non-canonical narrative practices in a Facebook group for the Portuguese
diaspora in France. Instead of reports of individual members’ past experiences,
these narratives function as invitations to other group members to co-tell typical,
shared experiences. Specifically, we investigate how group members share vaca-
tion trips to Portugal with each other in ways that produce a sense of collective
and simultaneous experience. ey accomplish this through deictically-based
narrative strategies that shiſt the social, spatial, and temporal perspectives of
narrating and narrated frames in ways that link the following: individual I’s with
collective we’s, one-time events with timeless event types, and co-presence on-
line with co-presence on vacation. rough these strategies, participants connect
Facebook narrations of vacations to the larger social project of diasporic longing
for and return to Portugal.
Keywords: narrative, Facebook, heritage tourism, diaspora, Portuguese descent,
France, roots tourism, imagined community, nationalism, deictics
is article combines the study of online narratives as social practices and the
linguistic anthropological study of imagined communities, to examine a set of non-
canonical narrative practices in a Facebook group for the Portuguese diaspora in
France. We examine how group members use a set of online narrative practices, not
so much to report individuals’ past experiences, but instead to invite one another
Narrative Inquiry 27:2 (2017), 286–310. doi 10.1075/ni.27.2.05sim
issn 1387-6740 / e-issn 1569-9935 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
Requests for further information should be directed to:
Michèle Koven University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Department of Communication,
702 S. Wright M/C 456, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. Email: mkoven@illinois.edu