Reimagining Communities through Transnational Bengali Decolonial Discourse with YouTube Content Creators

TL;DR

This paper investigates how transnational Bengali communities reimagine themselves through decolonial discourse on YouTube, linking nationalism, colonial legacies, and media platforms. Using semi-structured interviews with 15 YouTubers across Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, the authors apply grounded theory to reveal motivations and video strategies (reaction videos, travel vlogs, political explainers, and YouTube journalism) that foreground language, religion, and postcolonial partitions. The findings articulate a two-domain model of nationalism—the inner cultural identity and the outside institutionalization domain—demonstrating how YouTube can foster interconnected understanding while also riskings polarization through modular identities. The study contributes to CSCW and postcolonial computing by showing how online video modalities and sociomaterial practices enable decolonial work, offering implications for design, content governance, and inclusive digital citizenship in the Global South.

Abstract

Colonialism--the policies and practices wherein a foreign body imposes its ways of life on local communities--has historically impacted how collectives perceive themselves in relation to others. One way colonialism has impacted how people see themselves is through nationalism, where nationalism is often understood through shared language, culture, religion, and geopolitical borders. The way colonialism has shaped people's experiences with nationalism has shaped historical conflicts between members of different nation-states for a long time. While recent social computing research has studied how colonially marginalized people can engage in discourse to decolonize or re-imagine and reclaim themselves and their communities on their own terms--what is less understood is how technology can better support decolonial discourses in an effort to re-imagine nationalism. To understand this phenomenon, this research draws on a semi-structured interview study with YouTubers who make videos about culturally Bengali people whose lives were upended as a product of colonization and are now dispersed across Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. This research seeks to understand people's motivations and strategies for engaging in video-mediated decolonial discourse in transnational contexts. We discuss how our work demonstrates the potential of the sociomateriality of decolonial discourse online and extends an invitation to foreground complexities of nationalism in social computing research.