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ABSTRACT: This essay explores the dynamics of extreme speech online in the context of Eritrea's fraught politics. I find the public sphere that Eritreans in diaspora established on a website as constantly open to collapse and subversion, and thus requiring on-going negotiation among participants. The analysis draws on a close reading of a set of online exchanges in response to a narrative posted on a leading Eritrean news and discussion website. The operation of an open public sphere online is especially significant for Eritreans since there is no right to freedom of expression and no independent media inside the country. In heated exchanges online, people's identities as Eritreans and their loyalties are questioned in spectacular attempts to silence, intimidate, and exclude certain people or ideas. What I also uncover are the strategies used by some posters and the moderator to assert the value of civil discourse and to keep the public forum open and inclusive. The ways that Eritreans engage in and respond to extreme speech in an online forum are interesting for what they reveal about Eritrean politics, but furthermore shed light on the global issue of extreme speech, digital media, and public spheres.

ABSTRACTThis 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 the war that produced Eritrea as an independent nation, elevated its current president and ruling party to government leadership, and established the Eritrean diaspora. I argue that national narratives of the Eritrean state that celebrate sacrifice for the nation operate on Eritreans as a secondary form of violence that renders their personal losses unspeakable. Eritrean websites reveal complex communicative terrains where power is constructed and contested in ways that cannot be captured by the opposition between the diaspora and the homeland, between online and offline, or between silence and speech. [political violence, suffering, diaspora, internet, war, Eritrea]

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 been actively involved in the new state. Eritreans abroad use the Internet as a transnational public sphere where they produce and debate narratives of history, culture, democracy and identity. Through the web the diaspora has mobilized demonstrators, amassed funds for war, debated the formulation of the constitution, and influenced the government of Eritrea. Through their web postings, 'Internet intellectuals' interpret national crises, rearticulate values and construct community. Thus, the Internet is not simply about information but is also an emotion‐laden and creative space. More than simply refugees or struggling workers, diasporas online may invent new forms of citizenship, community and political practices.

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 anthropological scholarship on women can be divided between those who emphasize the relative importance of capitalism (for example, Leacock 1981; Nash and Fernandez-Kelly 1983; Boserup 1970) and those who emphasize culture (for example, Ortner and Whitehead 1981; Schlegel 1990; Rosaldo 1974) as determinants of gender roles and relations.