Digital Diasporic Self-Writing and the Imagined Nation: Constructing Indonesian Identity through @PuriViera’s YouTube Vlogs
Authors
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Poetry Salsabila Nurrania
Universitas Padjadjaran
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Aquarini Priyatna
Universitas Padjadjaran
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3009-1471
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Ari Jogaiswara Adipurwawidjana
Universitas Padjadjaran
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9520-904X
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36312/jolls.v6i3.5038Keywords:
Diaspora, Self-writing, National imagination, Narrative authority, YouTube vlogAbstract
This study examines how @PuriViera’s YouTube vlogs construct an imagined nation from the perspective of an Indonesian woman in diaspora living in California, United States. Functioning as video epistolaries, @PuriViera’s vlogs present American life through the narrator’s Indonesian perspective, constructing an idealized life built through the integration of Indonesian cultural habits into an American suburban setting. In doing so, the vlogger draws on her in-between, diasporic identity to establish narrative authority and credibility, generating the desirability of the life she portrays. The study focuses on three vlogs; Pengeluaran Seminggu di Amerika (2025), Sekolah TK di Amerika (2025), and Pesta Rumahan di Amerika (2024), as research objects, placing them within narratological frameworks to examine the construction of imagined national identity and diasporic life through focalization, voice, and the selective deployment of tripartite capital within the vlogs as texts. The analysis demonstrates that the imagined nationhood is produced not by American material culture itself but by the narrator’s Indonesian perspective, which selects, frames, and narrates American life for an Indonesian audience. The narrator’s authority emerges precisely from Puri’s in-between position, and her sustained Indonesianness amid American life is the specific condition that makes this imagined Indonesianness legible and credible to the audience. The study concludes that @PuriViera’s vlogs operate as a utopian narrative apparatus in which the narrator’s diasporic perspective is the mechanism that makes the ideal nation imaginable, displaying selected aspects of everyday Indonesian life against the amenities of the desired American social landscape as the benchmark for an ideal life.
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