MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

This ongoing study seeks to understand how young Indo-Canadian’s negotiate videos created by two highly popular Indo-Canadian YouTube stars called JusReign and iiSuperWomanii. As of June 2016, JusReign possesses a subscriber base of over 700,000 subscribers and iiSuperWomanii possesses a subscriber a base of over 9,000,000 subscribers. A common “theme” in their videos is to publicly showcase how they struggle with maintaining a transnational identity (i.e. Indo-Canadian) while living in Canada. As such, the videos constructed by the two aforementioned YouTubers are very much located in their relative Third Spaces (a theory by Homi Bhabha). Arguably, this showcase of their relative Third Spaces is why the aforementioned YouTubers have achieved such immense popularity amongst the Indian diaspora in Canada and across the globe. To gain a deeper understanding of how young Indo-Canadian’s negotiate this publicized struggle of being an Indo-Canadian; this study will conduct two focus group sessions, four one-on-one interview sessions, and a textual analysis. The two focus group sessions, divided based on gender, will be conducted on a total of eight Indo-Canadian participants (four males and four females) between the ages of 17 to 24. In addition, amongst the eight focus group participants, four will be used to further conduct in-depth interviews with. Finally, a textual analysis of select YouTube videos (constructed by the aforementioned YouTubers) will be used for contextual purposes in this upcoming paper.