The Land of Wakanda and Konoha: Imagining Indonesia Nationalism on Social Media

Paper Abstract: This paper aims to explore the way social media users articulate their criticism to Indonesian government's policies through the use of metaphors Wakanda and Konoha. Both Wakanda and Konoha are the fictional names of a land/village in the Hollywood's movie Black Panther and Japan's anime Naruto. Expressing concerms regarding issues related to public interests especially the controversy ones are considered as part of what Eriksen (2007) defined as everyday nationalism. A multimodal discourse analysis is selected as the method to analyse posts and comments on Twitter and Instagram. This study reveals that the terms were used to refer to Indonesia as a bad country: unjust, abuse of power and corrupt. This negative stigma was expressed by social media users through both verbal messages and visual images. It is developed through daily life praxis (Skey, 2009). Daily life nationalism such as imagining the self as mentioned by people about their nation and the world from the users' daily experiences. In this sense, nationalism is discursively narrated and reproduced by social media users in their daily life through the use of the terms. Thus, banal or everyday nationalism uncovers the unconscious, implicit and unnoticed nationalism.