Introduction: Thinking of a Black Digital Ethos

Abstract

This special issue offers a series of cross-disciplinary perspectives from a network of Black scholars in sociology, technology, media studies and humanities living through economic, political, social, and technological paradigm shifts that prompt us to revisit Stuart Hall’s question, “What is this Black in Black popular culture?” in the context of Black Digital Culture. We take up the challenge to center Black technocultural production on social media platforms through an intersectional lens. Using critical approaches including Black Feminist Thought (as articulated by Patricia Hill Collins, Sylvia Wynter, bell hooks, and Kimberlé Crenshaw among others), Black Cyberfeminism (Kishonna Gray, Catherine Knight Steele, and Tressie McMillan Cottom), and Andre Brock’s Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis, we investigate how race, gender, and digital media technologies have informed and influenced Black digital culture.

In his 1993 essay, “What is this Black in Black popular culture?” Stuart Hall challenged intellectuals to consider the conditions that contributed to a growing international fascination with public expressions of Black American culture. Citing Cornel West, Hall traced the temporal focus on Black popular culture to the displacement of Eurocentric models of culture, the political and intellectual decolonization of nation-states, and the United States’ economic influence as a global superpower. The confluence of these factors brought international attention to Black culture through mass-media production and distribution of iterations of our language, style, and intertextual expressions of self. Hall’s arguments are readily mapped onto the commercial viability of the early 90s-era Web as it connected people around the globe. Notably, Black internet users were often ignored and isolated in early cyberculture scholarship; our online engagement mischaracterized and overlooked as a casualty of the so-called “digital divide.”

Thirty years later, this special issue offers a series of cross-disciplinary perspectives from a network of Black scholars in sociology, technology, media studies and humanities living through economic, political, social and technological paradigm shifts that prompt us to revisit Hall’s question in the context of Black Digital Culture. We take up the challenge to center Black technocultural production on social media platforms through an intersectional lens. Using critical approaches including Black Feminist Thought (as articulated by Patricia Hill Collins, Sylvia Wynter, bell hooks, and Kimberlé Crenshaw among others), Black Cyberfeminism (Kishonna Gray, Catherine Knight Steele, and Tressie McMillan Cottom), and Andre Brock’s Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis, we investigate how race, gender, and digital media technologies have informed and influenced Black digital culture. This volume is the initial culmination of a project that began with a challenge: Our initial aim, as Blackademics, was to collaborate with intellectuals outside of academia to historicize and theorize our shared history in digital spaces via a series of essays and online conversations. In light of the ongoing global pandemic, we opted for posterity, choosing to publish our collective works in this special issue rather than wresting the conversations into the digital ephemera of yet another online meeting.

Zari Taylor weaves an analysis of Black humor in Twitter’s spaces, drawing on early analysis from Black digital culture scholarship to examine how laughter is fashioned as a complementary technology to the platforms affordances that enables Black Twitter's users to #TweetLikeThe1600s, broadcasting an intertwined sense of history and humor in ways that were previously limited to those who stopped to listen at the stoop or were fortunate enough to sit at the Black kids’ table. In visual media, Regina Duthely analyzes self-presentations of the fat Black female body in fashion via Instagram, chronicling the ways Black women and femmes have flourished via “networked vanity,” to borrow an analytical phrase from Minh-ha Pham. Similarly, Kiara Childs theorizes the political economy of the Fenty Effect in her analysis of Black beauty culture as performed on Instagram and other image-centric platforms. But the idea and importance of seeing oneself is placed into context by Tara Conley , harkening back to one of the early uses of digitized visual media in her essay “Are you Indmix?” a re-telling of how digital photo bulletin boards offered club-goers the ability to see and be seen in the early years of the new millennium. With Christopher Persaud acting as interlocutor, Ashon Crawley discusses the importance of Black joy and how digital and social media allows for interdisciplinary, intertextual creation and conversation that threaten oppressive structures from academia to the Black church.

Sound adds dimension to image in two essays on hip-hop. The first, by Reginold Royston , traces the influence of Afrobeats music, and with it, dance, from Ghana and Nigeria to the Black-beating hearts of U.S. cities including Houston, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Discussing the concept of “soulcraft,” Royston examines Black diasporic perspectives and technology use embrace our distinctive “social shaping of the world.” In a second historicization of digital platforms, Antoine Hardy situates the idea of “home” for the restless Black web traveler, detailing the social construction of OkayPlayer as a site for commonality, community, and hip-hop critique.

And in works on the spoken word, Ariel Smith explores the complexity of Black aurality through an autoethnographic retelling of moving out of shame and into love by listening to her own Black-belt-influenced diction through podcasting, all while telling the stories of Black migration, nourishment, and entrepreneurship via food trucks. A.D. Carson ,“the hip-hop professor” whose dissertation and peer-reviewed album testify to Hall's observation that Black music is a primary form of our cultural expression, again defies the convention of logos-centric scholarship through his contribution of a track, “Mourning Mix,” committing to the power of Black orality in rap.

This volume is an attempt to follow in the footsteps of our ancestors whose lives and works testify of the dynamism that is the Black experience; one in which we focus on the impacts of digital and social media technologies at the turn of the millennium and moving forward into the adolescent and young-adulthood eras of its first century. Honoring lessons from our past, we aim to present a more inclusive volume narrated by the voices of Black women and Black queer folks; one that crosses class lines with the inclusion of perspectives of Black feminist intellectuals, and is shaped by a vision to create opportunities for emerging scholars who may—as so many of us did—encounter resistance from academic standard-bearers who attempt to ghettoize the emergent canon of Black digital cultural studies. Together, our aim is to extend critical inquiry into the sites, sounds, and symbols that have defined an emergent era of living and creating Black digital culture, and to create pathways for continuing this work in social media spaces.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material – Supplemental material for A.D. Carson Mourning Mix

Supplemental material, sj-wav-1-sms-10.1177_20563051221117568 for A.D. Carson Mourning Mix in Social Media + Society