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Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures

Andr Brock Jr.

Andr Brock Jr.

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

www.nyupress.org

2020 by New York University

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). To view a copy of the license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0.

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Brock, Andr L., Jr., author.

Title: Distributed blackness : African American cybercultures / Andr Brock, Jr.

Description: New York : New York University Press, [2019] | Series: Critical cultural communication | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019012037 | ISBN 9781479820375 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479829965 (paperback ; alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: African AmericansCommunication. | African Americans and mass media. | African AmericansIntellectual life21st century. | InternetSocial aspectsUnited States. | Online social networksUnited States.

Classification: LCC P94.5.A37 .B76 2019 | DDC 302.23089/96073dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019012037

To my grandmother, Mrs. Florence Elaine Paris Scott Brock, House Hollis, First of Her Name

I finally finished it, Grandma

Race can be ontological without being biological, metaphysical without being physical, existential without being essential, shaping ones being without being ones shape.

Charles Mills (1998, p. xiv)

The Black body has long been a featureand shibbolethof articulations and theorizations of Black culture. But online identity has long been conflated with whiteness, even as whiteness is itself signified as a universal, raceless, technocultural identity. By this I mean that whiteness is what technology does to the Other, not the technology users themselves. The visibility of online Blackness can be partially attributed to the concentration of Black folk in online spaces that are not exclusively our own; we are finally present online in ways that the mainstream is unable to disavow. Imagine, if you will, millions of Black people interacting through networked deviceslaptops, computers, smartphonesat once separate and conjoined. This online aggregation and coherence of Blackness online, absent Black bodies, is what inspired this book.

I titled this book Distributed Blackness to evoke how Blackness has expertly utilized the internetworks capacity for discourse to build out a social, cultural, racial identity. Black online culture and sociality are more easily visualized today thanks not only to the hashtag and other algorithmic means but also to the near infrastructural use of social networking services as well as older online artifacts, such as messaging services, blogs, and bulletin boards, where one could see articulations of Black identity across digital networks. My subtitle, African American Cybercultures, speaks to this texts theoretical and rhetorical thinking about how and why Blackness and Black culture are easily and pungently performed, absent embodiment, when mediated by technologiesspecifically information technologies, the online, and the digital.

Distributed Blackness is also a reference to the methodology used throughout this text: critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA). I devised CTDA as a corrective to normative and analytic research on cultural digital practice. It decenters the Western deficit perspective on minority technology use to instead prioritize the epistemological standpoint of underrepresented groups of technology users. CTDA pulls together multiple disparate data points to conduct a holistic analysis of an information technology artifact and its practices.