An African City: Black Women's Creativity, Pleasure, Diasporic (Dis)Connections and Resistance Through Aesthetic and Media Practices and Scholarship

Abstract

How do Black women engulf themselves in the politics of being and becoming through everyday existence, aesthetics and media practices in creative, pleasurable, diasporic and resistant ways? How are global power relations including the hegemony of North America, Eurocentrism, anti-Blackness and sexism implicated in this? We consider such questions in relation to Black women’s media and aesthetic practices, and their related scholarship through an examination of the Ghana-based web series An African City. In doing so, we echo calls for the decentering of media and communication studies rooted in white and Western perspectives but positioned as “universal.” We explore Black women’s experiences (in Britain, the U.S., Ghana and Nigeria) as active producers in their communities in different continents; beyond the dominant epistemological hierarchy of whiteness in contrast with Blackness. Framing visual communication as a community-based source of self-expression, we emphasize the liberatory possibilities of aesthetics (fashion and screen depictions) for Black women, while tarrying with how capitalism constrains such radical potential.