Black Networked Resistance: Strategic Rearticulations in the Digital Age

Black Networked Resistance​ explores the creative range of Black digital users and their responses to varying forms of oppression, utilizing cultural, communicative, political, and technological threads both on and offline. Raven Maragh-Lloyd demonstrates how Black users strategically rearticulate their responses to oppression in ways that highlight Black publics’ historically rich traditions and reveal the shifting nature of both dominance and resistance, particularly in the digital age. Through case studies and interviews, Maragh-Lloyd reveals the malleable ways resistance can take shape and the ways Black users artfully demonstrate such modifications of resistance through strategies of survival, reprieve, and community online. Each chapter grounds itself in a resistance strategy, such as Black humor, care, or archiving, to show the ways that Black publics reshape strategies of resistance over time and across media platforms. Linking singular digital resistance movements while arguing for Black publics as strategic content creators who connect resistance strategies from our past to suit our present needs, Black Networked Resistance encourages readers to create and cultivate lasting communities necessary for social and political change by imagining a future of joy, community, and agency through their digital media practices.

Raven Maragh-Lloyd is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her work has appeared in Communication, Culture & Critique;Television & New Media;and Journal of Communication Inquiry; and in edited collections such as Studying Race and Media and The Handbook of Diasporas, Media, and Culture.