An African City

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

Bibliographic Data

ID12918162
AuthorsF Sobande (0000-0002-4788-4099, Cardiff University, corresponding author), Krys Osei (Goldsmiths University of London)
Year2020
Volume13
Issue2
Pages204-221
Publication date2020-04-06
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCommunication Culture and Critique (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1753-9137 • E-ISSN: 1753-9129
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/ccc/tcaa016
OpenAlexW3040804391
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited40

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 is 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, by examining the Ghana-based web series An African City. Our work echoes 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 United States, Ghana, and Nigeria) as active producers in their communities; 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

Aesthetics · Art · Capitalism · Creativity · Framing (construction · Hegemony · Pleasure · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Media Studies and Communication · Media, Gender, and Advertising · Psychology · Gender Studies · History · Social Psychology