What is the Scholarly Context and Impact?

The project ties in with a current trend in Afroeuropean studies that critically discusses notions of (contingent) belonging. It also pays tribute to the fact that a rising movement of Black activism is forming in European societies and that scholarship as well as a theoretical debate on Afrodiasporic communities keep surfacing in these countries (e.g., Abé Pans 2019; Angone 2018; Ekoka 2019; Gerehou 2021; Miano 2020; Maïga/Beausson-Diagne 2018; Mwasi 2018).

This (slowly) increasing visibility of these communities through scholarship, activism and writing is tightly linked to and fostered by the proliferating digital presence of these groups (Hassane 2010). This is why these fields and their intersections urgently need to be studied in detail for the first time. Through this new research seminal insights can be gained into how cyberspace offers a digital counter-public for marginalized groups to actively and self-determinedly participate in knowledge production.

My pioneering project thus explores how individuals and collectives in Europe who identify as African or Afrodescendant use digital platforms to gain agency, establish digital alternative public spheres, and also navigate the racial hierarchies produced online (e.g., the case of D. Bela-Lobedde who temporarily shut down her YouTube channel due to harshly racist user comments). It investigates how articulating alternative, potentially subversive discourses of Afrodiasporic identities and narratives contribute to resisting Eurocentric assumptions and to generating a sense of belonging(s). Using Afrodiasporic communities as an example to explore digital agency and digital diaspora formations, it will provide answers to how agency can be reasserted by challenging Eurocentric perspectives on Blackness and Afrodescendance and subverting or fighting institutionalized marginalization on a material or symbolic level. It also provides us with crucial knowledge about how diversity is negotiated in European mainstream societies and within marginalized communities.