Blackfishing on Instagram: Influencing and the Commodification of Black Urban Aesthetics

Abstract

This article examines blackfishing, a practice in which cultural and economic agents appropriate Black culture and urban aesthetics in an effort to capitalize on Black markets. Specifically, this study analyzes the Instagram accounts of four influencers (Instagram models) who were accused of blackfishing in late 2018 and is supplemented with a critical analysis of 27 news and popular press articles which comprise the media discourse surrounding the controversy. Situated within the literature on cultural appropriation and urban redevelopment policies, this study explores how Black identity is mined for its cultural and economic value in the context of digital labor. I assert that Instagram’s unique platform affordances (including its racial affordances) and the neoliberal logics which undergird cultural notions of labor facilitate the mechanisms by which Black identity is rendered a lucrative commodity vis-à-vis influencing.

“It’s All About the Look”: Making Sense of Appearance, Attractiveness, and Authenticity Online

“…Indeed, highly stylized images or “glamor shots” emphasizing influencers’ beauty and femininity tend to collect a significant number of likes and comments online (Baker & Walsh, 2018, p. 4562). Shots of the body and shots emphasizing women’s fitness are also known to generate a great deal of engagement among Instagram users (Baker & Walsh, 2018; Stevens, 2021).…”

Commodification of the Urban Community Image: An Instagram Case Study of Motivational Quotes and Skyscraper Photo

“…Creating a New Urban Identity Aside from hustling culture, there has also been studies into the image construction of metropolitan areas. According to Stevens (2021), US Instagram influencers use black identity and culture as commodities to gain cultural and economic capital through attractive urban settings. According to Eldik et al (2019), social media plays a role in migrant urban identity negotiations.…”

Curating new ethnicities in a digital era: Women and media work in the British South Asian diaspora

“…Pushing back against techno-utopian accounts of female empowerment in a digital economy, Brooke Erin Duffy and Emily Hund (2015: 2) theorize how postfeminist norms about ‘individual choice, independence, and modes of self-expression rooted in the consumer marketplace’ limit the kinds of content that women can produce and, on the whole, ‘obscure the labor, discipline, and capital’ necessary to succeed in this digital media market. Any analysis of the work that racial and ethnic minorities perform in digital spaces must, therefore, account for how spaces, bodies, and identities get differentially valued in economic, representational, and affective terms (Abidin, 2016; Sobande, 2020; Stevens, 2021). As we will see, in the case of British South Asian women, the home and the body emerge as fraught terrains on which these processes are worked out.…”

“…Beyond the organizational structures and production cultures of the media and cultural industries, new logics of datafication and algorithmic curation have exacerbated inequalities in cultural production even as digital platforms make claims to neutrality and notions of a post-racial society (Benjamin, 2019; Sobande, 2020). Furthermore, these technocultural logics (Brock, 2020) rest on an aestheticization and appropriation of racial and ethnic identities without grappling with their historical and political specificities (Stevens, 2021).…”