Spotlight: Raven Maragh-Lloyd

TreaAndrea M. Russworm:

I know some of your interests include exploring the synergy between social media and traditional media. For instance, in your work on the Jezebel stereotype, we learn that Black spectators have developed critical and cultural literacies around traditional media stereotypes that now show up in their online participation. What motivated you to explore connections like these? How do these interests converge in your book?

Figure 1.

Raven Maragh-Lloyd (Noralis Rodriguez-Coss, 2020).

Raven Maragh-Lloyd:

The study of digital media has long necessitated the consideration of traditional media platforms that intersect with online networks. I am motivated to explore the connections between social network sites and traditional media because the two have never operated in a vacuum. Even when I look back at my own early participation in what has now come to be widely known as “Black Twitter,” I think about the ways that my network engaged with reality television shows, how we “talked back” to problematic news representations of us, how we reimagined episodes of Black sitcoms like Girlfriends (UPN, 2000–2006; The CW, 2006–2008) and placed ourselves in the story lines. These traditional media forms were not necessarily more important than my own online networks, but the connection between the two allowed me and folks like me to take charge of our own representations while still engaging with media content that we knew and loved. Studying this intersection thus allows me to uncover important concepts like convergence, resistance across networks, and visibility within and outside of online media.

Russworm:

Given your research on unconventional practices of resistance that are now more evident in our engagements with digital media (such as using self-care as a tool), have you seen any practices that have emerged or resurfaced as a result of the compounding realities of anti-Black racism, protest movements like Black Lives Matter, and the COVID-19 pandemic?

Maragh-Lloyd:

Yes, absolutely. I think we’re starting to see more visibility and acceptance of care online, importantly, as part of radical resistance. For example, care can look like widespread disengagement with social media. The hashtag #BlackOutTuesday, for instance, originated from two Black women in the music industry and encouraged users to post a blacked-out screen to call attention to anti-Black racism and the toll it takes on Black people. I think this particular hashtag resonated with users and caught on so quickly on platforms like Instagram because users, and Black folks in particular, found solace in the blank screen. There’s something to be said about the inundation of information we receive online about our sisters’ and brothers’ violent killings. Care, in this case, looked like a kind of communal permission to close our eyes and rest—if even for just a moment.

Russworm:

Relatedly, perhaps, can you elaborate on some roles that humor plays in Black public and online spaces?

Maragh-Lloyd:

Humor has been used as a tool of resistance for African American publics for centuries. In many ways, Black humor relies on a carefully curated collective knowledge that allows for Black audiences to “read between the lines” as to a shared racial sociality. Mel Watkins argues that humor has both eased tensions in potentially violent interactions with white audiences while also providing a surreptitious kind of communication to develop in private for Black folks.¹ I follow this rich history of racial humor in my examinations of online communication as we see humor used to rewrite the logics of social network sites. That is, where platforms are inherently public, Black users utilize humor and collective knowledge to make this “public” communication culturally inaccessible. At the same time, racial humor can be used as an incisive critique. A recent example is the deployment of the name “Karen” to speak to the systemic privilege of whiteness, and white women in particular. Here, Black users tap into humor to call out white femininity’s long-standing collusion with the police state while also marking white women as visible (since whiteness...