Circumventing Virality: The Illegible Sensibilities of Vernacular Black Digital Culture

Contemporary discourses around digital anti-Blackness, especially the use of Blackness as an object of viral material, have raised questions on how Black digital cultural productions can avert ongoing exploitation. This paper asks, can the expansiveness of Black digital culture, particularly as it exists within vernacular and less visible spaces, circumvent the dominant hand that seeks to exploit and commodify? First, I examine the unique use of Blackness as a sentimental resource online that, when made digitally viral, becomes a commodified spectacle. Next, I move to engage Black cultural production that exists in the more marginal, quotidian, and non-viral spaces and propose the notion of a vernacular Black digital culture. This is exemplified through an Instagram case study of @brownstonearchives, a digitality that engages creative innovation, intimate space making, and selective (il)legibility to counter the exploitive spectacularization of Blackness.