“Beyond BAME, WOC, and ‘political blackness’”: diasporic digital communing practices

Abstract

What forms of opacity and excess propel Black and South Asian digital diasporic feminist cultures of commoning and communing? This article explores digital expressions of retreat, refusal, remixing, and reclamation which are central to diasporic feminist practices. We analyze three illustrative digital practices via two vignettes: (1) Quote tweets and digital anonymity as expressions of subaltern excess; (2) diasporic meme culture as a callout praxis of refusal; and (3) digital opacity as feminist retreat and reclamation of time, interiority, and intimacy. Throughout our analysis we incorporate reflections on the contours of “diasporic feminist excess” and the parameters of public, private, and personal spaces. Overall, by extending the vocabularies of feminist commoning to include certain digital diasporic feminist practices, we conceptualize the fluid and fraught ways that contrapublic discourses move in, between, and beyond, digital publics.