Emma-Lee Amponsah

Based on collaborative research and reflections on media depictions, marketplace experiences, and Black life in Belgium and Britain, this article embraces Black joy, while critiquing societal demands and (re)presentations of it. Informed by scholarship on racialised emotions, Black interiority, andBlack emotional epistemologies, we analyse how the idea of “Black joy” has been (re)presented in media in ways connected to racialised, classed, and national discourses of “we-ness” during the coronavirus (Covid-19) crisis. By analysing public (re)presentations of Black people, we critically consider how“Black joy” becomes “Black JoyTM” – a defanged expression, enabling brandadvertising by tapping into the racial and capitalist politics of marketable and mediated Black emotions and intimacy. We ask, “when, how, and why are the everyday emotions and experiences of Black people (re)presented by contemporary marketplace institutions as joyful?”. Consequently, we theorise the relationship between Black joy, crises, and forms of Belgian and British advertising and media.

This article presents a conceptualization and exploration of 'Black dis/engagement', which refers to Black people's 'non-presence' in mainstream media and involves a simultaneous engagement with grassroots community media that divert-to various degrees-from the norms of white respectability. Based on 20 in-depth interviews with media practitioners (journalists, writers, digital media producers, and activists) of Black African descent in Belgium, this study challenges popular media diversity discourses that equate mainstream media visibility and engagement with social progress and disengagement with quite the opposite: an alarming loss. Drawing on Black ontology and feminist epistemologies of refusal rooted in histories of marronage and Black fugitivity, the study sheds light on how Black people create, write, and engage outside the mainstream, and examines the possibilities and limitations that Black individuals can encounter along the way. The study reveals that while some Black critical voices have found platforms within mainstream media, there is increasing skepticism and questioning among Black individuals and communities toward mainstream media infrastructures and cultures. Centering Black people's agency and decentering the demands of dominant media cultures, the article sheds light on the diverse ways in which Black people have withdrawn from mainstream media, established digital community spaces, and engaged in various forms of community activities. Recognizing the fluid and contextual nature of Black dis/engagement, the author underscores the importance of valuing and understanding the diverse strategies employed by Black individuals and communities to navigate and resist oppressive media systems.

The article explores how Black people in Belgium have sought meaningful engagement with their history, culture, and identity to create a shared cultural memory, and vice versa: how Black people’s engagement with a shared cultural memory has formed a collective, Afro-diasporic identity and culture. To illustrate how Black identities take shape beyond personal histories, cultures, and memories, I conceptualize a memory framework called Black Cultural Memory (BCM), giving insight into Black people’s interconnected identity constructing/maintaining embodied culture, and shed light on how social media, memory and Black people’s lives interact by discussing how cultural memory is shaped, sharpened and inquired through Black people’s contemporary digital engagement. Examining the memory practices and discoursers of Belgian Renaissance, New Awoken African Generation, and #BLMbelgium, I illustrate how digital platforms helped these initiatives to shape and distribute notions of collective blackness, which ultimately connects them to a global Afro-diaspora culture.

This article focuses on Black women in and beyond Belgian mainstream media. It discusses media practices and interventions by Black women in Belgium and examines the discourses that Black women use when engaging with the topics of coloniality, racism, and blackness. Drawing from semi-structured interviews (N = 20) with Black women in Belgium, this article provides insight into who speaks, what is spoken about, and who is spoken to in Black
women’s media discourses. In doing so, three frames of engagement are distinguished: opinion-making, dissidence, and marronage. Data shows that Black women are positioned and framed in public debate by media institutions to perform a proximity to radical Black activism. Additionally, Black women’s anti-racist discourses and strategies diverge in ways that creates tensions in the way they reflect on their (sense of) agency in regard to media institutions. Moreover, Belgium’s colonial legacy influences the media landscape
and public engagement in the French- and Dutch-speaking regions of Belgium in different ways. Where Dutch-speaking Belgium positions itself as progressive by including Black “radical” voices, French-speaking Belgium averts critical Black voices in mainstream media and public debate which, in turn, leads to innovative, radical, grass-roots mobilizations among Black women in and beyond digital media.