“We Bring Home the Roots”: Black Women Travel Influencers, Digital Culture Bearing, and African Internationalism in Instagram

Abstract

This study examines how travel influencers Jessica Nabongo and Oneika Raymond use Instagram in a process I call “digital culture bearing,” employing the platform to nurture wisdom about Africa. They combine images, captions, hashtags, and geotags to share information about nations within the African continent with principally Black populations. Employing critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) to interpret how race, gender, global travel, and cultural knowledge promotion intersect within Instagram, the study analyzes the platform and practices of digital culture bearing, theorizing new ways of understanding how Black women situate themselves in Africa for their online networks. Ultimately, the study offers considerations of what it means to be a culture bearer in the twenty-first century digi-sphere and articulates new conceptualizations of Black internationalism within social networking sites.

“We Out Here”: Black Women, Well-Being, and #blackgirlsrun on Instagram

“…Even still, Black women founded and maintained in-person and digital communities (e.g., hashtags, Facebook groups, Instagram pages) to challenge their erasure within long-distance running and simultaneously invite other Black women to participate in the sport. This follows a larger trend where people of African descent afford social media, such as Instagram, to construct new self-definitions that reject stereotypical depictions of Black life, which mainstream media outlets often perpetuate (Arthur, 2022; Childs, 2022; Moody-Ramirez et al, 2024).…”