Banca de DEFESA: LAERCIO DA CRUZ PEREIRA

Cultural appropriation and blackfishing: 

agency in an afrocentric perspective from ethnography in Facebook communities

Keywords: Cultural appropriation, Blackfishing, Afrocentricity, Racism, Decoloniality

This study departs from an ethnographic character with the objective of investigating and understanding the relationship between cultural appropriation, blackfishing and the Afrocentric agency based on the analysis of social media in two Facebook communities, seeking to understand how digital spaces are linked to ramifications of appropriation, how much technology can contribute to reinforcing and enhancing forms of racism that are already known, as well as the quality of the Afrocentric agency within this digital scenario. For that, we looked for the relevance of blackfishing from the data provided by Google Trends and, later, we entered two Facebook groups, where we can develop in the field work the collection of publications involving cultural appropriation and blackfishing and also the conduction of interviews with members from a focus group of eight people. The bibliography used to support this study sought in an interdisciplinary way to contribute from the paradigm of Afrocentricity with other areas related to technology and ethnic-racial relations in the digital field, as well as directing our gaze to users who use social media for the construction of racialized spaces. As a result, we can reflect that the investigated black communities understand blackfishing as an offshoot of cultural appropriation and that it is already widely known by Afro-Brazilians, even though the knowledge of the practice has been spread from a North American word. We conclude that, in terms of Afrocentric agency, we can notice a process of disagency of black people also in online spaces, from the State and the traditional media, in what we identify as a weak agency quality, and that the more traditional media vehicles little focus on the production of Afro-Brazilian knowledge on these themes that already exist in depth in Brazilian society.