Zooming while black: creating a black aesthetic and counter hegemonic discourse in a digital age

In this essay, two members of the Global African diaspora finding themselves locked down in South-East Australia reflect on their experience as the pandemic raged. There were times they felt trapped in a surreal, oddly written dystopian novel when using online video and image-based communication platforms. The exploration and conflict within media platforms in the year 2020 changed their understanding of critical media literacy education at a time when every school student in their province interfaced with their teacher via Zoom. Video-/image-based communication platforms can magnify that, which is political, and for Global Africans, these platforms showed how much they were not reflected; how much social media did not mirror their experience. Rather, it amplified the colonizer’s gaze, thus creating an old and familiar dynamic of performance for survival. This chapter is a response to the electronic erasure of their experience using a poetic critical inquiry that explores the misrepresentation and distortion of Black humanity. Critical race theory is used as an analytical lens for their poetic counternarratives. This essay points out the meaning of education, a key tool for disseminating the White Western imaginary, replete with its colonial legacy, and the universalizing influence of media in education.