Consuming Culture As An Internet Lightweight

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Njari Anderson is a writer and Are.na user, whose work looks to define everyday Black culture. Below, his piece “On Culture” presents a case for culture on a personal, micro-level while exploring morally-complex facets of Black, Caribbean life in digital and physical spaces. From church chairs, to inches, to gunshots, Anderson breaks down the pinnacle “blocks” you can find in his Are.na channel, Culture.

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The channel “Culture” is a space I’ve cultivated over the past few years in an attempt to conceptualize a home for myself. Culture by definition is contingent on its belonging to more than one person. Yet for me, I was trying to localize what culture means on an individual level. I avoid the word intersection when diagnosing my cultural identities because I lie in the in-between. I sit at the in-betweens of Jamaican-immigrant and Black-American culture. I ebb and flow along the spectrum of these two vibrant and distinct identities and along this expansive spectrum is where I search for my version of culture. This channel consists of nostalgia, aesthetics, sweat, funk, sex, smut, scum, fucking, loving, dancing, dubbing, rubbing, bumping, grinding, shooting, dreaming, living, and dying — in effect — culture.