Anuli Obiodu Akanegbu

ANULI AKANEGBU, then a graduate student at New York University, New York, New York, was granted funding in October 2022 to aid research on “The South Got Something to Share: How Atlanta, GA Became the New Influencer Capital of America,” supervised by Dr. Arlene Davila. Non-standard work that blurs the boundaries between the personal and the professional has long marked the Black experience in America with Black workers serving as America’s original contract workers through the practice of self-hire. This study offers an ethnographic look at the performance of self-hood within a contemporary service economy through a study of Black contract workers in Atlanta who include, but are not limited to, social media influencers, actors, artists, comedians, marketing consultants, and musicians who work in the city’s creative and cultural industries (CCIs). It examines the economic and non-economic motives that propel the career choices of these workers to better understand how intersecting markers of identity such as race, gender, class, and geography impact their ability to convert symbolic cultural and social capital into material economic capital. This project ultimately advances an Afrocentric approach to the study of labor that positions dialectics of contemporary society such as work/life, physical/virtual, and visible/invisible not as balanceable opposites within a rigid dichotomy, but rather as fluid juxtaposed dimensions that are asymmetrical by nature.