Through a raucous tour of Instagram’s fisherwomen, The Instagram Archipelago proposes a radical new ethics of gender and race.
Through a raucous tour of Instagram’s fisherwomen, The Instagram Archipelago proposes a radical new ethics of gender and race.
Black studies (global), Criticism, Feminist
Set on Idan Hayosh’s peculiar Instagram page of women holding dead fish, The Instagram Archipelago is a conversation with contemporary culture’s logics of gender and race. Working through recent thinking in Black studies and Hayosh’s satirical images, Elliot C. Mason presents the aesthetics of capitalism as a sea that makes everything the same, turning the world into a single form.
The Instagram Archipelago brings radical antiracist and feminist scholarship to a general audience, applying a model of thinking beyond gender and race to the strange world of online fishing photos. This funny and fascinating book moves past the liberal celebration of gender and race, towards a tiny island of resistance in a growing archipelago.
Click on the circles below to see more reviews
By way of a personal response to Idan Hayosh’s deeply weird images, Elliot C. Mason has conjured a bracingly witty, original and lyrical meditation on architecture, fishing, bikinis and the possibility of escape from the ‘eclipsing wetness’ of our homogenizing neoliberal culture. ~ Josh Cohen
Elliot C. Mason is a force of nature. Dissolving the boundaries of genre, he provides a roadmap to the writing of the future. The Instagram Archipelago is witty, trenchant, and very very relevant. ~ Frances Wilson
Timely, insightful, moving, funny, and rigorous in its self-scrutiny. [Mason has written] a persuasive, and admirable, study of the white male gaze and the world it’s helped bring about. ~ Matt Greene, author of Jew(ish) and Ostrich.
