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Abstract
The travel industry and mainstream media often produce neocolonial narratives about global cultures that center the nations and people affiliated with them as exotic and even dangerous others. Today’s Black social media influencers and consumers are actively asserting Black travel perspectives in the digital realm, creating arresting imagery that flout neocolonialist discourse and challenges racial assumptions about certain spaces and people. This article examines how two popular Black travel influencers, Jessica Nabongo and Oneika Raymond, use the social networking site Instagram to challenge erroneous place myths (Shields) about Black travel sites. These influencers expose how racial politics inform the travel industry’s continued marginalization of Black spaces and people. The article ultimately argues that these Black travel activists use their Instagram content, chiefly photographs, to combat what I call the ‘white travel imaginary’, facilitate the survival of Black representation in the travel-sphere, and expose how racist erasure is contested in online spaces.