"A Love Letter to Myself": A Transformative Conversation with Serena Lee

As a child, Lee was inspired by this 1784 portrait of Queen Charlotte, who is rumored of being of African descent, and now she uses it as the profile picture for @georgian_diaspora.

It was an absolute pleasure to chat with Serena Lee. Lee is the founder of the @georgian_diaspora, an Instagram account that shares archival images of people of African descent from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What's the origin of the name? Lee's favorite historical period is the Georgian era. In fact, she is most animated by the histories of black Britons from this period, like Dido Elizabeth Belle, Olaudah Equiano, and Queen Charlotte (pictured above). Although the British Isles are often imagined as white, Lee's curation on the @georgian_diaspora reminds its followers that Great Britain has been a multicultural space since the eighteenth century (and further). After writing a thesis on resistance and black female body, Lee starved for affirming images of black people. She describes the @georgian_diaspora as "a love letter to myself." As a black British woman of Jamaican descent, she wants to "shake up the algorithm" and change the way black people have been historically represented.