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–Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes
"You will be galvanized by Legacy Russell’s analytic brilliance and visceral eloquence."
–Margo Jefferson, author of Constructing a Nervous System
A history of Black imagery that recasts our understanding of visual culture and technology
In Black Meme, Legacy Russell, award-winning author of the groundbreaking Glitch Feminism, explores the “meme” as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to the present, mining both archival and contemporary media.
Russell argues that without the contributions of Black people, digital culture would not exist in its current form. These meditations include the circulation of lynching postcards; why a mother allowed Jet magazine to publish a picture of her dead son, Emmett Till; and how the televised broadcast of protesters in Selma changed the debate on civil rights.
Questions of the media representation of Blackness come to the fore as Russell considers how a citizen-recorded footage of the LAPD beating Rodney King became the first viral video. And the Anita Hill hearings shed light on the media’s creation of the Black icon. The ownership of Black imagery and death is considered in the story of Tamara Lanier’s fight to reclaim the daguerreotypes of her enslaved ancestors from Harvard. Meanwhile the live broadcast on Facebook of the murder of Philando Castile by the police after he was stopped for a broken taillight forces us to bear witness to the persistent legacy of the Black meme.
Through imagery, memory and technology Black Meme shows us how images of Blackness have always been central to our understanding of the modern world.
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Creators
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Awards
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Release date
May 7, 2024 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781839762833
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781839762833
- File size: 5712 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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February 19, 2024
Black culture has played a pivotal role in shaping notions of digital virality, according to this innovative analysis from curator Russell (Glitch Feminism). Tracing “Blackness itself as a viral agent” transmitted through “mediation, copying, and carrying,” from 19th-century lynching postcards to today, Russell examines how Black imagery has been used to perpetuate racism and racist violence. (Even seemingly innocent internet artifacts are objects of appropriation, according to Russell, who describes a widely shared dancing baby GIF from the 1990s as an “imaginary projection of a Black child who dances for the viewer on loop, in endless labor.”) In addition to constructing a persuasive case that digital culture steals from Black culture even as it looks down on Black people, Russell takes care to highlight positive media depictions of Blackness, such as Michael Jackson’s 1983 Thriller music video, in which “zombies, in a constant state of transmission, transformation, transmutation, and becoming, are the embodiment of the Black meme—reanimated, empowered, collectivized.” This is sure to stir debate. Photos.
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