Fugitive Acts: Black Image-Making, Imagination, and the Enclosure of Antiblackness

• In Event: Visions of Freedom: Schooling and the Experiences of Black Youth

Abstract

Pushing beyond the canonicity that has defined meaning-making for Black life, I explore Black image-making “as refusals to accede to the optics, the disciplines, and the deathly demands” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 115) of anti-Blackness that struggle to make them invisible. To accomplish this, I employ Campt’s (2017) archival methodology to conduct an analysis of two recurring images in the narrative of Black people in the United States in and beyond educational contexts, 1) the Black power fist and 2) and two hands elevated and open, commonly, and henceforth referred to as hands up don’t shoot. A close tracing of these embodied gestures can assist in mapping the onto-epistemological work of representation for Black people as they compete with normative standards.

Author

• Wilson Kwamogi Okello, University of North Carolina - Wilmington