"What Now?": The Wailing Black Woman, Grief, and Difference

• In Event: The Interventional Possibilities of Difference: Thinking Through Communication, Difference, and Identity

Abstract

In a 2012 song Rihanna belts out, “And I just wanna scream, What Now? I just can't figure it out.” She announces the oncoming scream that expresses frustration and anguish; lamenting pricarity. Many black women similarly scream in this “post” moment and throughout history as they navigate a precarious relationship with the US state and society. I pursue the anguish-filled question of ‘what now’ by analyzing black women’s public grief in representations of the ‘wailing black woman’ figure in crime TV and in the representational trajectory of black mothers mourning publically to bring attention to injustices. Answering Herman Gray’s call to consider the work of “gatherings of sentiment, feelings, and intensities around media images and coverage of people of color,” I ask: 1) How does the deployment of wailing black women relate to hegemonic narratives of black death, criminality, and citizenship? 2) What are potential interventions of her affective labor?

Author

• Manoucheka Celeste, University of Florida