Seeing is Believing?: Interrogating Visuality as the Language of Resistance and the Digital Circulation of Black Death

• In Event: Black Death: Past & Present

Abstract

Digital infrastructures bombard many of us with images and videos of black men and women dying by police violence, especially those of us who work in many myriad ways towards racial and social justice. We are encouraged by the structuring of our social networks to like, retweet, and share these scenes of violence on black bodies as a means to raise awareness and expose the truth of racialized police brutality. The logic of the visual as truthful undergirds arguments that call for body cameras as protection against police malpractice and for the public release of videos of police shootings. move towards public visibility that offers up the visual capture of our own bodies and the bodies of others, especially black bodies, for consumption and surveillance in exchange for protection. However, video as legal evidence has not yet brought about a satisfactory rate of conviction of police officers. In the circulation of these artifacts we come across complicated questions of subjectivity, ownership of images, and black death as spectacle. In light of that we must also take a step back from the eager move to spread these videos to ask what we might be losing in focusing on visuality as the prime language of resistance.
In my paper, I explore the ways that visuality falls short of its implicit promise of recognition and instead perpetuates existing oppressions including the commodification/dehumanization of black bodies. I attempt to uncover how the well-meaning circulation of these videos perpetuates violences and obscures certain voices and certain modes of communication, for instance practices of storytelling and oral and written testimony. I examine as well the ‘virality’ or successful spread of certain police shooting videos and what visual elements made these videos go viral focusing on the ‘onscreen’ deaths of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Walter Scott, and Eric Garner in terms of. I also how study these videos came to be visually representative of the larger issue of police killings of black men and women and in what ways the subjecthood of the persons may be denied by these digital transactions. I consider how the sharing of these videos works as identity-affirming or community-forming practices and the implications of activism based on or fueled by the affective impact of these images.
Much work has been done by digital studies scholars on the potentials of activism and connection in digital spaces, and the ways that digital spaces affect physical spaces of protest. Visual culture studies has produced significant work on images of violence on racialized bodies. With this paper, I work in the fertile spaces between these two fields through a critical examination of this popular mode of dissent in order to contribute to expanding the discussion of digital practices of resistance in new directions.

Author

• Megan Rim, University of Miami