Black Camera

Abstract:

This article and its accompanying photo gallery explore #BlackLivesMatter as a civil rights movement that traverses the disunities between older forms of news media (such as television and periodicals) and social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. The movement's prominent use of digitized social media technologies augurs both prospect and peril for #BlackLivesMatter through, respectively, the promise of global reach and rapid dissemination, and the technologies' embeddedness within structural anti-blackness. Following, I argue that various forms of social media and the disruptive tactics of #BlackLivesMatter actually reiterate important aspects of the divide between Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism. That is, if global digital interconnection fosters greater awareness of the foreclosure of black life, it also provides a powerful platform for the dissemination of antithetical movements. While social media may offer a productive space for an undercommons—that is, a relatively untethered place for black social life—are not these same media merely scaffolding in the very anti-black structures that commodify the black body while simultaneously condemning it to social death? This essay and gallery show that, at present, to think carefully about #BlackLivesMatter is to unpack both the changing mediascape and crucial theoretical debates about black ontology.