“Can you be Black and Look at This?”: Reading the Rodney King Video(s)

Alexander, Elizabeth

doi:10.1215/08992363-7-1-77

Cited by 194 publications

(54 citation statements)

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“…Critical to maintaining white supremacy and domination over Black citizens, as scholars of slavery and lynching remind us, is the "display of mastery" (Hartman 1997, 4) in representing power, a display that reproduces terror (of Black residents) and pleasure (of white supremacy). The scene of Brown's unattended dead body reestablished logics of borders configured around race and space, as did the Jim Crow era's lynchings, in which limp, hanging bodies reassured white people of their protection and signaled their surveillance of Black people (E. Alexander 1994;Carby 1985;Young 2005).…”

Section: Unruly Black Bodies and Spectacles Of State Controlmentioning

confidence: 99%

@Ferguson: Still here in the afterlives of Black death, defiance, and joy

2020

American Ethnologist

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Collaboration and genre T his issue of American Ethnologist presents one of our occasional forums, in which anthropologists address contemporary events. It departs from the journal's usual issue lineup of research articles and book reviews by focusing on one collection-a multiauthored collage of essays, photographs, and artworks, titled "@Ferguson: Still Here in the Afterlives of Black Death, Defiance, and Joy." It began as an effort to textualize the effect of a March 2019 conference convened by the American Ethnological Society, the Association of Black Anthropologists, and the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists, in St. Louis, Missouri. The conference was held five years after the killing of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson, an event that triggered a local uprising and helped bring the Black Lives Matter movement to global prominence. During the conference plenaries, St. Louis-based academics, activists, and practitioners came together to explore how structural forms of violence continue to shape Black lives and how they are working creatively to expose and transform these conditions. There are moments when a social crisis not only calls for relevant scholarship but also shows researchers the analytical work created by people living the crisis. Foregrounding the voices of outraged St. Louis residents, guest editors Shanti Parikh (Washington University in St. Louis) and Jong Bum Kwon (Webster University) organized this forum to present multiple intellectual and creative modes of engagement with racially divided St. Louis and its history. These modes include protest, artwork, community organizing, journalism, scholarly research, and emerging forms of sociality and politics. This forum is not meant as an anthropological account of multiple, positioned actors' points of view in a social field. Instead, it uses an anthropological sensibility to build outward from a placebased, contextually specific praxis in which academics, activists, and artists came together to think. Moreover, the forum takes an unusual form in that sections of the whole are not subsumed under a single explanatory, academic voice. That is why this forum is published here as a single, integrated piece, meant to be taken in as a whole. For an academic journal in anthropology like American Ethnologist, this is an experimental format. As we worked to implement our vision, we discovered that many hidden aspects of academic journal production constrained the type of content we can create.

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Section: Unruly Black Bodies and Spectacles Of State Controlmentioning

confidence: 99%

@Ferguson: Still here in the afterlives of Black death, defiance, and joy

2020

American Ethnologist

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“…While the billions of images uploaded daily to Facebook are certainly read by algorithms far more than they will ever be seen by humans, it is also true that those images are often screened by humans working for content moderation companies outsourced by Facebook, and that this invisibilized and often lowpaid labour complicates the notion of machine-tomachine vision (Roberts, 2018). At the same time, these billions of images meant to be read by machines also emerge from (and are read within) a limited set of representational possibilities, such as a racially saturated field of visibility or prescribed modes of gendered behaviour (Alexander, 1994;Browne, 2015;Butler, 1993;Chun and Friedland, 2015;Keeling, 2005) that run deeper than the often criticised datasets in machine learning. This means that, even though datafication seems to do away with the field of vision as we know it, in fact older modes of visual engagement are still very much in function, but have moved further beyond the threshold of human perception.…”

Section: Big Data's Optical Unconsciousmentioning

confidence: 99%

The optical unconscious of Big Data: Datafication of vision and care for unknown futures

Agostinho

2019

Big Data & Society

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Ever since Big Data became a mot du jour across social fields, optical metaphors such as the microscope began to surface in popular discourse to describe and qualify its epistemological impact. While the persistence of optics seems to be at odds with the datafication of vision, this article suggests that the optical metaphor offers an opportunity to reflect about the material consequences of the modes of seeing and knowing that currently shape datafied worlds. Drawing on feminist new materialism, the article investigates the optical metaphor as a material-discursive practice that actively constitutes the world, as metaphors imply modes of thinking, knowing and doing that have material enactions. Expanding visual culture theories, the notion of 'optical unconscious' is taken up to discuss the tensions between displacement and persistence of optics within datafied worlds, that is, how optical vision is displaced but also mobilised and repurposed by data-driven knowledge. In dialogue with feminist science and technology studies and speculative ethics, I suggest that the datafication of vision offers a chance to reconceptualize the sense of sight towards a sensorial engagement with Big Data premised on responsibility, care, and an ethics of unknowability. Within this framework, vision may be conceived differently, perhaps not only as enhancement and control, but as generator of new possibilities. Ultimately, the article proposes that the visual theories after which Big Data is being imagined matter not only for our understanding of Big Data's epistemic potential, but also for the possibility of shaping emerging data worlds.

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“…In other words, the black person mirrored for society around her what a human being was not” (Spillers : 155). The relationship between black bodies and state‐sanctioned violence was also powerfully surmised in Elizabeth Alexander's groundbreaking essay “ ’Can you be BLACK and look at this?’: Reading the Rodney King Video(s).” With a parenthetical extension which denies the closedness of a singular video, Alexander describes a broader history of documents that enact the violence of the Rodney King video, but also probes local histories and various “artistic examples [that] militate…against a history of narratives of dominion which have attempted to talk black people out of what their bodies know” (Alexander : 108). With regard to contemporary popular music studies, scholars such as Marcileyna Morgan, Imani Perry, Zandria Robinson and Regina Bradley would be hard‐pressed to find room to make an intervention in the vision of the discipline that Saucier and Woods put forward.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

What is This Thing Called Hip Hop Studies?: A Response to Saucier and Woods

Forster

2015

Journal of Popular Music Studies

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“Can you be Black and Look at This?”: Reading the Rodney King Video(s)

Cited by 194 publications

References 0 publications

@Ferguson: Still here in the afterlives of Black death, defiance, and joy

@Ferguson: Still here in the afterlives of Black death, defiance, and joy

The optical unconscious of Big Data: Datafication of vision and care for unknown futures

What is This Thing Called Hip Hop Studies?: A Response to Saucier and Woods

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