Such an agentic proposition helps rehumanise the pain and suffering of the Black body as a collective, historical and moral encounter.įrank Wilderson III’s ( 2014) notion of Afropessimism locates anti-Blackness through everyday scenes rather than in spectacular violence to highlight the constitutive role of anti-Blackness for White civil society in the US, envisioning the social death of Black bodies forged through gratuitous violence. Through the politics of refusal, Blackness retrieves and reassembles Black death as an agentic and purposive encounter to mobilise an affective realm of re-signification.
Blackness not inscribed through ontology is already given to a ‘post-human’ status and this becomes recombined with the assemblage of digital platforms to re-articulate Blackness. The paper offers hope in the last section through an argument that Black death is re-appropriated and ‘post-humanised’ where communal grief and Black spirit are re-enacted through new modes of sociality and jouissance online where the marginalised and formless can ‘feel back’.
It conceptualises what it means to watch Black death on a loop or in repeat mode on digital platforms within the playground of semiotic capital and how the dead Black body even in death functions within a power archive and is racialised through this necro-aesthetic. It then re-premises Black death through the digital economy in which it assumes both speed and virality, exacerbating banality. The paper proceeds by exploring the historical resonance of the ‘Black horrific’ through time as a banal encounter. For Wilderson and Frank ( 2010, 57), the bridge between Blackness and anti-Blackness is ‘the unbridgeable gap between Black being and human life’. This naturalisation of this non-being becomes universalised and subsumed as an intrinsic logic in the governance of Blackness. Black humanity as dispossessed of ontology is not assembled as a being, neither is it attributed form or is it capable of realising the aesthetic or sensuous. The colonial history of race and racialisation and its white-defined realm of being is actively involved in the exclusion of Blackness. Franz Fanon ( 2008), in delineating the Whiteness of ontology in the ‘historico-racial schema’, asserts the imperceptibility of the Black body. Blackness cannot lay claim to the capacities that constitute human subjectivity in the world as it is a commodity in corporeal form (Warren 2017, 223). Black death configured through its excess and recurrence as a mode of signification opens up an enquiry into the genre of the ‘Black horrific’ as a resonance in distributing Blackness, 1 inducing a Black visuality through Afropessimism 2 (Wilderson III 2014). It engenders Black flesh and Black death through a set of significations in which the popular and interminable aestheticisation of its demise, its visual abstraction into a shadow archive, and its present manifestations of death on a loop on digital platforms provide a continuum. Black death and its material production as Black flesh (Spillers 2003) are part of a historical visual regime and a paraontology (Chandler 2006 Moten 2003) of White supremacy. That question seemed to bridge the historical and present reality of ‘Black death’ as a recurrent banal encounter against the offerings of the viral digital economy which offers death on a loop or ‘repeat mode’ abstracted from its socio-cultural context and historicity. An email on an academic mailing list on ‘Internet Research’ raised concerns from a Black student on what it means to watch a Black man dying in repeat mode against the brutal lived reality of racism and Black subjectivity in the US. This was shortly after the horrific killing of George Floyd in America.