Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital AfterlifeThe first critical examination of death and remembrance in the digital age—and an invitation to imagine Black digital sovereignty in life and death. In Resurrecting the Black Body, Tonia Sutherland considers the consequences of digitally raising the dead. Attending to the violent deaths of Black Americans—and the records that document them—from slavery through the social media age, Sutherland explores media evidence, digital acts of remembering, and the right and desire to be forgotten. From the popular image of Gordon (also known as "Whipped Peter") to photographs of the lynching of Jesse Washington to the video of George Floyd's murder, from DNA to holograms to posthumous communication, this book traces the commodification of Black bodies and lives across time. Through the lens of (anti-)Blackness in the United States, Sutherland interrogates the intersections of life, death, personal data, and human autonomy in the era of Google, Twitter, and Facebook, and presents a critique of digital resurrection technologies. If the Black digital afterlife is rooted in bigotry and inspires new forms of racialized aggression, Resurrecting the Black Body asks what other visions of life and remembrance are possible, illuminating the unique ways that Black cultures have fought against erasure and oblivion. |
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23andMe accessed March Afeni Shakur African American American Archivists anti-Black April archives of Atlantic argues Atlantic slavery Black Americans Black Archival Practice Black Body Black communities Black lives Black Marxism Black memory technologies Black memory workers Caribbean carte de visite Celebrities cell line chapter chatbot circulate Coachella collective created cultural daguerreotypes dance dead deceased Derek Chauvin digital afterlife digital environments digital resurrection document Dunham Technique enslaved Ethics example Facebook genome George Floyd Harvard Henrietta Lacks homegoing human images institutions Johns Hopkins Journal Katherine Dunham Lacks's Landecker Library of Congress murder MyHeritage NAACP NAACP Papers narrative Odumosu Pepper's Ghost racial racism refusal Renty and Delia Replika rituals Saidiya Hartman Shudu slavery Snoop Dogg social media sousveillance spectacle tion Tonia Sutherland traditions trauma Tupac hologram Tupac Shakur Twitter uncanny valley United University Press users violence visual Washington white supremacy York