The Problem of After

I want to think "care" as a problem for thought.

—Christina Sharpe¹

I

How do the visualities of Black Lives Matter protests relate to—maybe amble into—the nonperformative textures of mourning?² What happens to the question of nonperformativity in the face of the protest photo's presumptive publicity? I ask these questions in relation to a 2014 New York Daily News photo of the late Erica Garner. In it, she's said to be staging a die-in in the place where her father, Eric, was killed.

How not to parse the visualities of mourning and protest and then, with respect to the latter, project a space where the photo's political performativity can surface uncomplicatedly as an askable question? A photo that might hide as much as its purportedly said to show—a "protest photo"—where the hypercirculated image of a daughter dying-in is perhaps also an unregardable and unrecoverable (family) portrait? What might the challenge to a certain presumptive performativity, following Christina Sharpe's brilliant meditations on Black life and ongoing anti-Black "disaster," have to do with care as a problem of thought?³

Care: how is it possible to know whether Erica Garner, with eyes alternately open and closed, is, at the moment of a flash, protesting or mourning or upset by the camera's presence there at all? Does this complicate or trouble how we think the after, the moral askability of the question of the aesthetic, the political, and more precisely of their performative intersection?

What is more, most broadly, I'm interested in Black protest images as a problem of and for thought; one bespeaking a commitment to projects of Black feminist study and ethical learning, instantiated by Harriet Jacobs, and extending through the writings of Nahum Chandler, Tina Campt, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Kevin Quashie, and Christina Sharpe.⁴

In other words, I don't know whether the performative mobilization of the photo toward protest's aesthetic-political thinkability ignores the irresolvable, unencroachable heaviness and anguish of the image. What's hard to hold, what makes the photo hard to hold. Maybe not right to hold. Maybe never right to hold.

Along these lines, I wonder whether the analytic of performativity—often deployed by those who believe/hope/know-but-don't-know-how protests do something (much as they consider the images of protests likewise to do something)—engages in a particular capturing and propertizing of Black social life, a propertizing against which insurgent Black mattering symbolically disturbs and defends itself. For this reason, I'm interested most directly in the spacing around a protest photo's thinkablility, the nonpropertizing futures it might announce, and how the unelaborated itself, the question of non- or outra-performativity, moves as an exercise of care.

At the time I initially wrote this essay, Erica Garner was alive. She now isn't. At twenty-seven years old, she died after suffering a heart attack, leaving two small children and a world that loved her in the wake (Sharpe). No sentence should immediately follow this one.

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Here's what I wrote in October 2017, two months before Erica Garner's death:

In a set of images featured in a New York Daily News article on Garner's serial die-ins (which I won't reproduce here), Erica Garner's eyes are open and closed. The title of the New York Daily News article reads: "Eric Garner's daughter holds 'die-in' at Staten Island location where her father was put in fatal police chokehold."⁵

In the middle of the piece, Garner herself discloses, "I felt his spirit when I was walking down to the spot, … I've been doing this every Tuesday and Thursday since my father's death. I do it without cameras there. I do it with cameras there, and I'm going to keep doing it."

What goes unsaid, what's left out of the sound bite and caption matters; even if under-elaborated and not made available to a reading public's thought, we can't discount what the sidewalk, that endlessly ruined...