Introduction: #BlackLivesMatter and the Mediatic Lives of a Movement

In Memory of Jordan Russell DavisIn Memory of Eric GarnerIn Memory of John CrawfordIn Memory of Michael BrownIn Memory of Laquan McDonaldIn Memory of Akai GurleyIn Memory of Tamir Rice . . .

because white men can'tpolice their imaginationblack men are dying

—Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric¹

The epigraph that begins this introduction, from Claudia Rankine's Citizen, presents an abridged version of her verses.² The first stanza appears on a single page, where it wanes from full, dark font (on the line memorializing Jordan Russell Davis) to near-invisibility at the end of the page, where there are no more names, but only a series of lines (barely) reading "In Memory" in an elliptical gesture that preserves spaces for future black victims of police killing. In fact, since the book was published in 2014, those lines would now be filled, necessitating many more elliptical lines added to the end of the poem. The second stanza appears on the page opposite this memorial list, and, although the font has regained its boldness, the title-case capitalization is no more. This part of the poem eschews capitalization completely, using three deceptively simple lines to brilliantly and evocatively connect whiteness, masculinity, policing, imagination, blackness, and death. It is precisely this conjunction—of black life and death, whiteness, policing, memorialization, and the perils and possibilities of the imagination—which founds this Close-Up on the mediatic lives of #BlackLivesMatter.³

Inaugurated in the aftermath of the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin, #BlackLivesMatter gained mounting exposure and increased membership following the police killings of Michael Brown (and the Ferguson, Missouri protests that followed) and Eric Garner in 2014. The organization was founded by the black female activists Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patrisse Cullors, and describes itself as "a movement, not a moment." It is loosely organized, and it encourages purposely disruptive protests, peaceful civil disobedience, mainstream political activism, and mass demonstrations, among other things. #BlackLivesMatter also makes extensive use of the Internet and social media, the latter evidenced by its formal use of the hash character for denomination.⁴ In addition to its three well-known founders, #BlackLivesMatter has elevated activists like Sean King and DeRay McKesson. Crucially, the group does not limit itself to matters of race, police brutality, and anti-black violence; indeed, the movement supports LGBTQ activism, trans* issues, feminism, immigration reform, economic justice, and so on. In its assault on the structural foundations and specific instantiations of anti-black violence, the movement is thoroughly entangled in both the present and the past.⁵ Yet, while #BlackLivesMatter is rightly credited with significant political and cultural achievements, the influence it has on various mediatic forms, and the influence it gleans from those same forms, is less often studied. This Close-Up explores the racial, political, theoretical, technological, ethical, cultural-expressive, and social dimensions of #BlackLivesMatter through the lenses of various media.

Explicitly, this collection of essays traces the implications of the movement as they are made manifest in film, social media, and contemporary critical theory. The authors variously emphasize the inspirational resonances of #BlackLivesMatter in current aesthetic, political, and technological/mediatic developments. Further, each paper understands #BlackLivesMatter as a productive hermeneutic, offering conduits to new thinking about epistemology, ontology, ethics, medium specificity, gender, and race. This Close-Up thus seeks to provoke conversation and debate about the complex imbrication between #BlackLivesMatter and media. In this spirit, we ask a variety of daunting questions. What are the aesthetic implications of black life and black death? How do narratives of loss and mourning intersect with black life? What roles do memorialization and black love play in moving forward, while still looking back? How can mediatic tools embedded within anti-black matrices offer hope for overcoming anti-blackness? How do new media bring attention to the trenchant problem of structural anti-blackness? When (and how) do black lives matter and not matter?

This Close-Up originally emerged from a panel on the "mediatic...