The dying Black body in repeat mode: the Black ‘horrific’ on a loop

ABSTRACT

What does it mean to watch a Black man dying in repeat mode? This paper deconstructs the notion of consuming Black death in a loop (or repeat mode) online and its redistribution in the virtual realm centring the Black body in this pornotropic assemblage. The spectacularisation of Black death and its juxtaposition as a banal encounter is examined against the history of slavery and White oppression. The enactment of Blackness as lacking form or ontology redrafts the virtual sphere in enacting a politics of refusal for reconstituting Blackness adduced through its fluidity. The virtual as an unstable and disembodied realm is re-read as a generative graveyard for reclaiming Black consciousness and Black humanism. In countering the ‘Black horrific’ the paper discerns digital platforms’ agentic and sensuous potential as a stage for performative insurgency to resurrect an affective Black body politic through the disembodied formlessness of the virtual sphere.

KEYWORDS:

• Blackness
• black consciousness
• black death
• black humanism
• afropessimism
• paraontology of blackness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For Fred Moten, Blackness is ‘ontologically prior to the logistic and regulative power that is supposed to have brought it into existence’ (2013, 739). Moten invokes Wilderson, in defining Blackness as ‘fantasy in the hold’ (2013, 743).

2. The term ‘Afropessimism’ refers to a school of thought from African American or Black Studies inspired by Saidya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection which expresses disaffection with a post-racial discourse in which racial discrimination is still rife and experienced in the anti-Blackness of the everyday (Weier 2014, 419).

3. Blackness is described as an adjunct to racial slavery (Wagner 2009: 1–2).