Critical memory and anti-racist media: An analysis of the transnational political subjectivity of BLM-DK

ABSTRACT

When a young Danish-Tanzanian man was brutally murdered in Denmark, the Danish division of Black Lives Matter (BLM-DK) followed closely the journalistic coverage of the police investigation. BLM-DK posted 37 memes and commented links in the six months following the murder. Drawing on theories of critical memory, black publicity, and African American resistance that produces a genealogical counter-public this article explores the question of how BLM-DK’s textual and visual social media content concerning the murder addressed and helped mobilise a counter-public. In particular, the article investigates the convergent nature of the posts and the insistence on transnational political subjectivity. The article employs discursive analyses and produces detailed visual discursive readings of selected posts by BLM-DK.

KEYWORDS:

• Counter-publics
• critical memory
• political acts
• vernacular expressions
• visual social media

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 All comments originally in Danish are translated by the author.

2 The dialogue of course extends to the comments sections, which however go beyond this study.

3 While BLM-DK did not conduct a survey of the coverage, it later becomes clear that mainstream media to an extraordinary extent made use of the same sources and angles irrespective of the individual newspaper’s political tradition when covering the case (Dindler & Blaagaard, 2021).

4 Dolezal is a former NAACP president, who although she was born white insisted that she was in fact black.

5 The note related to the murder of journalist Kim Wall, which was another high-profile killing in Denmark.