Networked testimony as necroresistance

Abstract

By catalyzing the affective sentiments of networked publics through the depiction of death, necroresistance cultivates empowerment through the sight of death to enable the security of the living. This essay conducts a close reading of Diamond Reynolds’ livestream video, which polemicized the execution of her partner, Philando Castile, at the hands of the state in order to examine how networked testimonies and necropolitical “selfies” have altered the discourse concerning racialized violence in a US context. Her networked testimony is both an indictment of this historical legacy, and an overture to accountability, for the video anticipates the multiple narratives that will abound in a court of law. In the struggle for liberation against state violence, Reynolds’ video differentiates itself from conventional notions of testimony because her narration is self-reflexive, simultaneously enacting both sousveillance and self-surveillance. Through this hybrid form of testimony, Reynolds’ produces a novel, performative form of necroresistance that centers her networked testimony as a counter-discourse to that of the state and its auxiliary components, including law enforcement and the judicial system. As such, necroresistance via networked testimonies harbor an anticipatory logic, act as evidence of criminal harm, a means of self-exoneration, and provide a forum for public mourning via digital circulation.

Keywords:

• Diamond Reynolds
• Philando Castile
• testimony
• necropolitics
• anti-black violence
• sousveillance
• selfies
• necroresistance
• spectacle lynching
• social media

Notes

1 Steve Mann first coined the term sousveillance referring to new media technologies that would enable citizens to challenge the surveillant gaze, or power "from above" by examining it from “below.”

2 In Walter Scott's death, which occurred nearly a year before Castile's death, officer Michael Slager was recorded not only shooting and killing Scott but is also seen placing his taser by Scott's body. Many viewers have speculated that Slager did this to stage the crime scene in his favor by falsifying evidence.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Francesca Romeo

Francesca Romeo is a PhD candidate in Film and Digital Media at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on the intersection of digital media and political violence. Drawing upon visual studies and political theory to interrogate the nature of information and advocacy in the digital age, she is particularly invested in how networked resistance proliferates in a global context through the production, alteration, and circulation of images. To this end, she employs a feminist media archaeology to expose human rights violations and collate evidence that can be used at trial through open-source investigations.