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Abstract
The death of Sandra Bland on July 13, 2015, coupled with the dashcam footage that documented the verbal and physical violence she experienced as Texas law enforcement officials arrested and detained her, marked a critical historical moment in the Black Lives Matter era. Yet, the “Sandy Speaks” videos she recorded in the months preceding her death left profound digital traces of her words and thoughts. This article combines historical and cultural analysis to observe how theater, poetry, and visual art focused on Sandra Bland, what I term aesthetic insurgency, create platforms to resist police violence against Black women.
Acknowledgments
I thank Keisha Blain for the initial discussions that helped me to conceptualize this article. Gratitude goes to Charisse Burden-Stelly, Kali Gross, Olga Dugan, and Cynthia Gwynn Yaudes for helpful comments on earlier drafts. John Guess, Jr. and Dominic Clay of the Houston Museum of African American Culture deserve thanks for facilitating conversations about art and activism. I salute Houston artist Lee Carrier for sharing the story behind her art on Sandra Bland. Finally, I thank the Reverend Hannah Bonner for the use of Sandra Bland images.
Notes
1 Simone John, “On [Not] Watching the Video,” in Testify (Portland: Octopus Books, 2017), 57.
2 Danez Smith, “Short Film,” in Black Movie (Minneapolis: Exploding Pinecone Press, 2015), Kindle Version, Location 313 of 485.
3 Marcus Wicker, “Conjecture on the Stained-Glass Image of White Christ at Ebenezer Baptist Church,” in Silencer (Boston: Mariner Books, 2017), 3.
4 “The Charles Gilpin Players Perform in Honor of Sandra Bland,” Amplify the Shout (November 29, 2015), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iB27hae87M8 (accessed April 1, 2016).
5 “Sandy Speaks—April 8, 2015 (Black Lives Matter),” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIKeZgC8lQ4&index=28&list=PLMkogOT3Op_DO7CxQWwKU-BQEuN8sN3vW (accessed August 12, 2015).
6 “The Charles Gilpin Players Perform in Honor of Sandra Bland.”
7 Ibid.
8 Josh Bowers, “Annoy No Cop,” University of Virginia School of Law Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper Series (March 2017): 1–74; Belen V. Lowrey-Kinberg and Grace Sullivan Buker, ““I’m Giving You a Lawful Order”: Dialogic Legitimacy in Sandra Bland’s Traffic Stop,” Law and Society Review 51, no. 2 (2017): 379–412; Ashley B. Reid, “The Sandra Bland Story: How Social Media Has Exposed the Harsh Reality of Police Brutality” (M.A. Thesis, Bowie State University, 2016); Brian Pitman, Asha M. Ralph, Jocelyn Camacho, and Elizabeth Monk-Turner, “Social Media Users’ Interpretations of the Sandra Bland Arrest Video,” Race and Justice (2017): 1–19; Victoria D. Gillon, “The Killing of an ‘Angry Black Woman’: Sandra Bland and the Politics of Respectability” (Winning Paper, Eddy Mabry Diversity Award, Augustana College, Augustana Digital Commons, 2016), https://digitalcommons.augustana.edu/mabryaward/3/ (accessed August 12, 2017); Andrea J. Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence against Black Women and Women of Color (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017), 101, 220; Theresa M. Senft, “Skin of the Selfie” (Unabridged Version, 2015), 1–21, http://www.academia.edu/15941920/The_Skin_of_the_Selfie_Unabridged_Version (accessed August 12, 2017). An abridged version of Senft’s paper appeared in Ego Update: The Future of Digital Identity, Alain Bieber, ed. (Düsseldorf: NRW Forum, 2015); Christopher J. Lebron, The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 70–72, 154–55; Phillip Luke Sinitiere, “Religion and the Black Freedom Struggle for Sandra Bland,” in “The Seedtime, the Work, and the Harvest”: New Perspectives on the Black Freedom Struggle in America, ed. Reginald K. Ellis, Jeffrey Littlejohn, and Peter Levy (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018), 197–226.
9 While I recognize that there are other black reparative movements and initiatives such as those associated with the moniker Black Girl Magic, or #BlackGirlMagic, for example, I also have in mind the intellectual inquiry of black futures as it relates to the work of scholars such as Saidiya Hartman, Tina Campt, Fred Moten, Christina Sharpe, and others. In addition to the books and essays the aforementioned scholars have published, in writing this paragraph I had in mind Tina Campt, “Black Feminist Futures and the Practice of Fugitivity,” October 7, 2014, Barnard Center for Research on Women, http://bcrw.barnard.edu/videos/tina-campt-black-feminist-futures-and-the-practice-of-fugitivity/ (accessed February 1, 2018); Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman’s 2016 conversation with J. Kameron Carter and Sarah Jane Cervanek for the Black Outdoors: Humanities Futures after Property and Possessions series. See “The Black Outdoors: Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman at Duke University,” October 5, 2016, Duke Franklin Humanities Institute, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_tUZ6dybrc (accessed August 17, 2017); and Kathleen E. Bethel, “Black Feminist Futures: A Reading List,” Black Perspectives, April 1, 2017, https://www.aaihs.org/black-feminist-futures-a-reading-list/ (accessed August 17, 2017).
10 While space does not allow me to address music in this article, for a reflection on the subject in reference to Sandra Bland, see Phillip Luke Sinitiere, “#SandraBland Soundtrack,” Black Perspectives, August 19, 2016, http://www.aaihs.org/sandrabland-soundtrack/ (accessed August 19, 2016). For additional examples of aesthetic responses to Sandra Bland, see the Black Perspectives forum “Remembering Sandra Bland” published in July 2018, https://www.aaihs.org/online-forum-remembering-sandra-bland/ (accessed July 9, 2018).
11 Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 1–12, 191–98; Walidah Imarisha, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Jonathan Horstmann, “Black Art Matters: A Roundtable on the Black Radical Imagination,” July 26, 2016, Red Wedge Magazine, http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/black-art-matters-roundtable-black-radical-imaginatio (accessed August 1, 2017).
12 See, for example, Neil Sapper, “Black Culture in Urban Texas: A Lone Star Renaissance,” in The African American Experience in Texas: An Anthology, ed. Bruce A. Glasrud and James M. Smallwood (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2007), 248–51; and Sandra M. Mayo and Elvin Holt, eds., Acting Up and Getting Down: Plays by African American Texans (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 3–5.
13 In a perverse irony that names the grotesque and unjust structural arrangements about which Sandra Bland commented, the same Waller County Judge, Albert McCaig, who in April 2016 cleared white Bastrop police officer Daniel Willis of Yvette Smith’s murder, dismissed ex-DPS officer Brian Encinia’s perjury charge in June of 2017. See Tom Dart, “Former Texas Officer Who Fatally Shot Unarmed Woman Found Not Guilty,” The Guardian, April 8, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/07/fdaniel-willis-not-guilty-fatal-police-shooting-yvette-smith-texas (accessed August 1, 2017); Jolie McCullough, “Perjury Charge Dropped against Trooper Who Arrested Sandra Bland,” Texas Tribune, June 28, 2017, https://www.texastribune.org/2017/06/28/perjury-charge-dropped-against-trooper-who-arrested-sandra-bland/ (accessed August 1, 2017).
14 Kelley, Freedom Dreams.
15 Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Seizing the Stage: Social Performances from Mao Zedong to Martin Luther King, Jr., and Black Lives Matter Today,” TDR: The Drama Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 28–38; Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Drama of Social Life (Malden, MA: Polity, 2017), 10–38.
16 For a summary of #SayHerName, see Homa Khaleeli, “#SayHerName: Why Kimberlé Crenshaw is Fighting for Forgotten Women,” The Guardian, May 30, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/may/30/sayhername-why-kimberle-crenshaw-is-fighting-for-forgotten-women (accessed October 15, 2017). African American Policy Forum and Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies, “Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality against Black Women,” p. 2, last modified 2015, http://static1.squarespace.com/static/53f20d90e4b0b80451158d8c/t/560c068ee4b0af26f72741df/1443628686535/AAPF_SMN_Brief_Full_singles-min.pdf (accessed October 15, 2017). See also “#SayHerName: An Evening of Arts & Action,” March 28, 2017, http://www.aapf.org/shn/ (accessed October 15, 2017). Relatedly, on Sandra Bland specifically, see Ritchie, Invisible No More, 101, 220.
17 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 11. My deployment of language associated around “slavery’s afterlife” comes from Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).
18 Sharpe, In the Wake, 1–11.
19 Ibid., 13.
20 Ibid., 13–14, emphasis in the original.
21 Ibid., 14.
22 Ibid., 20–21.
23 Ibid., 22.
24 While I did not engage the work of Hartman or Sharpe in previous writing on the subject of Sandra Bland, several pieces I wrote at Black Perspectives laid the intellectual foundation for this article. See Phillip Luke Sinitiere, “Sandra Bland (1987–2015): Art, Remembrance, Commemoration,” Black Perspectives, July 13, 2016, http://www.aaihs.org/sandra-bland-1987-2015-art-remembrance-commemoration/ (accessed July 13, 2016) and Sinitiere, “#SandraBland Soundtrack.”
25 “Sandra Bland traffic stop,” July 22, 2015, Texas Department of Public Safety, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaW09Ymr2BA (accessed September 30, 2017). See also Texas Department of Public Safety’s press release on the video, “DPS Releases Video of Sandra Bland Traffic Stop,” July 21, 2015, http://www.dps.texas.gov/director_staff/media_and_communications/pr/2015/0721a (accessed September 30, 2017). While I do not take up this issue in the article, readers should recall that several people, most famously film director Ava DuVernay, noted an editing discrepancy in the original DPS dash-cam video. See Ava DuVernay (@Ava), “I edit footage for a living. But anyone can see that this official video has been cut. Read/watch. Why? #SandraBland,” Twitter, July 21, 2015, https://twitter.com/ava/status/623683526001438720?lang=en (accessed September 30, 2017); and Jaeah Lee, “Texas Police Deny Editing Dashcam Footage of Sandra Bland’s Arrest,” Mother Jones, July 22, 2015, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/sandra-bland-arrest-dashcam-video-questions/ (accessed September 30, 2017).
26 Ryan Grim, “The Transcript of Sandra Bland’s Arrest is as Revealing as the Video,” Huffington Post, July 22, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sandra-bland-arrest-transcript_us_55b03a88e4b0a9b94853b1f1 (accessed September 30, 2017).
27 I adopt “scene of subjection” from Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
28 James McCorkle, “Light You Up,” American Poetry Review 46, no. 3 (May–June 2017): 33.
29 Ibid., 34.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 Tiana Clark, “Sandy Speaks,” in Equilibrium by Tiana Clark (Durham, NC: Bull City Press, 2016), 27.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid.
36 Simone John, “Ars Poetica,” in Testify, by Simone John (Portland: Octopus Books, 2017), 53.
37 John, Testify, 55, 60, 63.
38 John, “Lawful Orders,” in Testify, 69.
39 John, “A Woman’s Perspective,” in Testify, 70.
40 John, “I Tried,” in Testify, 77–78.
41 John, “Elegy for Dead Black Women #1,” in Testify, 54.
42 John, “The Poet’s Eulogy,” in Testify, 80–82.
43 “Individual World Poetry Slam Finals 2015—FreeQuency ‘Say Her Name,’” Poetry Slam, Inc., March 24, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64ZQu_RhTTg (accessed July 25, 2017). Patricia Smith also gives voice to Geneva Reed-Veal. See Patricia Smith, “Sagas of the Accidental Saint,” in Incendiary Art (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017), 108.
44 Kai Davis, Nayo Jones, and Jasmine Combs, “Sandra Bland,” Button Poetry, May 22, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpSC_IusogI (accessed July 25, 2017).
45 Brian Ward, Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004); Maurice Berger, For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Martin A. Berger, Seeing through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Aniko Bodroghkozy, Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013); Teresa A. Carbon and Kellie Jones, Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2014); John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, Celeste-Marie Bernier, Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015); Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Enduring Truths: Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). On Danny Lyon and Ferguson, see Randy Kennedy and Jennifer Schuessler, “Ferguson Images Evoke Civil Rights and Changing Visual Perceptions,” New York Times, August 14, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/15/us/ferguson-images-evoke-civil-rights-era-and-changing-visual-perceptions.html (accessed March 1, 2017).
46 Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
47 Berger, For All the World to See, 9.
48 “Sandy Speaks—January 15, 2015,” Sandy Speaks, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5VhTY3_FC8 (accessed March 1, 2017).
49 Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). I first thought of analyzing Bland in relation to Campt’s book after reading J. T. Roane, “Fugitivity, Refusal, and Visual Captivity: A Review of Tina Campt’s Listening to Images,” Black Perspectives, May 27, 2017, https://www.aaihs.org/fugitivity-refusal-and-visual-captivity-a-review-of-tina-m-campts-listening-to-images/ (accessed May 27, 2017).
50 For more on the context of this religious activism, see Sinitiere, “Religion and the Black Freedom Struggle for Sandra Bland.”
51 “Sandy Speaks—April 8, 2015 (Black Lives Matter),” Sandy Speaks, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIKeZgC8lQ4 (accessed March 1, 2017).
52 hannahabonner (@hannahabonner), Instagram photo, July 13, 2016, https://www.instagram.com/p/BHz4xbkjlpf/?taken-by=hannahabonner (accessed July 14, 2016).
53 hannahabonner (@hannahabonner), Instagram photo, July 13, 2016, https://www.instagram.com/p/BHyxWgOjiF5/?taken-by=hannahabonner (accessed July 14, 2016).
54 John Guess, interview by Phillip Luke Sinitiere, March 2018, Houston, Texas. Digital recording in author’s possession.
55 Ibid.
56 I attended the opening of the Sandra Bland exhibit (and the “Over There Some Place” exhibit discussed below) in February 2018, and subsequently returned to HMAAC several times to revisit the exhibits and interview artists as I further developed this article.
57 Guess interview; Getta Gandbhir and Blair Foster, “A Conversation with My Black Son,” New York Times, March 17, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/17/opinion/a-conversation-with-my-black-son.html (accessed May 12, 2018).
58 Guess interview.
59 Ibid.
60 Lee Carrier, interview by Phillip Luke Sinitiere, March 2018, Houston, Texas. Digital recording in author’s possession.
61 I adopt the “cohesive yet ambiguous” quote in this paragraph from “Over There Some Place,” exhibit sign, Houston Museum of African American Culture (Houston, Texas).
62 Carrier interview.
63 Ibid. On the sense of an image’s “present” and its future, see Roane, “Fugitivity, Refusal, and Visual Captivity.”
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Phillip Luke Sinitiere
Phillip Luke Sinitiere is Professor of History at the College of Biblical Studies, a predominately African American school located in Houston’s Mahatma Gandhi District. A scholar of American religious history and African American Studies, his books and essays address African American Christianity, the prosperity gospel, American evangelicalism, and the intellectual and cultural history of W. E. B. Du Bois. In 2018, Sinitiere co-organized the online forum “Remembering Sandra Bland” on Black Perspectives and published “Religion and the Black Freedom Struggle for Sandra Bland” in The Seedtime, the Work, and the Harvest, an essay volume on contemporary civil rights.