Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Picturing Catastrophe: The visual politics of racial reckoning

2021; Wiley; Volume: 109; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tyr.2021.0044

1467-9736

Rizvana Bradley,

Law in Society and Culture

Picturing Catastrophe The visual politics of racial reckoning Rizvana Bradley (bio) The grammar of antagonism breaks in on the mendacity of conflict. —frank b. wilderson iii And we, here, amid a failure of images. —dawn lundy martin Now more than a year into the pan-demic, with the wheels of atrocity once again turning as they should, one might expect most of the obligatory annual retrospectives on 2020’s so-called summer of racial reckoning to serve as little more than a kind of punctuation, one that might be anxiously folded into various stories of unity and progress. Representation’s [End Page 158] injunction saturates daily life to the point of satire: Netflix offers its customers a Black Lives Matter genre, police cars are adorned with historic black political leaders and Pan-Africanist colors for Black History Month, and even the U.S. president implores the American people, citizens of a noble if imperfect nation, not to look away from the spectacle of black death: “We have to look at it—we have to—we have to look at it as we did for those 9 minutes and 29 seconds. We have to listen. ‘I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.’ Those were George Floyd’s last words. We can’t let those words die with him. We have to keep hearing those words,” President Biden said. The trial of Derek Chauvin, the white Minneapolis police officer who murdered George Floyd, was fashioned as the culminating drama of last summer’s upheavals. Like the final act of a familiar play whose outcome is always known in advance, Chauvin’s guilty verdict was to be the climax of a multiracial saga that had captured our hearts and minds, a cynical reprise of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s declaration that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” President Biden went so far as to pluck words from the mouth of George Floyd’s daughter, Gianna, in his speech on April 20 following the trial: “She said to me then—I’ll never forget it—‘Daddy changed the world.’… Let that be his legacy: a legacy of peace, not violence—of justice.” George Floyd’s death would not be in vain; it would be the very lifeblood of American democracy, the fleshly renewal of the social contract, a catalyst for the “healing” we need. “Black death functions as national therapy,” as Frank B. Wilderson III would say. This vampiric narrativization, of course, stumbled over the conditions of its making, for it was difficult to reconcile the righteous trumpetings of Chauvin’s guilty verdict with the killing of sixteen-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant not twenty minutes later, or of Andrew Brown, Jr., the following day. Even as the obligation to repeat these facts marks the fulfillment of a murderous script which is incapable of mourning the life it steals. Even as the recourse to empiricist appeal, to common truth, or to conscience is itself, as Saidiya Hartman might say, “just an extension of the master’s prerogative.” [End Page 159] Indeed, the manner in which the liberal face of empire has scrambled to exploit the politics of representation this past year betrays a latent desperation as much as an appetite for extraction; what else are we to make of this demand to look, again and again, upon the brutalized flesh of blackness? To look, so that a picture of the world might be preserved, so that the world might be saved—from itself, for itself. Because in fact the precipitate turns that characterized the past year tell a story of anything but progress: the “summer of racial reckoning” was followed by a U.S. presidential election that commentators likened to the deadlocked electoral contest of 1876, the “resolution” of which signaled the end of Reconstruction, trammeling over hopes for achieving what W. E. B. Du Bois called “abolition democracy” and paving the way for the revanchism of racial terror commonly known as Jim Crow. The exuberant celebrations of the outcomes of the U.S. presidential and congressional elections as signaling an irreversible, universally awaited tide of “diversity and inclusion” gave way to the white supremacist...