Black Meme

Legacy Russell, the award-winning author of Glitch Feminism, takes the idea of the meme and applies it to Black visual culture from 1900 to today, drawing on both archival material and contemporary media. Her central claim is that digital culture as we know it would not exist without the contributions of Black people. The book works through a series of case studies. Russell looks at how lynching postcards circulated, and at why Mamie Till chose to let Jet magazine publish a photograph of her dead son, Emmett. She considers how televised coverage of the protesters in Selma shifted the national argument over civil rights, and how citizen-shot footage of the LAPD beating Rodney King became the first viral video. Questions of who controls Black images, and who profits from them, run through the later chapters. The Anita Hill hearings show how the media builds a Black icon. Tamara Lanier's effort to win back from Harvard the daguerreotypes of her enslaved ancestors raises the matter of who owns images of Black life and Black death. The live Facebook broadcast of Philando Castile's killing by police, after a stop for a broken taillight, makes viewers witnesses to the long afterlife of the Black meme. Through image, memory and technology, Black Meme argues that pictures of Blackness have always sat at the center of how we understand the modern world, and that they reshape how we think about visual culture and the technology that carries it.