Resurrecting the Black Body

The first critical examination of death and remembrance in the digital age—and an invitation to imagine Black digital sovereignty in life and death.
 
In Resurrecting the Black Body, Tonia Sutherland considers the consequences of digitally raising the dead. Attending to the violent deaths of Black Americans—and the records that document them—from slavery through the social media age, Sutherland explores media evidence, digital acts of remembering, and the right and desire to be forgotten.
 
From the popular image of Gordon (also known as "Whipped Peter") to photographs of the lynching of Jesse Washington to the video of George Floyd's murder, from DNA to holograms to posthumous communication, this book traces the commodification of Black bodies and lives across time. Through the lens of (anti-)Blackness in the United States, Sutherland interrogates the intersections of life, death, personal data, and human autonomy in the era of Google, Twitter, and Facebook, and presents a critique of digital resurrection technologies. If the Black digital afterlife is rooted in bigotry and inspires new forms of racialized aggression, Resurrecting the Black Body asks what other visions of life and remembrance are possible, illuminating the unique ways that Black cultures have fought against erasure and oblivion.

Tonia Sutherland is Assistant Professor of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Contents

Author’s Note 
Acknowledgments 

Introduction: Trouble These Waters 

Part I RECORDS

1. Recording Trauma 
2. Recording Hate 

Part II RESURRECTION

3. The Resurrection of Henrietta Lacks 
4. The Resurrection of Tupac Shakur 

Part III RIGHTS

5. The Right to Be Forgotten 
6. The Right to Be Remembered
Conclusion: Homegoing 

Notes 
Bibliography 
Index