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.
"Resurrecting the Black Body reminds us that the right to be forgotten is just as important as the right to be remembered, and that in all of the recent demands among and of archivists to expand representation in the historic record, we have lost focus on the right to self-determination."—Michelle Caswell, author of Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work
"Tonia Sutherland raises new and complex questions concerning the social and political dynamics of race and racialization tied to the Black body, requiring us to think more critically about elements of digital technology we have long celebrated."—Charlton McIlwain, author of Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter
"Beautifully written. Sutherland approaches this text with the kind of care that the subjects of her inquiry are rarely afforded. Resurrecting the Black Body demands readers consider how digital technology provides not only a site of circulation for images of Black death but new possibilities for how we who work with and think about the archival records of Black folks consider the fullness of Black life."—Catherine Knight Steele, author of Digital Black Feminism
232 pp.5.5 x 8.25
9780520383876$27.95|£24.00Paper
Oct 2023