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Black Meme:A History of the Images that Make Us
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A history of Black imagery that recasts our understanding of visual culture and technology
In BLACK MEME, Legacy Russell, awardwinning author of the groundbreaking GLITCH FEMINISM, explores the “meme” as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to the present, mining both archival and contemporary media.
Russell argues that without the contributions of Black people, digital culture would not exist in its current form. These meditations include the circulation of lynching postcards; why a mother allowed JET magazine to publish a picture of her dead son, Emmett Till; and how the televised broadcast of protesters in Selma changed the debate on civil rights. Questions of the media representation of Blackness come to the fore as Russell considers how citizen-recorded footage of the LAPD beating Rodney King became the first viral video. Why the Anita Hill hearings shed light on the media’s creation of the Black icon. The ownership of Black imagery and death is considered in the story of Tamara Lanier’s fight to reclaim the daguerreotypes of her enslaved ancestors from Harvard. Meanwhile the live broadcast on Facebook of the murder of Philando Castile by the police after he was stopped for a broken taillight forces us to bear witness to the persistent legacy of the Black meme.
Through imagery, memory, and technology, BLACK MEME shows us how images of Blackness have always been central to our understanding of the modern world.
Reviews
Black Meme makes clear we are an image based world and the foundational force shaping our understanding of this is Blackness. That acknowledgement naturally then brings forward questions of agency and authorship. Russell expertly explores and guides readers through the many quandaries therein allowing us to arrive on the other side, eyes wide and taking in the many, many sights (screens) almost as if for the first time tasked with better queries for our AI-powered-hyper-visible world but still with familiar demand: Reparations now! Free the Black meme!
Russell teases out how Black life and Black death shaped viral culture even before the birth of the internet.
Toni Morrison considered ways to fight back against dehumanization in her lectures, collected as The Origin of Others. Images and language, she notes, have the power to "help us pursue the human project-which is to remain human and to block the dehumanization and estrangement of others." This recentering is what Russell proposes as a remedy: In order to address digital exploitation, she argues, we need to de- and reconstruct the conditions of digital culture, building "one predicated on new definitions of authorship."
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A riveting history of the images that have made and maimed Black people in an omnivorous white culture, one that stretches across centuries and technologies, from street to cyberspace; from the violence we suffer to the virtuosity we invent. You will be galvanized by Legacy Russell’s analytic brilliance and visceral eloquence.
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Unsettles, expands and deepens our understanding of the black meme. At the center of this book is work. How black bodies, divorced from context and circulating, are made to do all kinds of cultural work in perpetuity. Throughout, Russell stays with black/ness as viral material, encourages us to consider memes with "slowness," and wonders what might intervene in and end this perpetual labor. Black Meme is necessary reading; brilliant and utterly convincing
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What is a meme? Legacy Russell's provocative answer takes readers on an unexpected journey that loops back to the early twentieth century, then propels us forward to see our hyper-digitized twenty-first century through new eyes. Mapping the trajectory of pivotal conjunctures in the history of digital media and visual culture, her incisive insights and compelling prose show us that Black virality is fundamentally constitutive of the internet, as well as the ongoing predicament of Black life past, present and future.
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[An] innovative analysis…in addition to constructing a persuasive case that digital culture steals from Black culture even as it looks down on Black people, Russell takes care to highlight positive media depictions of Blackness.
Publishers Weekly -
An expert deconstruction of how Blackness has been presented in culture from the beginning of the twentieth century until the present day.
, i-D -
Legacy Russell's Black Meme is a truly critical offering for the digital age in America's racial democracy.
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I can't wait to get my hands on Russell's history of Black visual culture, from early 1900s photographs to today's memes.
, Marie Claire -
Russell's Black Meme is a history of dispossession and cultural production that have molded our evolving media landscape.
, Art in America -
Russell's Black Meme is a keen study of resistance, and there's no more exciting mind to tackle a potent array of topics: Paris Is Burning, Rodney King, Trayvon Martin, Emmett Till, Cindy Sherman, Anita Hill, Magic Johnson, and so much more
Interview Magazine -
Timing is everything, and Black Meme's is fortuitous, arriving not too long after 2020's pivotal reconfigurations of the market's relationship to blackness-the apotheosis of 'blackness as a business model,' as Russell puts it-and not too far into the tectonic shifts that are occurring now for readers to be unfamiliar with the changing landscape.
, 4Columns -
[Black Meme] - which is dedicated to figures like Saartjie Baartman and the unnamed Black jockey in Eadweard Muybridge's Animal Locomotion ('a GIF before the GIF') - is a rigorous study and tribute to 'the ways in which Black art and Black life bow to one another in a limitless and radical exchange.'
, The Cut -
Writer and curator Legacy Russell's latest thought-provoking book forges a strong connection between Black imagery from 1900 on to the development of contemporary digital culture, as well as to our understanding of culture, race, gender, violence and more.
, Ms. Magazine -
Russell calls for a shift in the theorization of the Black meme, reorienting our attention so that we might disrupt the present-day subjugation that drives our constant misrecognition of Black cultural expression.
, Hyperallergic -
Transformative ... Russell reframes the conversation around race and technology.
, Polyester -
Russell's much anticipated follow up to Glitch Feminism invites readers to think more critically about the semiotics and histories undergirding contemporary visual culture, from reaction gifs to viral memes. Behind the seemingly playful, Russell uncovers a brutal legacy of racism and exploited Black labor and pain.
Gagosian -
BLACK MEME delves into the complex interplay between race, digital culture, and internet aesthetics. Russell’s innovative approach continues to shape current discussions in art and technology.
Essence