American Elegy

A Triptych

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2428451
AutoresK A Mariner (0000-0002-6413-6383, autor de correspondencia)
Año2020
Volumen32
Número1
Páginas5-23
Fecha de publicación2020-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaPublic Culture (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0899-2363 • E-ISSN: 1527-8018
EditorialDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/08992363-7816269
OpenAlexW3003025151
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas9
Referencias citadas16

On March 26, 2018, Jennifer Hart drove her SUV off a cliff along the northern coast of California with her partner and at least five of their transracially adopted Black children inside. Their remains were recovered at the crash site. As of this writing, a sixth child, Devonte, remains missing and is presumed dead. Four years before the crash, Devonte was famously photographed at the age of twelve, tearfully hugging a white police officer at a Ferguson rally in Portland, Oregon. By simultaneously occupying the feel-good spectacle of interracial intimacy and the everyday tragedy of interracial violence, Devonte embodies and embodied the conditions of contemporary Black life and death in the United States. His disappearance is intimately linked to other forms and histories of American state violence. Through cultural analysis, autoethnography, and poetic intervention, this essay performs wake work as a method for living with the unmournable

Archaeology · Art · Elegy · Indigenous · Literature · Officer · Poetry · Political science · Sociology · Spectacle · Gender Studies · History · Homelessness and Social Issues · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society