Archives against the Police
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20106483 |
|---|---|
| Authors | A J Yumi Lee (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 59 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 137-139 |
| Publication date | 2021-10-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | English Language Notes (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-8282 • E-ISSN: 2573-3575 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/00138282-9277337 |
| OpenAlex | W3212981627 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 5 |
Literary scholars work at the mercy of the print archive, and for centuries, the coloniality of this archive has shaped both our reading practices and the parameters of our received knowledge. Critical scholars of race have particularly had to learn to read archives against the grain, attending to and imagining beyond their limits to fashion new kinds of knowledge and narratives.1 In the present day, in digital space, we are able to access what feels like a boundless stream of textual evidence that, while still mediated by power and capital, falls outside the grasp of immediate state control. Three recent articles address the urgent question of how to read and archive the explicitly oppositional, grassroots body of online communications protesting racist police violence. How do we read and analyze these texts? How might we collect, preserve, and frame them for the future?In “Black Lives and Justice with the Archive: A Call to Action,” Angela J. Aguayo, Danette Pugh Patton, and Molly Bandonis address “the possibilities and challenges of archiving the abundance of public communication about police violence in an ephemeral, digitally networked world” by reflecting on their experience of gathering videos into a research collection that they’ve named the Sandra Bland Digital Archive.2 In 2015 the tragedy of Sandra Bland’s death in police custody was widely publicized through the circulation on social media of police videos and photographs of her unjust arrest and detainment as well as videos that Bland herself had previously recorded and circulated documenting her criticisms of racist policing practices. The public outcry and call for justice in response to her death included a “tremendous social media response including hashtags, side-by-side photographic analysis, looped video, and other digital discourses.”3 Crucially, Aguayo, Patton, and Bandonis note, the public accessibility of social-media websites enables the “grassroots archiving” of such materials, including, for example, videos created by Black women that present “performances and iterations of words like ‘if I die in police custody’ or #SayHerName.”4 Aguayo, Patton, and Bandonis argue that these texts “create ‘critical interruptions’ in the normative discourse around police brutality: an apathetic resignation of a white supremacist status quo.”5 As such, the Sandra Bland Digital Archive and other similar projects document an invaluable “stream of resistance to official police reports.”6Elaine Richardson and Alice Ragland’s “#StayWoke: The Language and Literacies of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement” generates models for reading and interpreting such emerging archives. In the essay Richardson and Ragland “survey, codify, and trace a sampling of the language and literacy practices of the Black Lives Matter movement,” showing how they represent a “discursive impetus to affirm . . . Black humanity and disrupt . . . white supremacist capitalist patriarchal logics.”7 Examining a range of social practices from street protests to memes, Richardson and Ragland argue that such practices are “both new and rooted in Black protest literacies of the past.”8 Considering the slogan “Stay woke,” for example, they trace the distinctive meanings of both stay and woke that emerge out of African American English, the linkages of the phrase to 1990s hip-hop subcultures, the circulation of the phrase after the 2014 uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri, and the mainstreaming of the phrase in subsequent years.9 Through this example and others, Richardson and Ragland remind us that these literacies “[fall] outside of . . . state-sanctioned ideologies.”10 “In the eyes of the oppressor,” they write, “Black still equals not fully human,” and it is in opposition to this hegemonic stance that the Black Lives Matter movement “expands upon Black language traditions and creates its own semiotic system and literacy practices to signify pride, resilience, and affirmation of all Black humanity.”11David Ponton’s “Clothed in Blue Flesh: Police Brutality and the Disciplining of Race, Gender, and the ‘Human’” examines how it is that policing “divorce[s]” Black subjects from “citizenship and humanity” through a reading of a different kind of digital text: the cell-phone video recording of a police stop-and-frisk taken by a man named Alex Bodilla in Philadelphia in 2013.12 Whereas the other two pieces look horizontally at the wide range of communications available on social media, Ponton closely reads one source that is exemplary in its very mundaneness. Analyzing in granular detail the words and actions of two police officers and the two men they detain over sixteen minutes of footage, Ponton shows how the police establish and maintain their authority through “ritualized performance”—the way Bodilla’s friend “throws his hands up” in response to the officers’ physical and verbal aggression, for example.13 Over its course, Ponton argues, the encounter “redefine[s] the subjectivities” of all the involved parties: the two Black men who are forcibly stopped, interrogated, harassed, and ultimately released are transformed into “the ‘not-quite-human’ black-criminal-suspect,” while the officers’ ability to violate their victims’ bodily integrity at will reconfigures them as “something more-than-human.”14 Ponton thus reads the officers as constituting something like a racial group, refashioned from a status as “simply human” into—taking seriously the pro-police slogan “Blue Lives Matter”—“persons in blue flesh.”15 By highlighting race in this encounter as a “process of becoming,” Ponton’s essay emphasizes the active contestation of power that takes place in everyday acts of policing—and in the documenting and archiving of those acts.16Reflecting on their archiving work, Aguayo, Patton, and Bandonis write, “We are answering a call to action that does not have an immediate end.”17 Indeed, each of these essays develops and shares new archival and reading practices for materials whose future use we do not yet know. These three pieces were published before the mass protests and uprisings that took place in the summer of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis and the circulation of video of that act on social media. The insights that these authors offer remind us that what has frequently been called a “reckoning” since the summer of 2020 has been long in the making. Those of us who aim to abolish deadly policing systems need both long memories and capacious imaginations. As the state and its institutions attempt to absorb, distort, and soften critiques of police violence, counterarchives like the ones described here work to disallow histories of resistance from being erased or forgotten. They help us envision the narrative trajectories that can lead to Black liberation, and with it, our collective liberation.18
Criminology · Genealogy · Sociology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Race, History, and American Society
| Highly cited | No |
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