Legacy Russell

Black Meme

A History of the Images That Make Us

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

*** Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle award for Criticism *** Through imagery, memory, and technology, BLACK MEME shows us how images of Blackness have always been central to our understanding of the modern world. Without the contributions of Black people, digital culture would not exist in its current form. Through the study of a series of iconic images -including the very fist black kiss on film, lynching postcards; the image of Emmett Till's coffin; the Rodney King video; Michael Jackson's Thriller . Questions of the media representation of Blackness come to the fore as Russell considers why such images shed light on the media’s creation of the Black icon. Further more she argues that such memes question who owns such imagery and the right to the memory; as told through the story of Tamara Lanier’s fight to reclaim the daguerreotypes of her enslaved ancestors from Harvard. As well as the live broadcast on Facebook of the murder of Philando Castile by the police after he was stopped for a broken taillight. Powerful, unflinching and deeply moving, Legacy Russell forces us to bear witness to the persistent legacy of the Black meme and the question of what we owe to repair and restore visual culture's persistent appropriation of Black imagery.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Verso
• Seitenzahl: 192
• Erscheinungstermin: 15. September 2026
• Englisch
• Gewicht: 367g
• ISBN-13: 9781839762819
• ISBN-10: 1839762810
• Artikelnr.: 76283595

Autorenporträt

Legacy Russell was born and raised in New York City. She is the Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen. Formerly she was the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Russell holds an MRes with Distinction in Art History from Goldsmiths, University of London with a focus in Visual Culture. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow, a recipient of the 2021 Creative Capital Award, a 2022 Pompeii Commitment Digital Fellow and a 2023 Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow. Russell’s written work, interviews, and essays have been published internationally. Her first book was Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020). Black Meme was shortlisted for The National Book Critics Award, 2024.

Inhaltsangabe

List of Illustrations

Overture: Black Planets / Black Memes / Black Acts

1. Strange Fruit, Gone Viral: The Souls of Moving Image
2. Eating the Other: Emmett Till's Memory, Myth, and Black Magic
3. Selma On My Mind: Protest, Media, and Viral Witness
4. Sporting the Black Complaint: John Carlos and Tommie Smith, Silent Blackness, and Memetic Nationhood
5. Viral Zombiism: Michael Jackson and "Thriller"
6. Paris is Burning: Viral Ballrooms and Memetic Royalties
7. Reality, Televised: On the Rodney King Generation
8. Refusing Symbolism: Anita Hill and Magic Johnson
9. "The Dancing Baby": Birth of a [Gif] Nation
10. The Shadow, The Substance: Renty and Delia as Viral Daguerreotypes
11. Meme Afterlives: Lavish Reynolds In Broadcast (And, Anyway, Arrest the Cops That Killed Breonna Taylor)

Outro in Remix: Lyric for the Black Meme

Acknowledgments
Notes

Rezensionen

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! Arimeta Diop Vanity Fair