Resurrecting the Black Body

Book excerpt: "In Resurrecting the Black Body, Tonia Sutherland examines 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 present, Sutherland explores media evidence, digital acts of remembering, and the rights and desires of humans to be forgotten. From the popular image of Gordon (also known as "Whipped Peter"), photographs of the lynching of Jesse Washington, and the video of George Floyd's murder to DNA, holograms, and posthumous communication, Sutherland draws on critical archival, digital, and cultural studies to make legible Black bodies and lives forever captured in cycles of memorialization and commodification. If the Black digital afterlife is rooted in historical 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 the silence and erasure of oblivion"--