Sights of Racial Violence: New Media Technologies and Acts of Watching, Memory, and Legitimation.

Racial VIolence;New Media;Blackness;digital;technology;Screen Arts and Cultures;African-American Studies;American and Canadian Studies;Humanities (General);Humanities;American Culture

Sung, WendySee, Sarita E ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Racial VIolence;    New Media;    Blackness;    digital;    technology;    Screen Arts and Cultures;    African-American Studies;    American and Canadian Studies;    Humanities (General);    Humanities;    American Culture;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/133513/wendsung_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation explores the relationship between race, technology, and media cultures by examining the phenomenon of watching anti-Black violence in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American culture. Through selected case studies, Sights of Racial Violence excavates a history between spectacular anti-Black violence and new media, revealing how racial violence is instrumentalized as a legitimizing force for new media technologies in moments of instantiation and industry crisis. The questions that guide this historical inquiry are: What are the cartographies of the relationships between new media, social worth, and racial violence? How does the intersection of racial violence and new media affect imaginings of race, technology, and racial progress? And finally, how does this relationship create particular modes of spectatorship in the consumption or witnessing of racial violence? To answer these questions, each chapter of Sights of Racial Violence focuses on an iconic instance wherein highly visible, state-sanctioned racial violence intersects with the emergence of new media technology: television’s proliferation into the American home and civil rights violence in the 1960s; the Rodney King beating tape and camcorder technology in 1992; Rodney King’s appearance on reality television in 2004’s post-network age; and, finally, Twitter and the #BlackLivesMatter hashtags memorializing Sandra Bland’s death in 2015.Using primarily textual analysis, I examine televisual representations in tandem with online audience reactions and media industry history. My reading of these sources seeks to understand how cultural memory and the historical and social architectures of spectatorship inform how we watch, witness, and understand spectacular racial violence. From television to Twitter and from the civil rights movement to #BlackLivesMatter, this trans-media history produces dynamic effects and consequences that range from shifts in racial formations and the legibilities of racial progress to critiques of the very nature of the visual and the creation of spectacular ;;newness” of technology. In the end, this dissertation dismantles the persistent belief that technology operates as a type of public accountability, delivering protection and freedom from racial violence. Instead, Sights of Racial Violence illuminates how racial violence offered opportunities for new media technologies to utilize its images and social importance as a conduit for legitimation.