Black Meme: A History of the Images that Make Us

"Unsettles, expands and deepens our understanding of the black meme...necessary reading; brilliant and utterly convincing." –Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes "You will be galvanized by Legacy Russell’s analytic brilliance and visceral eloquence." –Margo Jefferson, author of Constructing a Nervous System A history of Black imagery that recasts our understanding of visual culture and technology In Black Meme, Legacy Russell, award-winning author of the groundbreaking Glitch Feminism, explores the “meme” as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to the present, mining both archival and contemporary media. Russell argues that without the contributions of Black people, digital culture would not exist in its current form. These meditations include the circulation of lynching postcards; why a mother allowed Jet magazine to publish a picture of her dead son, Emmett Till; and how the televised broadcast of protesters in Selma changed the debate on civil rights. Questions of the media representation of Blackness come to the fore as Russell considers how a citizen-recorded footage of the LAPD beating Rodney King became the first viral video. And the Anita Hill hearings shed light on the media’s creation of the Black icon.