Black Meme : A History of the Images that Make Us

*** 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 first black kiss on film, lynching postcards, the image of Emmett Till’s coffin, the Rodney King video, and 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. Furthermore, she argues that such memes question who owns such imagery and the right to 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.