![]() ![]() This essay analyzes the Black Twitter hashtags #IfTheyGunnedMeDown and #AliveWhileBlack to develop a revisionary theory of anti-racist activism that reveals how certain socially mediated protest movements, in insisting on the ability of the Black body and human to “matter,” encourage the recognition of alternative forms of humanity and embodiment to those offered by humanist, economic, and juridical models. Therefore, the author argues, the genre of tragedy provides a vocabulary or structure for understanding the processes of dehumanization as well as the articulation of suffering and dissent that are at stake in these spectacles. But, the fact that we now have immediate, visual access to these incidents does not necessarily mean that the truth about them is less a matter of dispute. Police brutality against black people is increasingly being documented as digital images and videos become highly circulated. The visual modalities in which their deaths are expressed and experienced are part of the justification of them. But what makes them tragic? When the black body is cast as a threat to law and order, it might be impossible to appeal to standard notions of innocence, right to protection, and fair trial. The injustice in Brown’s and other unarmed teenagers’ deaths are clear. More specifically the author enlists Sophocles's Antigone (441 BC) in an anachronistic analysis of Brown's tragedy. ![]() ![]() The article frames Michael Brown as a tragic teenager and includes literary tragedy in the interpretation of his downfall in order to eschew such determinations of his character as either a thug or a student with a bright future. Future investigations should include a wider range of emotions to be evaluated as well as cross platform analysis. The user generated content most shared is webpage links and the hashtags that appear most frequently next to #BlackLivesMatter are #Ferguson (427) and #MikeBrown (111). Rage is the most common emotion, closely followed by enthusiasm. The findings indicated that the events that most influences the use of #BlackLivesMatter are the deaths of black people by the hands of police officers, trials and manifestations. The methodology uses a quantitative approach to analyze a sample of tweets that contain the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. This objective is divided in four questions: What types of events influence the use of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter?, What type of user generated content appears with this hashtag?, What other hashtags are used when #BlackLivesMatter is present? And which emotions (rage, fear or enthusiasm) appear in these messages? We present a theoretical framework that includes characteristics of microblogging platforms as well as their impact on social movements of the last decade. This study presents a process to research the elements that influence the creation and proliferation of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, and explores the ways Twitter members use this hashtag. I conclude by proposing that, while #BLM aims to empower black lives and build a collective, we remember the political possibilities that affect and queer theories have to offer in order to attend to, and potentially disrupt, the violence that such collectives bring. I argue that these affective intensities incite an 'unpredictable intimacy' that closely connects strangers to black bodies and intensifies the forces of race, gender, and hetero/ sexuality in ways that-counter to the movement's purpose- violate the bodies of queer/black women, in particular, via the processes of replication and erasure. Within this piece, I explore how #BLM, as a larger sociopolitical movement, works to collectively bind strangers together by transmitting affects that produce a sense of immediacy, intimacy, and belonging. #BlackLivesMatter (#BLM) has garnered considerable attention in recent years with its commitment to honor all black lives, yet the affective dimensions of this global cause remain largely under-theorized. ![]()
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