Abstract
In this chapter, we analyze the way Black Lives Matter activists represent the victims of police killings in online media, in a context where African Americans are criminalized both in life and after death. Departing from Peirce’s semiotic theory, we find that activists reconstruct the deceased’s personhood by identifying them with a larger victimized collective and with the protestors themselves as potential victims of racialized police violence. We also find that activists frame their claims visually, utilizing different modes of representation in different contexts. In doing so, the dead not only become full persons again, but also postmortem actors. The dead join the fight against police killings of African Americans.
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Notes
- 1.
The United States federal government does not keep official statistics, and it is difficult to quantify the issue with precision (Klinger, 2011). Amnesty International (2015) estimates that between 400 and 1000 persons are killed by police every year. These estimates coincide with the statistics gathered by activist groups and journalists (see, e.g., Mapping Police Violence and The Counted by The Guardian).
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Langa, M., Creswell, P.K. (2019). Aligned with the Dead: Representations of Victimhood and the Dead in Anti-Police Violence Activism Online. In: Holmberg, T., Jonsson, A., Palm, F. (eds) Death Matters. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11485-5_10
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