Networked testimony as necroresistance

Abstract

By catalyzing the affective sentiments of networked publics through the depiction of death, necroresistance cultivates empowerment through the sight of death to enable the security of the living. This essay conducts a close reading of Diamond Reynolds’ livestream video, which polemicized the execution of her partner, Philando Castile, at the hands of the state in order to examine how networked testimonies and necropolitical “selfies” have altered the discourse concerning racialized violence in a US context. Her networked testimony is both an indictment of this historical legacy, and an overture to accountability, for the video anticipates the multiple narratives that will abound in a court of law. In the struggle for liberation against state violence, Reynolds’ video differentiates itself from conventional notions of testimony because her narration is self-reflexive, simultaneously enacting both sousveillance and self-surveillance. Through this hybrid form of testimony, Reynolds’ produces a novel, performative form of necroresistance that centers her networked testimony as a counter-discourse to that of the state and its auxiliary components, including law enforcement and the judicial system. As such, necroresistance via networked testimonies harbor an anticipatory logic, act as evidence of criminal harm, a means of self-exoneration, and provide a forum for public mourning via digital circulation.