Smashing the icon of Black Lives Matter: afropessimism & religious iconolatry

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article seeks to intervene in the critical conversations surrounding Black Lives Matter (BLM) to urge scholars to challenge the very political calculus from which we (dis)count lives and ascribe value or matter as a mechanism of anti-Black power. I argue that we must abandon the axiological framework of the Human, by situating the Human as the centerpiece of rituals of anti-Blackness that occur in the most basic of social interactions. We must center the ritual of iconolatry, the creation and extreme veneration of icons, in order to understand how BLM has become an icon of resistance that is deployed in service of the anti-Black status quo. I end with the gesture towards an alternative praxis of Black Iconoclasm that ritually enacts a shattering of various icons of Humanism in favor of what Christina Sharpe calls the hold.