Unhomeliness—Afterlife and Testimony

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article considers the unhomeliness of blackness by interrogating aspects of the controversial 2019 Dallas Country District Court case in which Judge Tammy Kemp ruled the jury to consider the state’s “ castle doctrine” and “mistake of fact” in the trial of Dallas police officer, Amber Guyger, who claimed to shoot Botham Jean, an unarmed black man in his own apartment, by mistake. In doing so, the article places together the notion of afterlife as conceptualized separately by Walter Benjamin and Saidiya Hartman to raise the role of testimony as a fundamentally anti-black structural dilemma rooted beyond legal theory and notions of evidence.