Visuality, Surveillance, and The Afterlife of Slavery

Abstract

In July 2016 the New Yorker printed “American Exposure,” Harvard University historian Jill Lepore’s reflection on the widely circulated video of Philando Castile’s deadly encounter with police officers that his girlfriend Diamond Reynolds recorded and uploaded to Facebook. Lepore’s decision to watch the footage of Castile’s death sets in motion a sustained reflection on visual media’s thorny role in the long African American freedom struggle, leading her directly from Reynolds to none other than Frederick Douglass. Recounting her viewing experience, Lepore writes: So I forced myself to watch. And, as I did, the screen went black—the police had thrown down Reynolds’ phone, and put her in handcuffs—and you could only hear voices, the muted, distant sound of Reynolds crying and praying, and closer, the urgent voice of her four-year-old daughter, and right then I remembered that photograph of Douglass. ... The image in question is a mid-1850s daguerreotype. In 1968 Life’s portrait appeared as the cover of its special issue “The Search for a Black Past,” printed a few months after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, assassination and the subsequent riots where police violently faced off with mostly black protestors.