Special Issue - Global Black Lives Matter

As we consider Black Lives Matter protests at a global level, we investigate the ripple effects that re-thinking and reclaiming icons such as films, statues, museums, monuments, streets, sites names and sounds are having for social change and equality in contemporary and historical eras (Klinkert, Casagrande and Lincopi). As Cornel West commented on the protests that followed Floyd’s murder: ‘It is ‘America’s moment of reckoning… but we want to make the connection between the local and the global’ (Democracy Now interview, 2020). We have seen solidarity in advocacy and protest as forces have joined in reaction and in relation to a shared history of oppression and inequality. Inspired by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest, calls against weaponised state violence on minorities, migrants and indigenous people have resulted in a decentralised movement that aims to protest police brutality while exposing the ‘carceral state as a fundamentally racist regime’ (Burton 2015) and the continuing cruelties of coloniality (Quijano 2020). 

In a world asphyxiated by the pandemic, pollution, carbon overload, violence and abuse - breathing becomes a metaphor for justice. Breath forges an energetic synergy between words, images, performance and context to create a fundamental, shared and synaesthetic effect as our senses intertwine and respond. Physical and political suffocation adds an additional dimension to our perceptions and experiences of the world, whilst building up frustration and anger, thereby accelerating the potential of resistance (Sharma, Rosamojo). From a moment of asphyxiation, ‘I can’t breathe’ becomes ‘an incantation, a conjuring of the ghosts of state-sponsored racism’ as Christen Smith (2015) recalls with regards to the police chokehold on Garner. Expiration became the inspiration and basis for a unifying politics of refusal as part of collective action to reject unjust structures and systems – and, building upon Paul Gilroy, a venture towards a transformative and performative planetary humanism (Kaur).

This Special Issue collates the works of a range of artists and early career and established scholars including excellent undergraduate and postgraduate students to further examine these issues from multiple perspectives. Initially, presented as part of three conference panels at the RAI Film Festival in March 2021, a crucial part of this enquiry was to highlight the complex interactions and relations between racism, resistance, memory, and politics and their permutations through sonic and visual representations. While we are inspired by the collection of short essays on BLM in the USA, Trinidad and Brazil introduced by Bianca C. Williams (2015), we note that their focus does not extend to other oppressed racial or ethnic groups that demonstrated solidarity in movements against racism. This is aside from considering other variants of Blackness as transpired in apartheid South Africa and in 1970s and 1980s Britain when migrants from formerly colonised countries came together under the political umbrella of Black to resist the racist state (see Fatton 1986, Kumiko 1997 on Black Consciousness Movement in South African, and Hall 1967, 1970 on ‘Black Britons’), notwithstanding that all of these categories of identity are contestable and ever-shifting. Nevertheless, such histories have been sidelined in US-centric histories and interpretations of Blackness. Contributors’ to this Special Issue therefore pan out from Black lives in the USA (Partridge) to consider the plight of and solidarity expressed by Native Americans that powerfully re-interpreted the racist state with their own experiences (Leeves) towards wider transnational and other manifestations as inspired by more regional (Melossi, Sharma) and personal calls for justice that embraces memories and traumas, while protesting lost lives through the arts, films, music, and performances (Sharma, Rosamojo, Lennon). The role of social media plays a crucial role in millennial movements where through viral imagery and audio-visual footage, op-eds, mailing lists, and innovative funding streams, protest might escalate to engage a wide network of people (Kaur, Grassilli, Klinkert, Bennet).

An examination of historical cases as with ethnographic film (Carroll) and music through the sonic and intimate experiences of reggae, jungle and grime in London (James) reaffirm that ‘the cultural is political’. The ‘vibe’ or the building of an intimate collective through jungle music - albeit now turned online, from radio and grime clubs to global algorithms - creates affective and material moments that represent alternative cultural politics in everyday experiences. Catharsis through music, sound and other kinds of performances represents a future of hope and of resisting dystopia through diasporic aesthetics (James). Meanwhile, white ignorance is made visible as a product of such catharses (Klinckert).