Black Meme: The History of the Images That Make Us

"This fascinating, profound and engrossing book places Legacy Russell as one of the more provocative, radical and original thinkers of her generation."-Lynn Hershman Leeson, artist and filmmaker (praise for Glitch Feminism) A history of Black imagery that recasts our understanding of visual culture and technology In Black Meme, Legacy Russell, award-winning author of the groundbreaking Glitch Feminism, explores the "meme" as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to the present, mining both archival and contemporary media. Russell argues that without the contributions of Black people, digital culture would not exist in its current form. These meditations include the circulation of lynching postcards; why a mother allowed Jet magazine to publish a picture of her dead son, Emmett Till; and how the televised broadcast of protesters in Selma changed the debate on civil rights. Questions of the media representation of Blackness come to the fore as Russell considers how a citizen-recorde