This article interrogates the visual and political logics that make black protest intelligible within modern regimes of political appearance. Focusing on the Black Lives Matter movement and the 2020 Minneapolis uprising, the essay draws on Afropessimist and psychoanalytic theory to examine how the riot unsettles the frameworks that render Blackness legible only through vulnerability, loss, or redemptive spectacle. Against interpretations that recuperate black protest as democratic renewal or moral claim, it theorizes black protest as a site of rupture rather than representation, and as an encounter that exposes the limits of visibility politics and gestures toward a mode of relation unbound from recognition, redemption, or the demand to appear.
Articles by Kevin Rigby Jr.
Kevin Rigby Jr. is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. A scholar of Black political thought, political theory, and critical Black studies, his research explores the philosophical and political dimensions of revolt.