In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police has sparked protests and riots around the world. The policing of the pandemic reveals the racial biases inherent to law enforcement and state-led discipline, laying bare ongoing infrastructural inequalities that render racialized subjects more vulnerable to premature death at the hands of police and public health systems alike. With the video embedded in the article, we guide readers through thirty-nine seconds of rioting in Los Angeles on May 31, 2020, shot on a mobile phone and circulated virally on Twitter. The affected body of the witness indexes both the intensity of the event and the embodied experience of the witness, establishing a relation between the two. The experiential aesthetics of the video exceeds the content and this affectivity circulates with its mediation and movement through networked platforms. Such forms of affective witnessing allow for an attunement to political struggle that occurs through what Hortense Spillers would call the analytic of the flesh. Thinking at the intersection of Black studies, affect theory, and media studies, we argue that the flesh is an affective register crucial to the building of global anti-racist solidarities towards abolition.
Articles by Michael Richardson
Michael Richardson is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales. His transdisciplinary research investigates witnessing and testimony at the intersection of political violence, technology, and culture. He is currently funded by an Australian Research Council DECRA fellowship on drones and witnessing. He is the author of Gestures of Testimony: Torture, Trauma and Affect in Literature (Bloomsbury, 2016), along with numerous essays and articles, and co-director of the UNSW Media Futures Hub.