Symposium Keynote
Resurrecting the Black Body
Dr. Tonia Sutherland
In Resurrecting the Black Body Tonia Sutherland examines the consequences of digitally raising the dead. Attending to the violent deaths of Black Americans–and the records that document them–from slavery through the present, Sutherland explores media evidence, digital acts of remembering, and the rights and desires of humans to be forgotten. From the popular image of Gordon (also known as “Whipped Peter”), photographs of the lynching of Jesse Washington, and the video of George Floyd’s murder to DNA, holograms, and posthumous communication, Sutherland draws on critical archival, digital, and cultural studies to make legible Black bodies and lives forever captured in cycles of memorialization and commodification. If the Black digital afterlife is rooted in historical bigotry and inspires new forms of racialized aggression, Resurrecting the Black Body asks what other visions of life and remembrance are possible, illuminating the unique ways that Black cultures have fought against the silence and erasure of oblivion.
Biography
Tonia Sutherland is Assistant Professor of Information Studies at UCLA. Sutherland holds a PhD and an MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh and a BA in history, performance studies, and cultural studies from Hampshire College. Global in scope, Sutherland’s research focuses on the critical and liberatory in archival studies, digital studies, and science and technology studies, emphasizing the often-messy entanglements of memory, community, and technology. Sutherland, an internationally recognized expert in the study of Black archival practices, is the author of Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife (University of California Press, 2023) as well as over two dozen articles and book chapters. In addition to her research and teaching, Sutherland is the Co-Director of the Community Archives Lab at UCLA, Co-Founder and Co-Director of AfterLab at the University of Washington’s iSchool, and a member of the Advisory Board for the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies at NYU.