James Garrison

Responding to interconnected tragedies affecting minority populations in America, Black Bodies That Matter: Mourning, Rage, and Beauty brings together the Black Lives Matter movement with the framework developed by Judith Butler in Bodies That Matter. Butler’s analysis of subject life as a kind of melancholy—preempted mourning where loss itself is lost—and her advocacy of public forms of grieving like the AIDS Quilt, which brings lost lives out of the shadows, highlight the problematic connection between memory and loss when it comes to subjects who do not fully matter as they should. Taking her remarks on public memorials like the AIDS Quilt, her reading of Michel Foucault’s idea of the subject as a self-surveilling prisoner, and her examination of Louis Althusser’s scene where the voice of police authority bellows “Hey, you there!” and creates the “you” that turns around beholden to conscience, James Garrison examines resonances with black experience in America, which itself is marked by violence, surveillance, imprisonment, and encounters with the ominous voice of police authority. Investigating a wide array of black cultural expression, Black Bodies That Matter brings new insight to how mourning, vulnerability and invulnerability, rage, and beauty connect to human dignity and the depth and breadth of black loss.

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