DIGITALLY MEDIATED MARTYRDOM: THE VISUAL POLITICS OF POSTHUMOUS IMAGES IN THE POPULAR STRUGGLE FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE

Kelly Lewis MSc, PostGradDipJourn, BA

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Digital Media Research Centre Creative industries Faculty Queensland University of Technology 2020

Keywords

Digitally mediated martyrdom

Death

Martyrdom

Injustice

Digital image

Posthumous image

Visual social media

Activism

Social justice movements

Political protest

Injustice symbols

Operative image

Khaled Said

Trayvon Martin

Instagram

Discursive practice

Memetic culture

Digital affordances

Visual politics

Digitally Mediated Martyrdom: The Visual Politics of Posthumous Images in the Popular Struggle for Social Justice i

Abstract

This thesis investigates an emerging dynamic within contemporary activist cultures: the production, editing, sharing, and further transformation of digital images in response to the deaths of innocent civilians due to police brutality and to political injustice. I call this “digitally mediated martyrdom”, understood as a ritualised communicative process that emerges in and through digital images to give visibility to the unjust killing of ordinary individuals, and establishes as its targets of protest systems of authority, abuse, and human rights violations. Digitally mediated martyrdom involves the visually oriented and discursive practices of activists and ordinary people who participate in symbolically resurrecting victims and transforming them into martyrs in the popular struggle for social justice. Digital media affordances enables the production and circulation of new types of images that can make violent injustice visible in new ways.

This thesis develops new theoretical frameworks and analytical concepts to study the increasingly complex role that digitally mediated images play in transnational activism and globalised politics. Specifically, it develops a new conception of digitally mediated martyrdom as a contemporary political practice within transnational activist cultures and popular social justice movements. The framework is 1) developed through a preliminary example of #WeAreAllKhaledSaid, where I investigated how, following the brutal death of Khaled Said in 2010 at the hands of Egyptian security forces, the circulation of posthumous images of Said (both in life and post-mortem) were deployed during and were instrumental to the 2010- 2011 Egyptian uprisings; and 2) then applied to the more elaborate case study of #JusticeForTrayvonMartin, where I investigated how posthumously circulated images of Trayvon Martin were deployed in the contemporary struggle for Black social justice in America and in the Black Lives Matter movement between 2012-2019.

Previous digital activism research has overwhelmingly tended to address activist practice through the prism of verbal/written textual analysis, whether through close reading or ‘big data’ analyses. The focus of this study was centred more on visual than verbal communication: it addressed the growing role and complexity of digitally mediated images that were deployed in emerging configurations of social contestation,

ii Digitally Mediated Martyrdom: The Visual Politics of Posthumous Images in the Popular Struggle for Social Justice

political resistance, and transnational activism. To do so, I traced the chronology of protest images and their circulation, appropriations and digital variations on Facebook, Twitter, and mainstream news media platforms (for Khaled Said), and on Instagram (for Trayvon Martin). I examined how images were discursively deployed to perform different communicative functions at different times and in relation to different events.

The study found that the posthumously circulated images of Khaled Said and Trayvon Martin were recurrently used for commemorative purposes to mobilise political dissent in ways that reflected new developments in the deployment of martyr images and the narrative of martyrdom. This occurred through complex communicative practices of appropriation and reappropriation, mediation, and remediation, which manifested around central claims of injustice, human rights abuses, and collective identification. The cultural meaning and symbolic representation of the figure of the martyr have evolved throughout history and beyond traditional religious or nationalist causes. This thesis argues that the narrative of martyrdom has re-emerged in the past decade as a distinct political aesthetic of popular protest, and that the phenomenon is made manifest as a discursive practice that is present within global cultures of digital activism. The study demonstrated that digital remix culture enabled for the development of new visual practices through which the martyr narrative was developed and made politically productive as a discourse of resistance. This significantly contributed to bringing into being multivocal discourses that reflected different articulations of lived experiences, public contestations, and collective discontent.

The study found that the figure of the martyr is increasingly being deployed to represent the popular struggle for social justice, to radically reimagine alternative futures, and to rearticulate and redress systems of injustice. Digitally mediated martyrdom, then, operates as a both an explicit and subversive vehicle through which activists and ordinary people are able to give visibility to flagrant human rights abuses and to perceived situations of political injustice. The affordances of digitally media technologies permit for the mediation of visibility of injustices that are often censored by oppressive regimes or overlooked in mainstream media coverage, including police brutality and racist violence. The study concluded that digital media affordances are critical to the emergence of digitally mediated martyrdom as a new transnational protest dynamic, in that they shape the possibilities of martyrdom as a digitally

Digitally Mediated Martyrdom: The Visual Politics of Posthumous Images in the Popular Struggle for Social Justice iii

mediated and ritualised performance of political mobilisation. The phenomenon of digitally mediated martyrdom offers valuable insights into how power and meaning is enacted in and through digitally mediated images.

iv Digitally Mediated Martyrdom: The Visual Politics of Posthumous Images in the Popular Struggle for Social Justice

Table of Contents

Keywords ...... i Abstract ...... ii Table of Contents ...... v List of Figures ...... vii List of Tables ...... ix Previously Published Content ...... x Statement of Original Authorship ...... xi Acknowledgements...... xii Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1 1.1 Overview ...... 1 1.2 Scope and Context ...... 7 1.3 Research Approach...... 9 1.4 Research Design and Methods ...... 12 1.5 Thesis Outline...... 25 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom ...... 31 2.1 Introduction ...... 31 2.2 Digitally Mediated Martyrdom Defined...... 33 2.3 Conceptual Framework ...... 41 2.4 Martyrdom and Mediation...... 46 2.5 Digital Mediation ...... 51 2.6 Exploratory Example #WeAreAllKhaledSaid ...... 74 Warning: Graphic images contained in this section ...... 74 2.7 Methods and Data Collection ...... 76 2.8 Data Analysis ...... 77 2.9 Conclusion ...... 88 Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice 91 3.1 Introduction ...... 91 3.2 The Rise and Resurrection of Political Martyrdom in America ...... 93 3.3 Background and Context ...... 103 3.4 The Mediatised Life of Trayvon Martin...... 110 3.5 Methods and Data Collection ...... 121 Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter ...... 133 Warning: Graphic images contained in this chapter and the following chapters...... 133

Digitally Mediated Martyrdom: The Visual Politics of Posthumous Images in the Popular Struggle for Social Justice v

4.1 Introduction ...... 133 4.2 Data Analysis ...... 135 Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin ...... 172 5.1 Introduction ...... 172 5.2 Data Analysis ...... 172 5.3 Conclusion ...... 195 Chapter 6: Conclusion ...... 199 6.1 Contribution to Knowledge ...... 199 6.2 Limitations and Future Research ...... 207 6.3 Opportunities and Implications for Practice ...... 210 References ...... 213 Appendices ...... 246 Appendix A Chronology of Key Events ...... 246

vi Digitally Mediated Martyrdom: The Visual Politics of Posthumous Images in the Popular Struggle for Social Justice

List of Figures

Figure 2.1. Widely circulated image of Khaled Said juxtaposing pre-death and post-mortem images (retrieved from Facebook) ...... 77 Figure 2.2. Khaled Said, appropriated as an internet meme in mid-June 2010 and labelled “Egypt's Martyr” (retrieved from Twitter) ...... 80 Figure 2.3. Egyptian youths protest in the streets of Cairo on 20 June, 2010, against the brutal killing of Khaled Said (in portraits) (retrieved from Agence France-Presse (AFP); image credit: AFP/Khaled Desouki) ...... 82 Figure 2.4. Khaled Said’s pre-death image appropriated as a graffiti stencil on the urban walls of Cairo in 2010 (retrieved from Middle East Eye; image credit: Amro Ali) ...... 83 Figure 2.5. Political cartoon of Khaled Said designed in 2011 by Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff for the “We Are All Khaled Said” campaign (retrieved from Twitter; image credit: Carlos Latuff) ...... 85 Figure 2.6. An Egyptian activist wears a face mask depicting Khaled Said on 25 January during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution (retrieved from Facebook; image credit: Hossam el-Hamalawy) ...... 86 Figure 3.1. Trayvon Martin (left) (retrieved from AP photo, image credit: Martin family); George Zimmerman (right) (retrieved from Wikimedia Commons) ...... 118 Figure 4.1. “58 years apart same struggle” (retrieved from Instagram) ...... 140 Figure 4.2. “America be like: He was a good kid, he was A thug” (retrieved from Instagram) ...... 141 Figure 4.3. “These are the first photos released by the media. The media needs to be held accountable to a higher standard” (retrieved from Instagram) ...... 142 Figure 4.4. “Not a boy. He was just a boy” (retrieved from Instagram) ...... 144 Figure 4.5. “Executed: An American boy” (retrieved from Instagram) ...... 145 Figure 4.6. The hoodie selfie: “I am Trayvon Martin” (retrieved from Instagram) ...... 150 Figure 4.7. The hoodie selfie combined with Skittles and iced-tea as other symbols of protest (retrieved from Instagram) ...... 152 Figure 4.8. The hoodie as a protest avatar (retrieved from Instagram) ...... 155 Figure 4.9. The hoodie v. the MAGA hat (retrieved from Instagram) ...... 159 Figure 4.10. “These hoodies are acceptable. This hoodie gets you murdered” (retrieved from Instagram) ...... 160 Figure 4.11. ‘Thug’ images taken from Trayvon Martin’s social media accounts (retrieved from Instagram) ...... 161 Figure 4.12. Trayvon Martin’s ‘thug-styled’ selfie (retrieved from Instagram)...... 166

Digitally Mediated Martyrdom: The Visual Politics of Posthumous Images in the Popular Struggle for Social Justice vii

Figure 4.13. “They don’t give a fuck about us!” (retrieved from Instagram) ...... 167 Figure 4.14. “Fuck Zimmerman” (retrieved from Instagram) ...... 170 Figure 5.1. Graphic post-mortem image of Trayvon Martin taken at the crime scene (retrieved from Instagram) ...... 174 Figure 5.2. Crime scene image of Trayvon Martin’s corpse covered by a yellow blanket (retrieved from Instagram) ...... 175 Figure 5.3. Photoshop-based collage combining post-mortem image and the painting “A Tale of Two Hoodies” by American artist Michael D’Antuono (retrieved from Instagram) ...... 178 Figure 5.4. Juxtaposed pre-death and post-mortem images of Trayvon Martin (retrieved from Instagram) ...... 178 Figure 5.5. Juxtaposed post-mortem images of Trayvon Martin and Emmett Till (retrieved from Instagram) ...... 179 Figure 5.6. Juxtaposed pre-death images/post-mortem images of Trayvon Martin combined with other deceased victims (retrieved from Instagram) ...... 179 Figure 5.7. Image of George Zimmerman juxtaposed with post-mortem image of Trayvon Martin (retrieved from Instagram) ...... 181 Figure 5.8. Photoshop-based collage with George Zimmerman juxtaposed with post-mortem images of Trayvon Martin (retrieved from Instagram) ...... 181 Figure 5.9. Photoshop remix depicting Trayvon Martin as an angel on horseback (retrieved from Instagram) ...... 186 Figure 5.10. Illustration depicting Trayvon Martin with Coptic style circle-halo and red Skittles to symbolise the shedding of his blood (retrieved from Instagram) ...... 187 Figure 5.11. Illustration of Trayvon Martin evoking the metaphor of the last supper (retrieved from Instagram) ...... 189 Figure 5.12. “Liberty: A Universal Chronology of Black Protest” by Afrocentric artist Omar Victor Diop (retrieved from Instagram) ...... 190 Figure 5.13. Remixed image of Trayvon Martin as the “young king” (retrieved from Instagram) ...... 192

All Figures have been removed from this published version of the thesis due to copyright restrictions and ethical reasons.

viii Digitally Mediated Martyrdom: The Visual Politics of Posthumous Images in the Popular Struggle for Social Justice

List of Tables

Table 3.1 Study and dataset overview...... 122

Digitally Mediated Martyrdom: The Visual Politics of Posthumous Images in the Popular Struggle for Social Justice ix

Previously Published Content

Portions of this study have been published as:

Myles, D. & Lewis, K. (2019). Constructing Injustice Symbols in Contemporary Trans Rights Activism. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning [Women, Gender and Research], 28(3- 4), 24–42. doi:10.7146/kkf.v28i2-3.116306

Lewis, K. (2019). Digitally Mediated Martyrdom: The Role of the Visual in Political Arab Activist Culture. Journal of Arab & Muslim Media Research, 12(2), 169–189. doi:10.1386/jammr_00002_1

My contribution to Myles & Lewis (2019) centres on the conceptual framework of injustice symbols, which appears in section 2.3 of the thesis.

x Digitally Mediated Martyrdom: The Visual Politics of Posthumous Images in the Popular Struggle for Social Justice Statement of Original Authorship

The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.

Signature: QUT Verified Signature

Date: 7 July, 2020

Digitally Mediated Martyrdom: The Visual Politics of Posthumous Images in the Popular Struggle for Social Justice xi

Acknowledgements

The unfurling of my ideas into the writing of this thesis has been a yearslong task of enthusiastic persistence in practice. It has been a journey guided by a mindset of discovery and curiosity, and an experience through which I have learned to sit willingly with uncertainty and have grown comfortable with my intellectual discomfort. Gaining an intelligent understanding of the importance of that struggle imbued me with great motivation in the face of challenges. I have been challenged to think deeply, critically, and rigorously about the arguments I put forward, and to acknowledge the importance of the work. My thinking has been shaped and supported by many people, and without whom this project would not have been possible. The writing of a thesis seems a solitary venture; however, it is truly the result of social creation. It is important to acknowledge that the experience of a PhD is a privilege granted to few. For every student that is admitted into a doctoral program, there are many who do not enjoy the privilege of that opportunity. I am acutely aware of the privileges I have been granted in my intellectual freedom, and of the weight and significance of the choices I have been afforded. It is fitting, then, that my thesis begins with recognising the many remarkable people, near and far, and forever treasured, who have not only enabled me with this opportunity, but have supported me throughout it. I would like to acknowledge my indebtedness and offer my warmest thanks to my exceptional supervisory team, who have been a tireless source of support. First and foremost, to my principal supervisor, Professor Jean Burgess, you have been the rock that has kept me grounded throughout this project, the courage that has pushed me through self-doubt, the kindness that has provided me with the space to cultivate my ideas, the guiding hand that has steered my course, and the good humour that has kept me sane. Your expert advice, valuable suggestions, and generous investment of time have been invaluable throughout all stages of the project. To my associate supervisor, Associate Professor Peta Mitchell, your attention to detail, expertise, comments, and suggestions have contributed greatly to the improvement of this thesis, and your warm support has kept me buoyed over the years. To my associate supervisor, Dr T. J. Thomson, I have benefitted significantly from your kind xii Digitally Mediated Martyrdom: The Visual Politics of Posthumous Images in the Popular Struggle for Social Justice

mentorship, support, and gentle advice, and you have been a generous source of encouragement for my research and aspirant future endeavours. To my former principal supervisor, Dr Tim Highfield, who began this journey with me and after my first year of candidature relocated for an academic position abroad, your encouragement and insights in several areas were pivotal in developing the early foundation of the thesis. I am profoundly grateful for the time, attention, and critical appraisal of the members of my Final Seminar panel, Dr Ariadna Matamoros Fernández, Dr Helen Berents, and Professor Sue Carson (and alongside my supervisory team), who infused me with enthusiasm and whose enlightening comments helped me to complete this challenging endeavour. Particularly, Ariadna and Helen, you inspire me with your intellectual brilliance, good humanism, and ethical positionality. It has been a true honour to have you as part of my journey, and as warm friends. I know the future will see us work closer, and I so look forward to what we will create together. Special thanks are also due to the members of my Confirmation panel, Associate Professor Emma Baulch, who provided with me constructive feedback and helped me to broaden my methodological approach, and (especially) Dr Aljosha Karim Schapals. Aljosha, you have been a great source of intellectual support, a wonderful colleague, and most significantly, you have become a beloved friend. Though there are too many to mention individually, I am deeply grateful to all the members of the Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC) community who have kindly shared their time to discuss and enrich my work, and for those who have entrusted me with their ideas and passions. Particularly valuable were PhD research seminars, DMRC Fridays and Research Methods workshops, the many kitchen chats in the DMRC office, and corridor chats in the School of Communication. I also thank the organisers and participants of the DMRC Summer School (2018, 2019) for providing a wonderful space that drew together a diverse group of people in which to develop critical methods, initiate collaborations, and cultivate new friendships. The DMRC has provided me with a not only a safe, supportive, and dynamic environment in which to learn and grow in these past years, it has most meaningfully become a second home. A special mention goes to Dr Brendan Keogh, Dr Elija Cassidy, Dr Timothy Graham, Dr Kim Osman, Associate Professor Michael Dezuanni, and Professor Amanda Lotz. It gives me great pleasure in acknowledging the generous support of DMRC coordinators Tess McGlone and Caroline Keating,

Digitally Mediated Martyrdom: The Visual Politics of Posthumous Images in the Popular Struggle for Social Justice xiii

who provided valuable help and furnished me with good working facilities. The DMRC is recognised as a world leading centre of research; and most importantly, it plays host to many exceptional and humble people, and for which the experience of knowing them will leave an indelible mark well beyond this thesis. I am profoundly grateful to you all. As much as a PhD is an intellectual journey it too is an emotional one. Throughout this journey many friends have accompanied me and provided me with valuable ideas, feedback, and emotional sustenance. Each of you, in your own way, have furnished with me your time, presence, expertise, and energy. For this, I am deeply grateful and I am all the richer for it. Although I cannot name everyone individually, I want to acknowledge you all from Brisbane to across Australia, the Middle East and North Africa, the United Kingdom and Europe, and North America. It is with immense gratitude that I acknowledge and thank my PhD colleagues, with whom I have shared moments of kind intellectual debate, deep anxiety, tears, tremendous joy, and adventure. To Dr Ehsan Dehghan and Guy Healy, we began this journey together, and we are now on the other side of it standing in warm friendship. I will always be grateful for your time and investment in me as a person and scholar, for our stimulating conversations, for your valuable suggestions in the preparation of my presentations, and for all the smiles and laughs we have shared. To Dr Felix Münch, you have been an invaluable source of emotional nourishment, thank you for trusting me as an audience to your curious musings, and for our deep and heartfelt conversations. To Dr Stefanie Duguay, many thanks for your support since the beginning of this project, it was a pleasure to share the office with you and to engage with your good conversation. Thank you to Dr Edward Hurcombe for your incredibly warming laugh that could uplift the heaviest of souls, you have been a wonderful friend and an inspiring colleague. To Alice Witt, thank you for your feminist intellectual virtues, kind presence, and gentle friendship. Thanks to Silvia Montaña for asking me to contribute to your PhD study through which I learned much, and importantly, thank you for the lightness of your enthusiasm and good spirits. To Katherine Kirkwood, thank you for enriching me with your delightful humour and empathetic friendship. Dr Fiona Suwana, thank you for your wonderful hospitality, your kind friendship and sense of calm, and for your continual encouragement. Thank you to Sofya Glazunova for dancing with me when I needed a creative escape, for the earnest conversations, and the exchanging of many xiv Digitally Mediated Martyrdom: The Visual Politics of Posthumous Images in the Popular Struggle for Social Justice

warm embraces, your friendship has buoyed me. To Aleesha Rodriguez, thank you for your inspiring passion, ethical principles, and for challenging my thinking from multiple perspectives, you facilitate a lot of work harmony and happiness. A particular heartfelt thank you goes to Dr David Myles, whose kind friendship and perpetual encouragement not only helped me to find my intellectual feet but also made the PhD more doable. Thank you for your kind mentorship and for being so generous with your time, for your precious feedback on drafts of my work, for your interest and belief in my project and discussing it me with on numerous occasions. Especially, thank you for being there when it mattered the most. Special thanks are also due to Xiaoting Yu, Bondy Kaye, Smith Mehta, Jarrod Walczer, Gabriela Lunardi, Xu Chen, Yi Wang, Callum McWaters, Samantha Ryan, Delfi Chinnappan, Fiona Drummond and Zin Myint, you have all left a mark on me and have made my time and experience vibrant, sincerely, thank you. The members of the Higher Degree Research support team, Cushla Bosanko, Helena Papageorgiou, and Jason McDonald, deserve special mention for ensuring my PhD journey ran smoothly and for assisting me in many ways. My sincere thanks goes to liaison librarians Alice Steiner and Cameron Rutter, whose diligent assistance has been crucial for the completion of this thesis. This PhD journey would not have been possible without the financial support of the Australian Government’s Research Training Scheme, and Queensland University of Technology. I am sincerely grateful for the provision of scholarships that enabled me to not only pursue my doctoral studies, but also permitted me the opportunity to attend conferences and meet numerous and exceptional people. Finally, I dedicate this thesis to my family. I am fortunate to have the privilege of a strong and loving family, for whom, there are many words of deep-felt gratitude that should be expressed, yet one Acknowledgement section only provides space for few. To my father, Brenton, thank you for teaching me the value of hard work, for instilling in me pride and a conscious awareness of the roots of my identity, and for showing me the importance of engaging with community. Especially, thank you for showing me that adversity is a place from which you can grow strong and live purposefully. To my mother, Kathy, thank you for your good humanism, resilience, and joy; you have taught me to approach life with an insatiable curiosity and to always dream big, from you I have learned that a light heart is good medicine, and your generous spirit has shown me the value of tenderness and respect toward

Digitally Mediated Martyrdom: The Visual Politics of Posthumous Images in the Popular Struggle for Social Justice xv

others. Your love has provided me with the strength to endure and persevere in spite of overwhelming challenges. To my sister, Bianca, thank you for your unfailing emotional support, encouragement of my life choices, and for always being present in my life. Despite the long periods and distances between us, you have always been a great source of love and relief from my scholarly endeavours. You have given me the courage to live and explore with an open mind and heart.

xvi Digitally Mediated Martyrdom: The Visual Politics of Posthumous Images in the Popular Struggle for Social Justice

Chapter 1: Introduction

1.1 OVERVIEW

In this thesis I explore how digitally mediated images are used in activist cultures to make visible and contestable significant instances of unjust death. I critically evaluate the role that the visual mediation of death and unintentional martyrdom plays in contemporary digital activist cultures, in both Western and non-Western contexts. The following sections set the context and parameters for the thesis, explain how the research question was formulated and approached, and specify the overall approach to the study and its relevance as a topic for empirical enquiry.

To clarify, this thesis is concerned with individuals whose unjust deaths (due to police brutality and to perceived political injustice) become the catalyst for popular social justice protests. I do not examine cases of individuals who self-sacrifice as an act of defiance and who then become appropriated as martyrs. Rather, I examine cases of ordinary people who are posthumously appropriated in popular discourse as ‘unintentional martyrs’ of a movement. The word martyr and the concept of martyrdom are not approached through the lens of religious ideology or religious struggles in this thesis. I draw from the Arab Spring martyr model as conceptualised by Elizabeth Buckner and Lina Khatib (2014), and I do not define a martyr a priori. I apply the terms martyr and martyrdom in the context of the social processes within which they are embedded, and are understood as an extension and reframing of their previous uses.

When I began developing this study in 2016, academic approaches to investigating the role of digital and social media technologies within activist cultures since the advent of the 2009 Iranian Green Movement—and specifically the 2010- 2011 Arab uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region—had been a focus in both Western and non-Western scholarship, and in popular media debate. Many studies indicated that new and emergent digital affordances were enabling possibilities for coordinating and mobilising protest in ways that radically altered protest tactics of past eras (see Gaffney, 2010; Lotan, Graeff, Ananny, Gaffney, Pearce, & boyd, 2011; Papacharissi & de Fatima Oliveira, 2012; Bruns, Highfield, & Burgess, 2013). Such studies with their important focus on infrastructure, affordances,

Chapter 1: Introduction 1

and networks, significantly contributed to understanding patterns of interaction among social media users and flows of information during the 2010-2011 Arab uprisings. In this thesis, I explore social media protest activity further through a detailed, close, and critical engagement with the significance and actual nature of user-generated content that is conveyed through digital and social media affordances. This is a necessary undertaking because it is frequently content (i.e. digital images) that is at the heart of the political struggle.

Extant literature addresses how images of unjust violence are used in environments of conflict, war, insurgency and counterinsurgency, yet, primarily abounds in the fields of journalism, media culture, and political communication. Internet research (Freelon, McIlwain & Clark, 2016) identifies the prominence and influence of digitally mediated images in spreading activist discourse on social media. Yet, Tim Highfield and Tama Leaver (2016) argue that big data approaches and verbal textual analysis largely dominate the field. This thesis provides a counterbalance and privileges the visual in emerging configurations of contention and resistance as a critical site for inquiry in digital activism and visual politics research.

Moreover, as much research and scholarship on contemporary activist culture and visual social media focuses on the Western context, exploring the visual culture and digital practices of activist communities in other geographic regions is an important undertaking since the sociocultural dimensions and specificities of political expression vary in response to localised contexts. As argued by International Relations scholar Lina Khatib (2013, p. 129), citizen-created visual content has become part of the “new politics of seeing” and speaking out against police brutality within contemporary Middle Eastern political culture. Digital images on social media platforms perform a critical element in contemporary activist culture as they enable activists to publicly “reclaim their visibility” within the public domain when their physical presence is restricted on the streets and they become “tools of mobilisation” (ibid., p. 129) for galvanising public support for political purposes. By investigating a preliminary example within the Middle East (Egypt) and a more elaborate case study in the West (America), this research will provide theoretical and empirical contributions to the fields of visual politics, digital activism, political communications, and social movement studies from a multidisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective.

2 Chapter 1: Introduction

In this thesis, I examine digitally mediated images1 that circulate online and are deployed in activist contexts to understand the role they play in political discourse and protest mobilisations. I focus on the entanglement of social processes with discursive practices, and I investigate the interaction that occurs between image, discourse, and the (re)creation of meaning in a variety of genres including portrait photographs, memes, political cartoons, and images of embodied protest. I interrogate the visual politics of digital images, their specific cultures of use, and how they are deployed as generative resources for meaning-making and countercultural activism and protest. In the context of conflict and violence, not only can digital images serve documentary functions, but they also perform mobilising functions and contribute to social contentions and political actions. Digitally mediated images operate, therefore, in a dialectical manner and deserve continuous analytical reflection on the temporal, spatial, and material logics that underpin them. Thus, comprehending the dynamics of digitally mediated images that are deployed by social actors to support claims of injustice and to mobilise popular resistance requires a novel and qualitative approach.

I place emphasis on the visual composition of death, martyrdom, and injustice to investigate the political productiveness of digitally mediated images that expose and seek to galvanise popular resistance to brutal oppression. My enquiry begins with the 2010-2011 Arab uprisings because this period marks the first time that activists successfully mobilised online dissent through social media campaigns that translated into popular protests offline, significant in these protests were digitally mediated images of brutally slain bodies (Hamarneh, 2011; Eaton 2013). Images of unjust death and martyr narratives were central not only in the beginning of 2010-2011 Arab uprisings, but also in their aftermaths (Mittermaier, 2015).

The study’s overarching research question was “how do the affordances of digital and social media technologies shape the practices, representations, and rituals of contemporary martyrdom within activist contexts?”.

The objective of the study was to develop new theoretical frameworks and analytical concepts to study the increasingly complex role that digitally mediated

1 The definition and operationalisation of the concept of digitally mediated images is provided in the Research Approach section of this chapter on page 10.

Chapter 1: Introduction 3

images of unjust victims play in contemporary activist cultures and popular social justice movements.

To address the research question and accomplish the objective of the study I mobilised: 1) the exploratory example of #WeAreAllKhaledSaid as a starting point to formulate the study’s theoretical and methodological framework. This preliminary investigation enabled me to explore how posthumously circulated images of Khaled Said (including images of him in life and after his death) invoked the symbol and narrative of martyrdom and were deployed during the 2010-2011 Egyptian uprisings (see section 2.6); and 2). I then applied the theoretical framework to the more elaborate case study of #JusticeForTrayvonMartin. I characterised this case study as explanatory because it is grounded in theory and attempts to explain why and how certain phenomenon occur. It moves beyond observed description to provide a valid explanation of the data—in consideration of broader political forces, social processes, and discursive practices—and a conclusion based on credible explanations that can be transferred to other contexts. This explanatory research enabled me to explain in detail how posthumously circulated images of Trayvon Martin invoked the symbol and narrative of martyrdom and were deployed in the contemporary struggle for Black social justice in the America, and particularly in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement between 2012-2019 (see Chapters 3, 4 and 5). I elaborate on the approach and methods employed for the study below. From this study I make the argument that appropriating the dead and making them into martyrs for protest purposes has manifested as a transnational practice of social justice activism that extends beyond the Arab world. Thus, if we are to understand the political significance and mobilising force of images of death and martyrdom in both past popular uprisings and in the revolutionary present, a critical engagement with these dynamics is fundamental.

My perspective on these topics is limited by my own subjectivity and identity as a white, Western researcher, and as a person not subject to the injustices as detailed throughout the thesis. I recognise the limits of my knowledge about the subjective, cultural, racial, and lived experiences of Arabs and Black Americans in relation to the example of Said and case of Martin, respectively. These are inevitable limitations that I have critically reflected on throughout the journey of this thesis. It is not possible for me to detach myself from the material and ideological construct of my whiteness. With conscious awareness of this, I have tried to decentre my whiteness, and white Western

4 Chapter 1: Introduction

epistemologies and literatures wherever possible in this thesis. I am not attempting to speak for the lived experiences of Arab and Black Americans in any way, but against systems of injustice. In service of this mission, my approach has been to actively listen to the expressions of trauma and resistance of racial and cultural groups at the margins, to empathise, understand, contextualise, and amplify those voices, and to elevate those subjective experiences by placing them at the centre of my analysis.

In this thesis, I engage in giving visibility to injustices and aim to aid in the decolonisation of research by including diverse cultural perspectives. I perform counter-discourse in my work through a critical interrogation of the structural, systemic, and everyday practices that contribute to cultures of oppression and violence and those that sustain them. From this place of awareness and understanding, I examine the practices of activists and ordinary people who put unjust death at the centre of sociopolitical protest to contest it, and who deploy the imagery and narrative of martyrdom to claim justice for victims posthumously. In service of this cause, I have tried wherever possible to frame the approach of the thesis through the selection of culturally appropriate scholarship emerging from affected communities, especially non-white sources of knowledge and namely MENA and Black (American) scholars.

The approach of the thesis is also informed by my past experience of living and working in the Middle East in a research development capacity, prior to, during, and post the 2010-2011 Arab uprisings. My proficiency in visual communication and political culture has been cultivated through previous academic studies and my former career as a photojournalist that began in Australia.

The popular uprisings that erupted across the MENA region in 2010-2011 came to be referred to as the Arab Spring. This period of unrest not only signalled the importance of bodies collectively mobilising in the streets to protest; it also marked a new era of Arab digital activist culture. Significantly, it marked the beginning of an unprecedented era of citizen-led global unrest that first took root in the Arab world and later emerged as a transnational phenomenon. In this thesis, I take a critical, cultural, and political approach in my reflections on what the Arab uprisings made evident: that the affordances of digital and social media technologies have become central to understanding how digital political culture operates, that is, how political identities and protest discourses are enacted and mediated (Fenton, 2016; Gerbaudo, 2017). For the thesis, this means not reducing movements to their technical infrastructures, rather, it

Chapter 1: Introduction 5

means critically reflecting on how social actors appropriate and deploy the affordances of digital and social media technologies for both strategic and symbolic purposes. Equally, it means approaching movements as heterogeneous forces and placing them in dialogue with the nuances of their specific cultures, histories, and the sociopolitical dynamics that underpin them.

The 2010-2011 Arab uprisings have been credited as the ‘spark’ that inspired a global wave of citizen-led protest movements between 2011-2016 (see Gerbaudo, 2017). This highlights an important juncture in emergent trends of transnational cultures of activism that have manifested beyond the political culture of the Arab world. To name but a few of the popular uprisings that emerged in this period are protests against economic inequality and austerity politics in Greece, Spain, Italy, and America; in Turkey against environmental issues and increasing authoritarianism; and in Hong Kong against reforms to social and political freedoms, among other movements. Importantly, each of these popular uprisings was heterogeneous and grounded in a specific context, but the thread that links them is the strategic and symbolic use of digital and social media technologies including Facebook and Twitter, among multiple other online and offline tools of communication. A key lesson I took away from the 2010-2011 Arab uprisings, and subsequent global uprisings since 2011, was that exploring cultures of connectivity alone was not sufficient for understanding the dynamics driving social unrest. I understood that a combined approach that could examine how political grievances and desires were being made manifest to mobilise collective resistance was also required.

Beyond the MENA region since 2011, I have also been following with interest the emergence of subsequent cultures of digital activism and popular social justice movements around the world. In the thesis, I refer to these movements as ‘popular’ because they appeal to the ‘people’ (Laclau, 2005; Gerbaudo, 2012), and because it is radical political activism that emerges as an affective response to oppression (Fenton, 2016). Significantly, I have been observing how similar protest tactics as deployed in the 2010-2011 Arab uprisings have been adopted and progressed transnationally by movements in the post-2011 landscape, namely, in the emergence of the Justice for Trayvon Martin movement in 2012 and the subsequent rise of the BLM movement since 2013. Central in all of these observations has been the increasingly critical role

6 Chapter 1: Introduction

that digitally mediated images of unjust death and martyrdom play in the enactment of contemporary visual politics and in the mobilisation of resistance communities.

1.2 SCOPE AND CONTEXT

This thesis responds to a shift in political activist culture since the late 2000s concerning how people use the affordances of digital and social media technologies to protest police brutality, document injustice, and challenge hegemonic discourses. It explores a particular dynamic that has materialised: the production, editing, sharing, and further transformation of visual content in response to the deaths of innocent civilians due to police brutality and to situations of political injustice.

The initial impetus for this study was motivated by prominent examples of this trend that appeared in the cases of Neda Agha-Soltan (2009, Iranian Green Movement; see Olesen, 2015), Hamza al-Khateeb (2011, Syrian Uprising; see Schwartz, 2015) and Khaled Said (2011, Egyptian Revolution; see Olesen 2013, 2015). Posthumous images of these people became symbolically appropriated by activists and ordinary people as a rallying cry for popular uprisings and functioned as symbols that represented a broader struggle for social justice and universal human rights. While the movements were diverse in their political aims, sociocultural composition, and geographic locations, they share common symbolic and discursive representations—notably, the appropriation of deceased victims of injustice as a central motif of resistance—and other discursive materials and framing such as #WeAreAllNeda, #WeAreAllHamzaalKhateeb and #WeAreAllKhaledSaid. The deaths of the previously named individuals have been credited, respectively, as the events that ‘sparked’ mass political protest both nationally and transnationally, they have received extensive mainstream media coverage, and generated widespread affective expression on social media. Each of the cases point to thematic narratives of death and martyrdom that are digitally mediated and ritualised through the development of communication practices (Sumiala, 2012, p. 89). These practices perform a mobilising function around these images and by symbolically resurrecting and transforming them.

The symbol and narrative of death and martyrdom as a form of political expression is now being performed through digital affordances and affective work that engender new ritualised forms of entanglements. In the thesis, I propose the term

Chapter 1: Introduction 7

digitally mediated martyrdom to conceptualise these phenomena and to designate the emergence of a new kind of visually oriented, socially constructed, and ritualised protest dynamic that emerges around instances of unjust death. To offer an elementary definition: digitally mediated martyrdom is a ritualised communicative process that emerges to give visibility to the unjust killing of an ordinary person and establishes as its target a system of authority and violation. It is a discourse of protest that is enacted by activists and ordinary people, who strategically and symbolically deploy and appropriate digital images of victims to posthumously resurrect them and transform them into a martyr that represents the popular struggle for social justice. It is a phenomenon that occurs in and through digital images that make unjust death visible in new ways, through complex creative processes of recurrent visual mediation, remediation, appropriation, and reappropriation.

In Chapter 2, I provide a detailed definition of digitally mediated martyrdom and develop the conceptual framework for understanding it as a contemporary political practice within activist cultures and popular social justice movements. I consider how instances of unjust death are always constituted as a personal and particular experience in that it happens to somebody, somewhere, who mattered to someone. I reflect on how unjust death becomes socially and politically productive when it transcends its particularity to symbolise corporeal vulnerability of other potential victims, and when publics collectively emerge around it in popular resistance to challenge and redress broader systems of injustice. These are the dynamics that underpin my concept of digitally mediated martyrdom.

Martyrdom has a long history that is rooted in all three Abrahamic religions: Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. In all cases it involves the representation of the innocent or heroic dead (see Hatina, 2014) (see section 2.4 for continued discussion). Martyrdom acquires specific meaning in connection with each religion, however; it has developed out of interactions with different cultural and political traditions, and its content and iconography have changed over time. Whether in pre-modern or contemporary conceptions, there is no single definition of martyrdom that is universally shared; martyrdom is both an interpretative and contested term (Ibrahim, 2015; Dehghani & Horsch, 2014). For the phenomenon of martyrdom to transpire, however, there must first be a martyr; and for a martyr to exist their suffering must be publicly witnessed (Hatina, 2014, p.7). This is a process that transpires “through the

8 Chapter 1: Introduction

hagiographical accounts of his or her suffering that allow the audience to relate to this suffering” (Cook, 2007, p. 1). Witnessing an act of martyrdom is a cultural practice— one that involves not only “seeing” but also ritualised acts of commemoration, memorialisation, and veneration. Thus, the witnessing audience plays an important and constitutive role in narrativising, shaping, and ascribing meaning to martyr deaths, and these practices have a strong visual element. Since martyrdom has always been a ritualised and mediated visual communication practice (Sumiala & Korpiola, 2017), the task of this thesis is to critically examine what digital affordances permit for the visual continuum and contemporary deployment of the symbol and narrative of martyrdom as a contemporary political practice.

1.3 RESEARCH APPROACH

This thesis invites rethinking of the meaning of martyrdom as an emergent social process and as a practice of political discourse in the contemporary era. In service of this mission, the thesis works across disciplinary boundaries to provide a critical understanding of how digitally mediated images of death and martyrdom operate in complex cultures of activism. To do so, I build primarily on theoretical approaches and debates from digital media and communication studies, as well as drawing from the fields of visual politics, visual culture, social movement studies, and sociology (see Chapter 2 for elaboration). This is a necessary undertaking because no entire or partial theoretical vocabulary or conceptual framework is available in the media and communication literature alone, and the dynamics made manifest through the study are too complex to be understood through the lens of one disciplinary tradition. Importantly, as this thesis examines phenomena from both Western and non-Western contexts, with a focus on Arab and African American cultures of activism, I privilege literatures and voices beyond a Eurocentric focus to provide cultural and contextual sensitivity from a decolonised approach.

As a first step, the thesis balances a political and cultural approach in understanding the operational and interactional dynamics between images, activism, social practices, and mediated processes. From the field of visual politics, I take from Khatib (2013, p. 3) that there should be no distinction drawn between the cultural and political spheres because, as she argues, “it is not just that popular culture and politics

Chapter 1: Introduction 9

feed off each other, very often, popular culture is politics. The image-making act can itself be a political act.” The scholarship of Khatib has been influential in shaping my approach to how I consider images within the context of political struggles, particularly for understanding the visual-political dynamics of the Middle East from a non-Eurocentric gaze. Correspondingly, the scholarship of Marwan Kraidy (2016), who works at the intersection of global media and communication, politics, and culture, shapes my thinking about how digital culture complicates understandings between activism, material objects, and embodied protest. Important for this thesis is Kraidy’s scholarship on the creative expression of dissent, and how digital culture connects deceased bodies and living bodies and transforms their relationships to space and political culture. From visual politics, I also draw from Roland Bleiker (2018, 2019) to critically reflect on both the role of digitally mediated images and of their political significance as they circulate in global information flows, and are performatively deployed in the context of transnational political activism. That is, I visually engage with the political and I politically engage with the visual to critically evoke reflection and discussion of the themes in the findings of the study.

My conceptual approach to digitally mediated images follows the framework of Leigh Raiford (2011, p. 6)—whose scholarship interconnects Black activism, visual culture, and social movements—to consider images as both artefact (to document cultural visibility) and artifice (as performance to challenge political invisibility). The vocabulary of digitally mediated images in this thesis refers to images (still and singular frames) as visual artefacts (photographs, drawings, memes, graphic design, street art etc.) that depict or represent subjects (people) and objects (non-human things) that are rendered visually perceptible (mediated) and made publicly accessible (stored and circulated) though digital and social media technologies (e.g., mobile camera phones and the affordances of social media platforms that often combine visual and textual elements).

Additionally, the literature of social movement scholar Alberto Melucci (1996), critical cultural theorists Stuart Hall (1986) and Antonio Gramsci (1971), and political sociologist Thomas Olesen (2015, 2018) informs my understanding of digitally mediated images as being resonant and recurrent sites of struggle between different articulations of social, political, and cultural positions. Digitally mediated images are then approached in this thesis as structuring devices of meaning that are

10 Chapter 1: Introduction

embedded in social processes marked by constant movement (memetics), contestation (interaction) and transformation (mediation and appropriation, and remediation and reappropriation). Digitally mediated images are also considered as racially structured and popular material forces that are always in the process of becoming. Therefore, I situate digitally mediated images as artefacts that circulate within dynamic and fluid processes of collective and social construction, sustainment, and transformation. Digitally mediated images circulate online and are frequently appropriated offline, through these processes they operate in different discursive currents of hegemonic contestation and commemorative ritualisation. The meaning of digitally mediated images can never be fixed, therefore; rather, meaning is recurrently negotiated, contested, and is always socially contingent. I approach digitally mediated images in this thesis as dialectical, that is, I consider them as the products and producers of socially mediated and complex communicative practices that perform political functions.

I use the term “posthumous image” in this thesis to refer to a range of digitally mediated image-types connected with digital martyrdom. Within academic literature the dominant meaning of the term posthumous image, or posthumous portraiture, relates to post-mortem images or portraits that are created after death in the tradition of portraying the dead as alive. I apply the term posthumous image in a more expansive way to accommodate different image-types that are circulated—often together or at the same time—within cases of digitally mediated martyrdom. Posthumous images comprise three main images-types 1) images of people taken in life before they became victims, such as portrait photographs, but were circulated publicly following their death; 2) digital variations of images of people as they were in life but were produced and circulated publicly following their death, for example, memes, political cartoons, artistic interpretations, images of street art and embodied protest etc., and; 3) images of the victim’s dead body that document the consequences of unjust brutality that were circulated publicly, and have also been subject to digital variations. To differentiate between ‘alive’ and ‘deceased’ imagery, I refer to the first two image-types as pre- death images, and the third as post-mortem, respectively, throughout the thesis. See also section 2.3 for a more detailed and contextualised definition.

Building on scholars who discuss images that operate in areas of social contention, political protest, and conflict through concepts such as “image weapons”

Chapter 1: Introduction 11

(Mirzoeff, 2005), “political weapons” (Khatib, 2013) and the “projectilic image” (Kraidy, 2017), I take from visual media theorist Harun Farocki (2004) the vocabulary of the “operative image” and apply it in the thesis as a way to grasp the growing role and complexity of digitally mediated images in emerging configurations of social contestation, political resistance, and transnational activism. That is, to consider that digitally mediated images in this context do not simply represent objects, rather, they are deployed as part of an operation (Farocki, 2004, p. 17). I expand on this thinking in depth in Chapter 2. Such an approach facilitates an ontological engagement with images that moves beyond pure reflection of their representational or illustrative functions, rather, it means to consider them as structuring forces that mediate social relations and affective discourses, and shape political contentions as much as they depict them.

Scholars in the fields of art history, media, cultural and communication studies have long examined the representational form and cultural context of images. Yet, within the realm of transnational activism and global politics too little is known about the increasingly complex role that digitally mediated images play (Bleiker, 2018; Eder & Klonk, 2017). The digital mediation of images that document conflict, violence, and human rights abuses has profound effects on the politics of visibility (Blaagaard et al., 2017, p.1112), not simply because the affordances of digital and social media technologies facilitate the speed and spread at which images can travel, but because these affordances enable the formation of new types of images that can make violence and social contentions visible in new ways. Traditional approaches taken to study the role of images in conflict, protest, and political struggles are insufficient in the current context of emergent digital and social media technologies. Thus, new theoretical frameworks, analytical concepts, and empirical insights are required in the present context. This study is an answer to this call.

1.4 RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS

The specific methods and data collection strategies for the study are detailed in section 2.8 for the exploratory example of Said, and section 3.5 for the explanatory case study of Martin.

12 Chapter 1: Introduction

I collected existing digital images and used them as data in this study to investigate the genres, functions, practices, and cultures of their use. Empirically, the orientation of the study attends to the relationship between the visual and the material to critically interpret and describe the embodied politics, political subjectivity, and sociality present in digital images that transverse online and offline contexts (Rose & Tolia-Kelly, 2016 ). The methodology of the study differs from enquiries based on formal image analysis. Rather, it attends to the interplay between representation, practice, discourse, digital affordances, performance, the construction and constitution of meaning, and articulations of social and political relations. That is, I critically engage with digital images in ways that comprehend the dynamic connections between social processes, discursive practices, materiality, and technological specificities. As a result the analyses in the thesis concentrates on the interpretation of these phenomena with the intent to uncover recurrent patterns and to provide a credible description of the themes presented in the data.

The thesis begins by theorising digitally mediated martyrdom through the scholarship of Buckner and Khatib (2014) who explore the representations of martyrs in the Arab Spring. The novel conceptual framework of digitally mediated martyrdom is then used to guide the exploratory example of how Egyptian youth Khaled Said, who was brutally killed on 6 June, 2010, was subsequently appropriated as the martyr of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution (see section 2.6). I then expand on the methodology and analysis conducted on Said, and apply the conceptual framework to the explanatory case study of Black youth and shooting victim Trayvon Martin (see Chapter 3, 4 and 5). Martin was unjustly killed in 2012 by a neighbourhood watch volunteer, George Zimmerman, and was posthumously appropriated as a martyr for a new generation of activism in the BLM movement in 2013.

A case based on an individual figure was conducive to answering the study’s research question. I selected the case of an otherwise ordinary figure as the subject of my investigation rather than a social movement or particular protest event that transpired following that person’s death. I did so because the phenomenon of martyrdom is socially constructed and centred on the interpretation and representation of the death of an individual figure. Selecting a movement or event to investigate these phenomena would not have been suitable or feasible to meet the aim of the study. My focus was to understand how posthumous images of unjust victims were appropriated

Chapter 1: Introduction 13

within activist contexts and were subsequently transformed through invoking the symbol and narrative of martyrdom, and to understand the practices and processes that emerge through, and are attached to, those images.

I selected the exploratory example of Said and explanatory case study of Martin not on the basis of representativeness, but because of their significance. The unjust deaths of Said and Martin, respectively, are regarded as the events that ‘sparked’ popular protests which led to unprecedented forms of widespread local, translocal, and transnational social action. The deaths of Said and Martin, respectively, received extensive coverage in mainstream news media, locally, regionally, and globally. On social media, campaigns were mobilised in the names of Said and Martin, respectively, and served as rallying spaces for social commemoration and discontent that translated into historic offline protests. The significance of their deaths and their symbolic resurrection as martyrs of popular protests deserves further empirical investigation. The importance of these instances lies in the fact they enable me to address questions of not only how practices, representations, and rituals of contemporary martyrdom are shaped with activist contexts, but of the role digitally mediated images play in the culture of activism at large.

The investigation of Said is presented as a worked example that is qualitative, exploratory, and inductive, and well-suited for interpreting the digital images that were publicly shared in response to the killing of Said. My approach was to 1) explore the complexity of the phenomenon under investigation, which permitted me to begin with broad questions that were refined as the investigation progressed, and 2) to use the example as a preliminary step for developing theory and refining concepts through a subsequent explanatory case study.

I used internet-related ethnography methods (Postill & Pink, 2012) to study how digitally mediated images of Said were appropriated in activist practice, invoked with the “We Are All Khaled Said” movement, and transformed into subsequent protest resources. Internet-related ethnography focuses on activist practices, sociality, and the movement of content that is circulated across internet-based sites and becomes implicated in offline contexts. I deployed this method to guide the chronological exploration of publicly available protest images online. I did this by using a combination of keyword search terms on Google Images to identify potential images and I then traced images to their site of online emergence on Facebook, Twitter, and

14 Chapter 1: Introduction

mainstream media. This enabled me to perform a chronological reading of the historical and ongoing discourse made manifest through posthumous images of Said between the time of his killing and the 25 January Revolution in 2011, and to explore the production, editing, circulation, and further permutation of these images over time. I was able to follow recurrent patterns of symbolic and discursive communication across multiple sites using this approach, and to observe connections between offline contexts and events, and their digital manifestations.

My data collection was not intended to be exhaustive or comprehensive, rather, to provide an initial corpus for inquiry on the visual mediation of death and martyrdom in digital activist cultures. The idea was that themes identified during this process would guide the iterative development of theory, and in turn inform the approach to data collection methods to be applied in a subsequent case study. A selection of six digital images of Said––comprised of pre-death and/or post-mortem images––as well as their various iterations were purposefully chosen for qualitative analysis. Data analysis followed a constructionist grounded theory approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) that moved between observational and contextual analysis of the data to develop emergent themes. I performed a textual and critical cultural analysis (see section 2.7 Methods and Data Collection) of key visual tropes and their embedded linguistic elements that emerged in a variety of digital image genres (i.e. portrait photograph, internet meme, political cartoon, protest placard, street graffiti, and protest mask). I did this to investigate the practices that contributed to Said’s posthumous construction, first, as a symbol of injustice, and on his subsequent transformation as a martyr. My aim was to interpret and describe the practices of activists and ordinary people who participated in symbolically resurrecting Said in and through digitally mediated images that transformed him into a martyr to represent the popular struggle for social justice and universal human rights. While some scholars contend the narrative of the Arab uprisings begins with the self-immolation of Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi on 17 December, 2010 (Mittermaier, 2015), I argue it begins before Bouazizi and with Said. As demonstrated in the empirical analysis, posthumous images of Said were temporally and spatially displaced from the time of his killing, and were transformed into symbols of popular revolt by an indignant population of Egyptian youth to mobilise political protest against the then Hosni Mubarak regime.

Chapter 1: Introduction 15

Civilian deaths during the 2010-2011 Arab uprisings are in the thousands; correspondingly, there are numerous individuals who could fit the narrative of an ‘unintentional’ digitally mediated martyr. I argue in the thesis, however, that not all unintentional martyr deaths are made to matter equally. There are different regimes of visibility and invisibility that surround the unnatural deaths of victims who, like Said and Martin, attain a visual hierarchy through their posthumous appropriation as the face or martyr that ‘sparks’ a movement. Then, there are victims whose unjust deaths form part of the continuum of violence and become appropriated in protest discourses as ‘other’ subsequent unintentional martyrs like the multiple Arab uprisings martyrs and Black Lives Matter martyrs. There are also numerous victims whose unjust death does not attain nuanced public visibility and whose individual memories do not become embedded within social consciousness. For example, while Alan Kurdi, a drowned three-year-old Syrian refugee, became appropriated as an unintentional martyr, or icon, of the Syrian Refugee Crisis (see Mortensen, 2017), there are countless youths and children whose death remains unrepresented and, thus, unknowable. They are unjust victims who die in war zones, refugee camps, and incarceration systems, in countries including Syria, Yemen, and Palestine, among others, for which we never come to know of their individual stories. Such regimes of visibility and invisibility, although beyond the scope of this thesis, say much about the politicisation of death and how global power relations come to socially condition the loss of life as valuable and grievable on the one hand, and devalued and ungrievable on the other (Butler, 2009; Berents, 2019; Chouliaraki & Stolić, 2019).

Edward Ziter (2013, p. 117) contends that activists and ordinary people contributed to an online martyrology of Arab uprisings martyr representations that grew in complexity and scope at the same time that death grew more politically charged in the MENA region. While exploring the narrative development of the martyr figure across multiple cases and different countries of the Arab uprisings is a rich line of research to pursue, that is not the objective of this thesis. The scholarship of Buckner and Khatib (2014), among others, already illuminates such an agenda. The purpose of employing the exploratory example of Said was to investigate how he was posthumously transformed, in and through digitally mediated images, into the martyr of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. And specifically, to explore the ways in which this period of digitally mediated protest led to the development of a new type of martyr

16 Chapter 1: Introduction

image. In doing this, I 1) build upon the existing scholarship of Buckner and Khatib (2014), and 2) advance the research agenda by making the argument that the 2010- 2011 Arab uprisings and post-2011 global protest wave has brought forth a new model of digitally mediated martyr representations beyond the Arab world that has manifested as an observable protest dynamic that is enacted in global cultures of activism. I argue that the death and subsequent martyrdom of Said marks the beginning of this transnational trajectory. This is the rationale for why Said provided the initial basis for empirical exploration, and broader theoretical framework formation.

The language of digitally mediated martyrdom first appeared (to the best of my knowledge) in a journal article by Johanna Sumiala and Lilly Korpiola (2017). In the article, they examine the visual mediation of Muslim martyrdom online in the Arab Muslim cultural sphere and North African context and, therefore, situate the mediation of martyrdom within the Islamic tradition. Sumiala and Korpiola only introduce the term in passing, however. My employment of the term digitally mediated martyrdom is applied systematically and with full association of the comprehensive framework that is developed in the thesis. Unlike Sumiala and Korpiola (2017) my conception of digitally mediated martyrdom moves beyond the bounds of religious discourse to refer to a secularised (see below paragraph), cross-cultural, and intersectional protest dynamic that I describe in the thesis as being enacted in and through memetic forms of mediated visual communication2.

My deployment of the term secular3 throughout the thesis draws from a sociologist underpinning, and I situate it with the context of progressive social justice movements. I deploy the term secular, not to denounce the existence and entanglement between notions of the secular and sacred in public life. Rather, to call for a reorientation toward examining forces of pluralism and universalisation that are at play in the phenomena under investigation, and that push against forces of religious

2 In this thesis, I apply the memetic lens from the field of media and communication studies, notably Limor Shifman (2013, 2014, 2018) and Ryan Milner (2013, 2016), who place a central focus on people as social agents who actively participate in the creation, circulation, and transformation of memetic forms of mediated communication.

3 In regard to its practical, institutional, and academic applications, the term secular is contested, ambiguous, and has multiple variants outside of its Western-centric context (see Kettell, 2019). My conceptualisation and application of the term secular draws from social movement theorist Alberto Melucci’s (1996) work on collective identity-based movements, and sociologist Christian Smith’s (2003) theoretical developments on the notion of the ‘secular revolution’.

Chapter 1: Introduction 17

fundamentalism (e.g. the Christian right and radical Islamism). Thus, the contemporary and popular movements referred to in this thesis may be understood as embracing a secular ideology that appeals to social justice for the ‘people’ as a core- organising element in the vernacular expression and goals of the movement. This understanding, as more of a cultural movement, is in contrast to other and diverging theoretical applications and disciplinary traditions associated with the term.

My conceptual proposition of digitally mediated martyrdom reflects a distinct shift from the long tradition of visuality, witnessing, and commemoration practices associated with the phenomenon of martyrdom. Digitally mediated martyrdom is not simply a visual continuum of historic forms of martyrdom in a new technologically- enabled manifestation. Digitally mediated martyrdom is a complex protest dynamic that operates through emergent social processes. The meaning of martyrdom becomes reconfigured through these processes and through the ritualised practices associated with the phenomenon. The practice of digitally mediated martyrdom transforms an otherwise ordinary person in their death into a hybridised martyr figure that is deployed for protest purposes. The martyr figure can be deployed (and made secular) in multiple social and political contexts that transverse spatial and temporal bounds, it decentres authoritative modes of cultural production, and is mediated through memetic participation and creative transformation (see section 2.5 ‘memetic dynamics of protest’ for a detailed discussion on how the terms memetic or meme are conceptualised in this thesis). Through these processes new global cultures of connectivity and flows of collective participation emerge. The digitally mediated martyr, in this context, is not deployed for religious or nationalist causes, as has historically been the case. Rather, digitally mediated martyrdom comes into being through the popular articulation of social and political demands that call for justice in the name of an individual on behalf of a collective, e.g. a social movement. This forms a discourse that interconnects local, translocal, and transnational modes of activism and concrete practices of resistance through which struggles for social justice and human rights are being fought.

I mobilise the exploratory example of Martin to empirically ground my argument that digitally mediated martyrdom has emerged beyond the Arab world as transnational protest dynamic. Reminiscent of how activists and ordinary people, transnationally, appropriated posthumous images of Said and made him into a martyr

18 Chapter 1: Introduction

of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, I mobilise the explanatory case study of Martin to analyse how posthumous images of Martin were appropriated and transformed by people across time as a contemporary vernacular of Black resistance and resilience in the ongoing struggle for Black justice in America. I perform a chronological reading of key events and digital images produced in response to Martin’s killing from 2012 until the seven-year anniversary of his death in 2019. Given my interest in the sustained use and transformation of Martin’s posthumous image, I did not predetermine a period of data collection focused exclusively on heightened episodes of activity. The timely data collection period and the study’s timeframe enabled for the capture of the life course of the historical use and emergent evolution of Martin’s posthumous image on Instagram, and it does so in the context of its broader deployment in ongoing political and social contexts. A detailed discussion of the rationale for platform selection, and the methods and data collection procedures are provided in section 3.5.

To summarise, I expanded on the methodology applied to the case of Said to focus on Instagram as the source for data collection. I also drew from other social and mainstream media sources to analyse the case in context. Instagram forms a central part of the social media strategy of the Black Lives Matter movement and, more broadly, it facilitates a space for cultures of visual activism to emerge, document, share, and archive images that speak to injustice. The focus on Instagram addresses the lag in scholarly attention directed at digital activism on the platform. Moreover, it provides nuanced insight into the affordances and aesthetics of the platform as well as the tropes and practices developed by its users. I employed a case study design for this study and empirically investigated public posts (digital images and their accompanying verbal textual commentary) that were manually retrieved from Instagram via a keyword search strategy. The dataset comprised 1819 posts containing pre-death and post-mortem images of Martin and their digital variations (e.g. internet memes, artistic interpretations, images of street art, and embodied protest). I used a hybrid approach combining the scroll back method (Robards & Lincoln, 2017) and digital ethnography methods (Pink et al., 2016) to study how digitally mediated images of Martin were appropriated, edited, circulated, and further transformed, and for what purposes and in relation to particular events.

Chapter 1: Introduction 19

This hybrid and observational method enabled me to attend closely to the communicative, spatial, and temporal dimensions of sustained appropriation, circulation, and transformation of Martin’s posthumous image. From this, I uncovered the archive, genealogy, and individual biographies of digital images on Instagram, and investigated the discursive and ritualised practices enacted in and through them over time. This attends to the digital traces of digital images that is historical through which I was able to look back chronologically to observe how the contours of Martin’s posthumous image was recurrently negotiated in everyday, critical, and transitional moments and how these were represented on Instagram (or not). Data analysis was structured around discourse, textual, and critical cultural analysis. I focused on the complex social processes and discursive practices that contributed to transforming Martin from his victimhood into a martyr over time.

To be clear, the particular accounts of Said and Martin are individually oriented within this thesis with the aim of understanding the complexity of each culture of activism under investigation, and to provide a rich description of cultural nuances and concrete practices of resistance. The worked example of Said and systematic case study of Martin are not mobilised for comparative purposes in this thesis. Rather, I mobilise these instances to describe in detail and explain how digitally mediated martyrdom has emerged as a mobilising force of protest, and has become a recurrent theme in global cultures of digital activism and popular social justice movements. As previously mentioned, I conceptualise digitally mediated images of death and martyrdom as structuring forces that mediate social relations and mobilise collective experiences of resistance. This, as I demonstrate in the study, is articulated through a system of visual tropes that manifests in a variety of visual forms.

Firstly, I will clarify how I apply the term trope in this thesis. The word trope derives from the Greek word tropos which means turn, direction, manner or style. In its contemporary application the term is generally used to refer to a “figure of speech, especially one that uses words in senses beyond their literal meanings” (Baldick, 2015). Within academic scholarship, trope has been used for different applications across diverse fields of study including art, entertainment, and media; philosophy and religion; and science and technology, among others. Within literary theory the term trope and its analysis has a long history, and Kenneth Burke (1941) refers to metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony as the “four master tropes”. Within film and media

20 Chapter 1: Introduction

studies Frank Manchel has used trope to refer to “a recurring cinematic motif that conveys a specific and poignant symbolic meaning” (as cited in Hughey, 2014, p. 8). Matthew Hughey (2014, p. 8) contends that “films are often driven by tropes that then come to define particular genres”. For example, Hughey defines the ‘white saviour’ trope as a contemporary and contentious device that is recurrently used in popular discourse and visual culture to articulate and rationalise asymmetrical social relations (ibid.). The white saviour trope is made recognisable through a genre of white heroic and stereotypical characters who are in service of other characters of colour who are disempowered and in need of saving (ibid.).

Following the scholarship of Manchel and Hughey (ibid.), I borrow from film and media studies to apply the term trope in this thesis to identify the archetypes, or archetypal characters, that belong to the phenomenon of digitally mediated martyrdom. Like recurrent cinematic motifs that impart meaning and drive film narratives, digitally mediated martyrdom operates in a similar way. That is, digitally mediated martyrdom is driven by the dramatic scripting of narratives and the production of archetypal or stereotypical characters that serve meaning-making purposes and are recurrently represented in particular visual genres that circulate online. I identify dominant tropes in the study that are understood as resonant and recurrent visual conventions that manifest in digitally mediated images. Such tropes function ideologically and discursively by invoking the image of the martyr figure and the archetypal innocent victim character to convey ideas about injustice and human suffering, and act as a critique on the systems of violence and the values and virtues of contemporary society in which that image manifests. Tropes identified in the study find purchase in a wide engagement of communities because of their ability to symbolise broader issues and events, and because they function as mental and affective templates that tap into existing cultural knowledge and iconographic genres (e.g. activist cultures, religious traditions, art history, and popular culture).

Visual tropes pertaining to violence and conflict effectively condense complex emotional and imagined phenomena, and work to achieve broader cultural consensus of meaning (Zarzycka & Kleppe, 2013). Tropes are made manifest in the study through a variety of socially recognisable visual genres that include graffiti and political

Chapter 1: Introduction 21

cartoons, and internet meme genres including reaction Photoshops4 and image macros5 (see section 2.5 ‘memetic dynamic of protest’ for a detailed discussion on internet memes and memetic media). These digital image sharing practices are particularly well suited to reproducing the archetypes of digitally mediated martyrdom as a new vernacular of popular resistance that pervades any one culture, and as well as multiple digital and physical spheres of expression. Such communicative practices deviate from traditional verbal textual or image production conventions associated with the phenomenon of martyrdom because posthumously circulated images of unjust victims are recurrently mediated, remediated, appropriated, and reappropriated through contemporary digital remix culture and this produces a new type of memetic martyr images that travels.

Digitally mediated martyrdom, then, operates through a narrative and symbolic framework that has a system of tropes attached to it that connect the phenomenon with larger public discourses and signifies particular and universal systems of injustice, popular struggles, and human rights abuses. Importantly, affective discourses and ritualised communicative practices of solidarity, resistance, commemoration, and contestation emerge in and through the archetypal martyr figure and stereotypical innocent victim character because they are the material bearers of lived experiences. Drawing from Robert Hariman and John Lucaites’ (2008) repurposing of Raymond

Williams’6 concept of emotions as organising “structures of feeling”, tropes are visually oriented cultural performances that articulate patterns of affective response, they drive the visual manifestation of the martyr figure, and shape the enactment and embodiment of popular social justice movement discourses.

While the particular accounts of Said and Martin were mobilised to respond to the research question, other cases could have been used to examine the phenomenon of death and martyrdom. A number of other potential cases were considered, but were ultimately excluded for reasons extending to issues of relevance, problematic or ethical concerns, or feasibility. For example, I considered including the case of Elijah

4 Limor Shifman (2014, p. 102) defines a reaction Photoshop as “composed of the images created in response to memetic photos”. That is, “photographs that provoke extensive creative reactions”.

5 Limor Shifman (2014, p. 111) defines image macros as “a more general form of pictures with overlaid text”.

6 See Raymond, W. (1983). The Long Revolution, New York, Columbia University Press, pp. 48-71.

22 Chapter 1: Introduction

Doughty, a 14-year-old male Indigenous Australian, who was killed by a white, Australian man in a motor vehicle incident in 2016. In his death Doughty was appropriated in activist discourse as a symbol of anti-Black violence and systemic racism. Doughty’s killing gave rise to protests across Australia and on social media calling for “justice for Elijah Doughty”. While this case could have provided valuable insights into Indigenous activist culture, I decided to exclude it to respect the ethical and cultural sensitivities regarding the representation and publishing of images of deceased Indigenous people7.

In the thesis, I increase the credibility of the theoretical and conceptual framework of digitally mediated martyrdom beyond the accounts of Said and Martin, by showing how it can be transferred to investigate other empirical cases. For example, empirical examples are illustratively referred to in section 2.2: they include Mohammed al-Durrah, Oscar Grant, Neda Agha-Soltan, Hamza al-Khateeb, Joyti Singh, Mike Brown, Alan Kurdi, and Razan al-Najjar.

Inevitably, there are limitations to the study. As I discuss in Chapter 2, the historic culture of martyrdom is a gendered practice. The two instances mobilised in this study are of Said and Martin who are both male. The majority of unintentional martyrs in the 2010-2011 Arab uprisings were young men. Similarly, the majority of people who have become other faces or martyrs of the contemporary struggle for Black justice in America are young men. The straightforward response to why no female case is represented in the study is because it was difficult to establish instances of female martyrdom that fit the criteria of the study. This necessarily raises questions about gendered-political subjectivity and about the gendered nature of such state-sanctioned violence that predominantly targets young men and boys of colour. These questions while significant, are beyond the scope of this study.

The study of death and posthumous imagery that circulates online inevitably generates particular ethical considerations and implications for the design and conduct of research. This required particular choices to be made regarding the appropriate data to be collected, about suitable methods to retrieve and interrogate those data, and about my own ethical obligations to deceased victims of injustice and to their posthumous

7 For more context see Media Diversity Australia reporting guidelines concerning Indigenous affairs: https://www.mediadiversityaustralia.org/indigenous/

Chapter 1: Introduction 23

representation in my analysis. In this thesis, my ethical position is to do justice to cultures of activism that are living under oppressive regimes by not contributing to a culture of invisibility. Rather, I respect the activist context in which digital images have been circulated online by people as a means of intended ‘social visibility’ (Hutchinson et al., 2017), and with the intent to bring public focus to issues of the injustice around the death of an individual. I do not reproduce all digital images analysed in the study. Analysis undertaken predominantly takes the form of written textual (thematic) description and analysis and, in the thesis, I reproduce select digital images and salient portions of public commentary (that are associated with a particular digital image) to provide evidence of observed and significant patterns in public discourse.

The study was subject to institutional ethical approval in-line with national ethical frameworks which imposed a particular set of limitations on the study. The study required formal application as involving greater than low risk and underwent a full review by the Queensland University of Technology Human Research Ethics

Committee. The approving8 conditions imposed on the study restricted its capacity to engage with digital images and their accompanying textual commentary in the form of captions and comments that presented counter narratives (i.e. acts of racism, hate speech, political propaganda). The principle of national and institutional requirements is to promote ethically good human research, however, they also produce ethical consequences as to the stance they require the researcher to take and raise implications for the design and conduct of research.

In this thesis, I respect the memory of the dead and adhere to the conditions of ethical approval by privileging the intent and voices of those engaged in pro-social justice discourses and actions. I do not present anti-social justice discourses and actions that seek to inflict harm through defamatory or delegitimising practices, alternative political positions (i.e. alt-right), or the enactment of hate speech and commentary retaliation against social media users. The conditions of ethical approval presented the risk of producing bias in the study. It limited the capacity to investigate

8 The study presented and reported in this thesis was conducted in accordance with the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (2018), Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research (2018), and QUT Research Governance Framework (2018). The study received human research ethics approval from the Queensland University of Technology Human Research Ethics Committee approval number: 1800000402.

24 Chapter 1: Introduction

the broader ways that digital practices and visual social media content shaped public communication, which transpired through both discourses that can be considered as progressive and of the political left as well as those of conservative and of the far-right. Understanding that pro-social justice discourses and actions arise in response to acts of injustice requires the review and acknowledgment of contentious viewpoints and positions. To investigate the study in context I reviewed controversial content that engaged opposing voices. Some of these data were chosen for inclusion e.g. where counter-discourse was performed against racist content. This was necessary to understand how communicative discourses and creative practices of resistance were emerging and being forged. This is apparent, notably, in the study of Martin in Chapter 3, 4, and 5.

1.5 THESIS OUTLINE

Chapter 2 begins by introducing and defining the concept of digitally mediated martyrdom as a social process and political practice that is enacted in contemporary activist communication and protest culture. It provides the groundwork for understanding how digitally mediated martyrdom offers a framework for understanding the emergence of new and transnational protest dynamics. To do this, I mobilise other significant global instances of unjust death and subsequent martyrdom that underscore the rationale for the study and provide context and scope for the thesis. The chapter then discusses literature on contemporary perspectives of death and martyrdom, mediated and ritualised communication, and witnessing to provide the necessary theoretical vocabulary to understand how martyrdom operates in the context of contemporary activist communication. I build the conceptual framework of digitally mediated martyrdom to explore how digitally mediated images of unjust victims are operationalised posthumously in activist communication to construct injustice symbols and how injustice symbols are appropriated and mediated as modalities for performing sociopolitical expression and resistance. The conceptual framework of digitally mediated martyrdom is then applied to the exploratory example of Said. I analyse six digital images of Said: a juxtaposed pre-death/post-mortem headshot, an internet meme, a political cartoon, a protest placard, street graffiti, and a face mask worn by a protestor. I conclude by reflecting on how digital images operate as sites of

Chapter 1: Introduction 25

political struggle and highlight the significance of digitally mediated images within digital activist cultures and their deployment as mobilising modalities for popular sociopolitical expression and political participation.

Chapter 3 builds on the analysis conducted on Said, and expands on the conceptual framework developed in Chapter 2 to apply it to the explanatory case of Martin. It situates the tradition of political martyrdom in the American context and discusses its evolution and transformation as a vernacular of protest in the BLM movement. The phenomenon of political martyrdom discussed here both parallels and departs from its uses and functions as discussed in relation to the worked example of Said, and in the context of the Middle East. Comprehending these points of parallel and departure are significant for exploring how and why the figure of the political martyr carries both transnational (and spatial) significance and cultural (and temporal) particularity. It then describes and situates the Martin case study into the broader historical, political, and cultural struggle for Black social justice in America, and in dialogue with the national media context. The chapter then outlines the methods used to retrieve and analyse digital images and their accompanying textual commentary from Instagram.

Chapter 4 presents the analysis of the Martin case study. The analysis is structured and performed on five key tropes that emerged as significant in the dataset. The first three tropes are detailed in Chapter 4 with the remaining two presented in Chapter 5. The tropes analysed in this chapter are ‘childhood saint and youthful innocent’, ‘everyday teenager’, and ‘Black thug’. I explore how these tropes are invoked discursively through digital images on Instagram to perform counter discourse against racist and hegemonic media framing, and to commemorate Martin. The analysis focuses on the memetic participation of activists and ordinary people through the creation, editing, circulation, reappropriation, and remediation of visual content including photographs, memes, and mixed-media artistic responses.

Findings show the tropes were invoked by activists and ordinary people on Instagram through different discursive practices, at different times, and were deployed to serve different functions. Existing family snapshots of Martin were reappropriated and remixed in singular, juxtaposed, and collaged forms. The trope of ‘childhood saint and youthful innocent’ was invoked to retell the story of Martin’s boyhood innocence, to construct injustice frames that linked Martin’s killing with past and present

26 Chapter 1: Introduction

injustices committed against Black people, and a series of politicised memes were operationalised to call out instances of mainstream media bias and white privilege.

The trope of ‘everyday teenager’ was invoked by people as they engaged in acts of solidarity, collective identification, and popular resistance to counter hegemonic claims that Martin’s Black ‘hooded’ body was suspicious. People performed acts of selfie protest wearing hoodies with slogans and hashtags including “I am Trayvon Martin”, “we are all Trayvon Martin” and “do I look suspicious?”. This established the hoodie an omnipresent symbol of collective protest and identification.

The trope of ‘Black thug’ was deployed in pro-Martin discourse to reclaim Martin’s posthumous identity from racist and hegemonic media framing. Defamatory media coverage reappropriated images taken from Martin’s social media accounts to criminalise his posthumous character and negatively stereotype his Blackness. In pro- Martin discourse these same images were discursively used to reclaim the thug narrative as a vernacular of authentic Black resistance and to speak back to systemic and systematic cultures of racism, racial hierarchy, and institutional injustice.

Chapter 5 presents the analysis on the remaining two tropes: ‘martyred body’ and ‘young king’. The analysis of the former focuses on the discursive practices associated with post-mortem images of Martin that were created, edited, circulated, and further transformed through digital remix culture. The latter investigates how Martin was discursively reclaimed from his victimhood and is transformed in his digitally mediated reincarnation as a martyr. The trope of the ‘martyred body’ was discursively mobilised through post-mortem images that were operationalised as indexical markers that, simultaneously, called upon digital publics to bear witness to affirm the truth of Martin’s death and suffering, while inviting collective consciousness that Martin’s broken body stands for, and stands in for, shared Black vulnerability and the pain of the nation. Multivocal and affective discourses were brought into being with this genre of imagery. Ethical concerns were raised by some about the appropriateness of “showing” or “not showing” post-mortem images, while others expressed the need to show these images to counter the invisibility of unjust violence and the erasure of Black life.

The trope of ‘young king’ was deployed to discursively reclaim Martin from his victimhood and to make his life matter by transforming him into martyr. Martin’s martyrdom was constituted through visual discourse and creative cultural practices that

Chapter 1: Introduction 27

combined classical forms of iconography with contemporary forms of Black representation and cultural production. This contributed to a genealogical digital archive of Martin’s martyrdom that sustained his visual legacy. The practice of making Martin into a martyr centred on practices that rejected oppressive discourses of the Black body, and enacted the affordances of digital and social media technologies to rearticulate images of Blackness in its full humanity and of its future potential.

Chapter 6 (Conclusion) synthesises the findings of both the exploratory example of Said and the explanatory case study of Martin. I contend that digitally mediated martyrdom has become a new transnational protest dynamic in the post- 2010-11 Arab uprising era. I discuss the need to consider the implications of digitally mediated martyrdom as a transnational protest dynamic that is enacted across complex activist cultures and political contexts. I argue for a critical rethinking of the contemporary meaning and deployment of the symbol and narrative of the martyr figure in the context of digital political activism.

The findings of the study lead me to call for further chronological investigation of the ways in which creative, contentious, and commemorative discourses are constructed, sustained, and situated in and through digitally mediated images that operate as part of a complex and emergent cycle of conversation in visual social media. I also argue that further critical investigation is needed to trace the trajectories and biographies of images in order to understand their political dynamics. Digitally mediated images that are deployed in transnational cultures of activism play an increasingly complex role. This asks us to think about digitally mediated images as being part of an operative process that has significant consequences: that is they do things, they perform operative functions, they shape culture and they enact politics. Thus, studying their operations in emerging configurations of contention and resistance—beyond Western contexts—remains a critical site for inquiry in digital activism and visual politics research.

In the concluding sections of the thesis I stress that while user practices contribute to making visible particular images of death and posthumous content, that it is also critical to consider the intermediary role played by social media platforms in moderating content and defining the boundaries of what visual content is acceptable and prohibited. Social media platforms and algorithmic filtering increasingly technically choreograph regimes of visibility and invisibility. Content moderation

28 Chapter 1: Introduction

practices and policies have consequences and these consequences can produce a particular set of ethical, cultural, social, and political implications. I argue that future research should engage and wrestle with the implications for understanding mediated visibility and the sociality of images that meets at the intersection of processes of algorithmic content moderation and agentic practices of mediation.

Chapter 1: Introduction 29

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

2.1 INTRODUCTION

This chapter introduces the conceptual framework of digitally mediated martyrdom (established in section 2.2), which is then explored through the worked example of Khaled Said (section 2.5).

In section 2.2, I formally introduce and define the key elements of digitally mediated martyrdom, first. I then provide some examples of other significant deaths that underscore emergent trends in the mediation of martyr narratives. By mobilising these examples I demonstrate how digitally mediated martyrdom represents an important and transferable framework that can be applied to study contemporary activist cultures and transnational social justice movements. This section also helps to establish context and scope for the thesis.

In the body of the chapter, I make the arguments that: a) activists and ordinary people increasingly appropriate posthumous images of unjust victims to construct injustice symbols; b) that injustice symbols are further transformed through acts of creative insurgency; for which c) mediation, appropriation, remediation and reappropriation are central to the memetic dynamics of contemporary participatory protest culture; d) that cultures of connectivity and collectivity are necessary for understanding both the technical affordances and the emotional dynamics that drive mobilisation processes; e) that digital affordances permit for the emergence of multiple spaces of appearance that create visibility and enable a digital co-presence between physical bodies and a visual co-presence with death; f) that connective witnessing presents a new form of testimony and reconfigures the relationship between personalised political expression and connective and collective action; and that g) ritualised communication practices extend the spatial and temporal dimensions of protest and sustains resistance communities. These are all necessary dynamics that contribute to understanding how posthumous bodies are made to matter, as symbolically resurrected and strategically operationalised martyrs in popular social justice discourse.

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 31

In section 2.3, I proceed with a discussion on the conceptual framework of the thesis, notably highlighting the key concepts of “injustice symbols” (Olesen, 2015) and “operative images” (Farocki, 2004). These concepts provide the foundation for understanding how unjust victims are constructed and operationalised, first, as injustice symbols (Olesen, 2015).

In section 2.4, the chapter refines its focus to a specific discussion on the discourse of martyrdom, its mediation, and the ritualised communication practices that underpin it. Here, I draw on the concepts of “connective witnessing” (Mortensen, 2015) and “grievable” life (Butler, 2009). Conceptually, these permit for an understanding of how digital affordances redefine traditional notions of witnessing, reconfigure connective and collective action, and contribute to understanding how posthumous bodies are made to matter.

Then in section 2.5, I address what a focus on digital affordances permits for the study of martyrdom, and I clarify how I apply the terms affordances and digitally mediated or mediation in the thesis. I expand on this discussion by introducing the concepts of appropriation, reappropriation, and remediation. These concepts enable me to explain how injustice symbols (Olesen, 2015) are transformed through recurrent acts of memetic protest. I then clarify how the memetic lens is applied in the thesis, I provide examples of why exploring the visual and memetic dimensions of contemporary digital activist culture is a growing and necessary area for analysis. This is followed with the introduction of the concept of “creative insurgency” (Kraidy, 2016) as a practice of radical dissent. This enables me to explain how injustice symbols (Olesen, 2015) are further transformed through agentic practices and processes of creative resistance that aid the narrative construction of martyrdom. Concepts of connectivity and collectivity are then introduced and defined in their application in the thesis. By interfacing these literatures, I am able to draw together various phenomena and explain how the complex dynamics of digitally mediated martyrdom operates. I then introduce the “space of appearance” (Mirzoeff, 2017). Conceptually, this enables me to explain how unjust death is made visible in new ways, extends the spatial and temporal dimensions of protest, sustains transnational resistance communities and the political productiveness of unintentional martyrs well beyond the immediacy of their respective deaths.

32 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

Finally, in section 2.6, the theory of digitally mediated martyrdom is explored through the worked example of Said, in which I develop the methodological groundwork then becomes the basis for the larger study on Martin (as demonstrated in Chapter 3, 4 and 5).

2.2 DIGITALLY MEDIATED MARTYRDOM DEFINED

The phenomenon of martyrdom has its roots in earliest human history. Meir Hatina (2014, p. 3) argues that every culture, whether ancient or modern, has a multitude of individuals who could fit the narrative representation of martyr. This thesis does not attempt to rehearse the extant literature pertaining to the discourse on martyrdom. Suffice to say that martyrdom draws from different religious, political, and cultural traditions. It has long been used as a symbolic and narrative framework to represent the innocent or heroic dead (see Hatina, 2014). Martyrdom acquires specific meaning in Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, and it is a highly contested field within the respective religions (see Dehghani & Horsch, 2014); there are different discourses on martyrdom in the “East and West”, as well as in popular and scientific discourses that associate non-violent and unintentional martyrs with the secular and suicide bombers with religion (Horsch 2014, p. 205). See section 2.4 for a continued discussion of martyrdom and mediation.

As specified in Chapter 1, I draw from Buckner and Khatib (2014) to conceptualise martyrdom in the contemporary context: as an emergent and discursive practice that is politically and symbolically oriented in its operative functions, which draws from religious interpretations, namely Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, and develops from interaction with other cultural traditions. Digitally mediated martyrdom transcends traditional religious connotations by invoking universal values and represents the popular and intersectional struggle for social justice, freedom, and dignity. The digital production, presentation, and circulation of martyr narratives, in their construction, stylisation, mediation, and appropriation, brings forward new political frames of interpretation and possibilities for mediating transnational digital solidarities (Sumiala & Korpiola, 2017). Digitally mediated martyrdom is a distinctly politicised, visually oriented, and communicative practice that is constructed, ascribed, and publicly articulated by people, who claim martyrs in the name of their struggle for

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 33

social justice. These communicative processes decentre authoritative and religious hierarchies, as well as “normative definitions” of who is able to be claimed and venerated as a martyr (Dehghani & Horsch, 2014, p. 7). This is especially important because who gets to be a martyr and how the martyr is constituted through social processes is always already political.

The term digitally mediated martyrdom refers to the mediated visual communication practices that occur around the unjust killing of an ordinary person, who is posthumously transformed by activists and people in and through digital images into a mediated symbolic martyr. Unjust victims are ultimately made martyrs through symbolic and ritualised forms of digitally mediated communicative practices that rely on the production, editing, circulation, mediation, and appropriation of digital images to aid the construction and sustainment of imagined communities through collective identification and resistance. While the framework of digitally mediated martyrdom evidently draws from existing concepts and theories, no entire or partial theoretical vocabulary or conceptual framework are available in the media and communication literature. Thus, the research process commenced by applying some initial theoretical and conceptual language that was further developed through the worked example of Said.

Specifically, I began by theorising digitally mediated martyrdom through the scholarship of Buckner and Khatib (2014) who argue that the Arab Spring brought forth a new model for the martyr in the Arab world. That is, Buckner and Khatib (2014) contend that images of Arab Spring martyrs were citizen produced; the narrative portrayals of martyrs were highly personalised and enabled transition from needless victimhood to empowerment and agency. The analysis conducted on Said enabled a meaningful application of the theoretical and conceptual framework, and permitted for the development of an initial methodological approach that was further expanded for the subsequent case study of Martin (see Chapter 3). From this, I advance the scholarship of Buckner and Khatib (2014) to argue that the 2010-2011 Arab uprisings and post-2011 global protest wave has brought forth a new model of digitally mediated martyr representations beyond the Arab world that has manifested as a transnational practice of protest. My argument is grounded in the empirical analysis of the thesis and illustrates how the posthumous bodies of Said and Martin are made to transition from victimhood to martyrdom, respectively, to mobilise popular protests against

34 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

systems of injustice and to sustain resistance communities. The framework of digitally mediated martyrdom presented here, however, has been developed in mind as transferrable to other contexts and where it could be systematically applied to other empirical cases. I demonstrate the applicability of understanding digitally mediated martyrdom as a practice of protest that has emerged as a transnational phenomenon by providing some examples below of other significant deaths, both from within the Middle East and globally. Each of the following examples underscore emergent trends in the mediation of martyr narratives.

The Emergence of Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

Perhaps the earliest indication of the emergence of a new visual manifestation of digitally mediated martyrdom in the Arab world can be argued to have begun a decade before the 2010-2011 Arab uprisings. I trace the materialisation of this trend to the unjust killing of 12-year-old Palestinian boy Mohammed al-Durrah, who was shot by Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) in Gaza on 30 September, 2000. Huddled against a wall with his father who was trying to shield him from live fire being exchanged between Israeli and Palestinian security forces, the final moments of al- Durrah’s life were captured by a Palestinian cameraman working freelance for the television station France 2. The footage, and still image frames showing the moments before al-Durrah was shot, and after as he lies dead and slumped across his father’s lap, were subsequently broadcast to global television audiences and published online. The advances in digital media technologies and the internet, but not yet mobile and social media technologies, enabled for the subsequent circulation, appropriation, and remediation of the stills of the father and son.

Posthumously, al-Durrah was resurrected as an unintentional martyr of the Second Intifada (a Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation between 2000- 2005), he was appropriated as an injustice symbol (Olesen, 2015) to signify the shared vulnerability of Palestinians to IDF violence, and became a geopolitical symbol of renewed Middle Eastern conflict more broadly (see Campbell, 2004). In Palestine, still images were appropriated and remediated for use in protest placards, martyr posters, on stamps, street murals, on T-shirts as protest attire, and in countless works of art. Such practices were not confined to Palestine; the digital images travelled into use across the Arab world and globally in solidarity protests (see Ensel,

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 35

2014). The initial footage of the incident has since been uploaded to YouTube, making al-Durrah’s killing a universal site for perpetual witnessing. The affordances of digital media technologies and the internet enabled for the emergence of a new ‘space of appearance’ (Mirzoeff, 2017) for the global witnessing and ritualisation of al-Durrah, which ultimately immortalised the corporeal body and crystallised the beginning of a new type of citizen-produced martyr image.

It then becomes evident that advances in digital technologies enable for the continuum of the visual mediation of martyrdom. Notably, the affordances of emergent digital, camera-enabled mobile phones, and social media technologies, since the early 2000s (and more prominently since 2007 with the popular adoption of smartphones), have enabled for the production of citizen-generated witnessing of police brutality and violent injustice beyond state control and mainstream media accounts. Importantly, such visual testimony serves as mediating devices in the construction of the martyr narrative (Hatina, 2014; Allen, 2009). Two early and notable examples of this trend can be seen in the 2009 cases of shooting victims: 22- year-old Oscar Grant in America and 26-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan in Iran. On 1 January, at the Fruitvale BART train station in Oakland, California, Grant, a Black unarmed youth, was detained along with several other passengers by police officers and was physically forced to lie on the ground of the platform. Grant was fatally shot in the back by white officer Johannes Mehserle and later died in hospital. The killing of Grant was captured by multiple witnesses at the station who used their mobile phones to record the unfolding of events, the footage was uploaded to YouTube, disseminated and viewed widely, and was broadcast in mainstream media coverage (Kiss, 2009).

Grant’s killing became the catalyst for widespread local protests and riots in Oakland, and nationally served as a present reminder of past injustices committed against Black people, notably the 1991 Rodney King beating by four Los Angeles police officers (Gonzales, 2009). In online and offline protests, a pre-death headshot image of Grant came to be the dominant image that was appropriated and remediated for use in protest posters9 calling for “Justice for Oscar Grant” and an end to police

9 For visual context of the pre-death image of Oscar Grant see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Oscar_Grant#/media/File:Oscar_Grant_die_in.jpg

36 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

brutality. Grant’s posthumous image has since been memorialised in countless works art, film, and literature including the Oscar Grant Memorial Arts Project10 and the 2013 biographical feature film Fruitvale Station. The digital pre-death headshot image of Grant was also recalled into use in combination with the “Justice For Trayvon Martin” campaign where the pre-death images of both slain victims (and others including Emmett Till, see section 4.2.1) served as a juxtaposed reminder of past, present, and persisting injustices committed against Black people in America.

On June 20, 2009, Neda Agha-Soltan, a Muslim youth, attended a street protest in Tehran against the disputed election of the then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when she was fatally shot. Witnesses used their mobile phones to document Agha-Soltan’s final moments as she collapsed and bled to death surrounded by bystanders. The video footage and multiple still frame images were subsequently shared and uploaded to YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blogs and international mainstream media, opening up a space for global witnessing that subverted the Iranian government’s attempt to prevent Agha-Soltan’s memorialisation (Fathi, 2009). The visual testimony of her killing went viral with some claiming her death to be one of the most widely witnessed in history (Mahr, 2009). She became dubbed “the YouTube martyr” and “the martyr of the Green Movement”, as an iconic symbol of the Iranian Green Movement, and a face that represented the role of women as prominent symbols of Iran's struggle for democracy (Ravitz, 2009). Subsequent pre-death images of Agha-Soltan, as a smiling and aesthetically ideal woman, emerged online and were juxtaposed alongside still post- mortem images of her bloodied face and lifeless gaze, the images were reappropriated and remediated extensively online and offline. Appearing as both singular and juxtaposed images dialectically infusing each other with innocence and injustice meaning, Agha-Soltan was constructed by activists and ordinary people as an injustice symbol that resonated nationally and globally (see Olesen, 2015), galvanising popular opposition against the Ahmadinejad regime.

The abovementioned cases of Grant and Agha-Soltan are drawn from different contexts and cultures, though, they establish the emergent and productive

10 For background and context on the Oscar Grant Memorial Arts Project see: http://www.reimaginerpe.org/rpe/oscar

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 37

possibilities of digital affordances for the formation of injustice symbols (Olesen, 2015), and of the potential for those symbolised to be transformed into a face or a martyr of a movement. It also establishes both parallel and divergent patterns of memetic trajectories and resonance. For example, both Grant’s and Agha-Soltan’s posthumous image were sites for recurrent acts of creative insurgency (Kraidy, 2016). Though, while Grant’s killing served as an injustice symbol (Olesen, 2015) at a local/national level, it did not resonate at a national/global level as did the killing and subsequent martyrdom of Agha-Soltan. It could be argued that Grant’s killing provided for some of the injustice discourse that succeeded in finding popular form in the 2012 killing and martyrdom of Martin, as discussed in depth in the thesis. Though it also makes evident that not all deaths are made to matter equally, this could be due to a number of reasons including cultural and political, among multiple others. In considering the case of Agha-Soltan, it also demonstrates the democratic potential of digital affordances for the construction of martyr narratives from a secularised perspective and beyond dominant and masculinist agendas, I will return to this point.

A similar thread of martyr narratives can be traced between Agha-Soltan’s martyrdom and that of 21-year-old Gaza medic Razan al-Najjar, also a Muslim youth. On 1 June, 2018, al-Najjar was in the field attending to wounded civilians taking part in the Great March of Return protests when she was shot and killed by IDF forces. Immediately following her killing she was heralded as a martyr and frequently referred to in Arab and international mainstream media coverage, and on social media as an “angel of mercy” (Alsaafin & Humaid, 2018). Her name and image, and al-Najjar’s blood-stained medical vest with a single bullet hole, were transformed into recurrent symbols of Palestinian suffering and signified for a global audience the human rights abuses committed by the Israeli government. Her martyrdom was not unchallenged, the Israeli army tried to smear the posthumous character of al-Najjar by falsely accusing her of engaging in rioting and acting as a human shield for Hamas, a Palestinian-Islamist resistance organisation (Mackey, 2018). The actions of the IDF invited extensive criticism as human rights organisations, activists, and ordinary people participated in physical and digital protests against the injustice. Her martyrdom has been recurrently retold and transformed through digital images, appropriated in countless works of art, street

38 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

graffiti, internet memes, cartoons, and protest placards, and made manifest as both a local and transnational protest phenomenon.

Reflecting on the ways the martyrdom of al-Najjar and Agha-Soltan was deployed in digital activist culture, it troubles the idea of the body and blood of the female identity as a historic and domesticated trope synonymous with the idea of the motherland, i.e., if the nation is vulnerable, so too is the female body. Crucial in these instances was the body and blood of the female victims in making them politically productive in ways that challenged the sexual, feminised, and heteronormative11 discourses traditionally associated with childbirth, menstruation, citizenship, and political subjectivity12. Their martyrdom also served to challenge patriarchal assumptions that it is the male body and not the female body that could challenge the social order. Moreover, it confronts (though does not resolve) the discourse that the masculine body can be abstracted from its biology transforming it into a ready symbol for humanity, nationhood, and revolutionary martyrdom, while the body of the female cannot be abstracted from its sex, notably in Arab and Muslim discourse (see Kraidy, 2016).

This discourse also extends beyond the bodies of Arab and Muslim females as made evident in the case of 23-year-old medical student Jyoti Singh who was violently gang-raped in Delhi, India, on 16 December, 2012, and subsequently died days later as a result of the sustained injuries. Crucial to the political and discursive significance of Singh’s death was the symbolic appropriation of her as an injustice symbol (Olesen, 2015). The manner in which Singh’s posthumous identity was symbolically deployed within national discourse challenged the usually associated invisibility of raped female bodies in Indian society. In section 2.5, I further discuss the significance of Singh’s death in relation to memetic protest. It is important to clarify here, however, that while her identity was initially withheld in media coverage, due to regulations in the Indian Penal Code that strictly prohibit such

11 Other research (see Myles and Lewis, 2019) establishes how the posthumous construction of murdered trans persons as injustice symbols has made unjust death politically productive in trans rights activism in ways that troubles heteronormative discourses of martyrdom.

12 These dynamics reflect contemporary and broader movements across the Middle East and North Africa region that are aimed at advancing gender equality and women’s rights, as well as global feminist movements.

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 39

disclosure, her name was later made public in subsequent media coverage13 with the permission of Singh’s parents and used in protest, notably #JusticeForJyoti and #JyotiSinghPandey. However, her image was not published. The affordances of digital and social media technologies, though, enabled for ritualised and creative communicative practices that aided the symbolic construction of the memetic signifier (Gerbaudo, 2015) that substituted the space of Singh’s absent and corporeal body. Such practices reflect a decisive cultural shift in the public memorialisation of a rape victim in India, and new and emergent struggles against state-sanctioned boundaries of women’s (in)visibility and political-subjectivity in the public sphere.

Each of the victims offered for discussion, al-Durrah, Grant, Agha-Soltan, al- Najjar, Singh, and in conjunction with the specific accounts of Said and Martin elaborated in the thesis, establish the once particular and universal nature of their deaths. That is, they became posthumous symbols and/or subsequent martyrs that represented more broadly popular struggles for social justice and human rights. Similar patterns are also evident in the unjust deaths of Hamza al-Khateeb (2011, Syrian Uprising), Mike Brown (2014, Black Lives Matter), and Alan Kurdi (2015, Syrian Refugee Crisis), among others. These cases serve to illustrate that digitally mediated martyrdom can be considered as a recurrent practice observed across contexts and cultures, each individually offering nuances and concrete practices of resistance. An important question to consider though is why, from among countless other victims who died unjustly from the same or similar circumstances, is it that the identities of these particular individuals came to serve as polysemous symbols of injustice and/or representative claims of martyrdom? It is evident the victims were unintentional martyrs, they shared corporeal suffering, they were all young and died prematurely, they fit the idealised notion of pure innocence, and provided an aesthetic appeal and interpretation. But none of these factors alone can be attribute to the making of their ritualistic martyrdom.

Since martyrdom has always been a mediated visual communication practice (Sumiala & Korpiola, 2017), it is necessary for this thesis to examine how the affordances of digital and social media technologies challenge the meaning and

13 For Indian media coverage that publicly named Jyoti Singh as a rape victim see: http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/want-the-world-to-know-her-name-delhi-victim-s- father/1055552

40 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

nature of martyrdom as a contemporary political practice within activist cultures. In service of this mission, digitally mediated martyrdom provides a framework through which agentic practices and processes of mediation, appropriation, remediation, and reappropriation can be examined and explained. I argue these practices are fundamental to the construction, temporal sustainment, affective resonance, and transformation of the martyr narrative as a template, or archetype, that is deployed in transnational activist practice. The empirical basis that supports my argument is developed through the exploratory example of Said and below I introduce the conceptual tools needed to analyse the phenomenon.

2.3 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Injustice Symbols

In the thesis, I apply the concept of injustice symbols (Olesen, 2013, 2015, 2018) to show how digitally mediated images of Said were appropriated by activists, who constructed him as an injustice symbol to strategically and affectively mobilise popular opposition against the former Hosni Mubarak regime between 2010-2011. But before I expand on how posthumous images of Said attained status as injustice symbols, let me first properly introduce and explain what constitutes an injustice symbol. Images of unjust death become political when they are symbolised (Olesen, 2018) that is, when they are inscribed with meaning and are appropriated to reflect broader discourses of injustice within society. At their base, injustice symbols have empirical objects: events/situations that involve perceived instances of suffering and injustice; people/individuals who are considered as ordinary and undeserving victims of violent death and who posthumously gain iconic or symbolic status through their association with social, cultural, and political struggles for democracy and human rights; and images/photographs that either a) document an unjust act as it unfolds, b) provides visual testimony of the consequences of unjust behaviour and subsequent death, or c) are images of victims before they became victims that lend emotional credibility to claims of innocence that can be made in their name (Olesen, 2015). I focus on and refer to these latter two categories of images as post-mortem and pre- death, respectively, throughout the thesis.

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 41

Understanding the formation processes of injustice symbols is complex and multifaceted. That is, they undergo a range of processes that begins when a) post- mortem and/or pre-death images are shifted from private spaces into the public realm, b) when then publicly available images are transformed from their particularity into symbols that point beyond themselves to reflect larger symptoms of social discontent, and c) when post-mortem images are juxtaposed with pre-death images to provide an emotional and moral contrast of innocence (before) and injustice (after) that serves to mobilise political consciousness and amplify the articulation of injustice (Olesen, 2015, 2018). Importantly, the formation of injustice symbols requires the direct intervention and mediation of activists and people who appropriate images and inscribe them with injustice meaning by linking them with existing injustice frames within society (Olesen, 2013). Significant in this process is the role played by “intimate injustice interpreters” and commentators (Olesen, 2018). Intimate injustice interpreters, are people who have an intimate relationship with the victim, like the family members of Said and Martin, and play a constitutive role in shifting existing private (post-mortem and/or pre-death images) images into the public sphere and inscribing them with emotional and symbolic capital. That is, they create visibility for global witnessing and help us emotionally interpret the significance and meaning of death by linking the particularity of the deaths of Said and Martin, respectively, with wider systems of injustice and human rights abuses. The work of intimate injustice interpreters is further supplemented by non-family members i.e. activists, public figures, media personnel, celebrities, and ordinary people, who act as injustice commentators by recurrently mediating the meaning and visibility of unjust death. These processes play a key role in the construction and posthumous interpretation of victims as injustice symbols, and contributes to their global resonance.

As should be clear from the above-mentioned discussion, the concept of injustice symbols balances a political and cultural approach in understanding the interactional dynamics between images, activism, and social processes. Underpinning the theoretical vocabulary of injustice symbols is the concept of injustice frames because they are laden with emotion and provide the cultural interpretation and moral indignation needed for political mobilisation processes. William Gamson and colleagues (Gamson et al., 1982, p. 123) define an injustice

42 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

frame as “an interpretation of what is happening that supports the conclusion that an authority system is violating the shared moral principles of the participants”. Here, injustice frames help to develop the argument surrounding the complex processes of the formation and deployment of injustice symbols. Work on emotions, notably social movement sociologist James Jasper’s (1997) concept of moral shocks, is also applied to discuss how the political potential of injustice symbols is inextricably linked with the capacity of images to make visible bodily suffering and generate affective resonance.

Therefore, we can understand injustice symbols as created “in and through social movements [...] they [social movements] not only draw on and invoke existing symbols but also contribute to the formation of new ones” (Olesen, 2015, p. 1). Injustice symbols are “based on events and situations that entail some element of human suffering and unjust behaviour toward others” (Olesen, 2015, p. 9). That is, injustice symbols are habitually produced by feelings of indignation, what Jasper (1997, pp. 159-162) refers to as “moral shocks”. They are “enveloped in emotions” (Jasper 1997, p. 112) and motivated in response to unexpected events that trigger outrage in people and provides a stimulus for collective political action and solidarity among other imagined allies. The construction of injustice symbols is driven by dynamic communication processes that habitually see posthumous images of victims travel a) ‘temporally’ into new historical contexts and are invoked in relation to subsequent protest events, and b) ‘spatially’ as injustice symbols are appropriated and remediated into new geographical contexts which see digitally mediated images transverse between digital and urban spaces, and local and transnational contexts (Olesen, 2015, p. 15). Thus, digitally mediated images that function as injustice symbols are highly unstable and are never fixed. Rather, they operate through complex social processes and ritualised communicative practices that are marked by constant movement (memetics), contestation (participatory interaction), and transformation (visual variation).

In Chapter 3, 4 and 5, I extend on this theoretical vocabulary to describe and explain in detail how Martin was discursively constructed as a victim of injustice and made into a martyr in and through digitally mediated images on Instagram. The analysis attends to not only what is made visible through digital images, but to also what can be and is said in and through them. In doing this, I examined the discourse

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 43

that emerged between image and text, between visual form and language in use, in their collective manifestation as social media posts. This approach permitted for an investigation of the interplay between discursive, sociotechnical, political, and cultural factors that emerged in and through digital images. It provided insight into the ways in which activists and ordinary people produce and mediate new spaces of appearance (Mirzoeff, 2017) and affective economies of social action in and through digitally mediated images on Instagram.

In formulating and specifying the abovementioned interactional dynamics, I borrow the concept of “operative images” (Farocki, 2004) as a useful way to theorise my argument in the case of Martin, and for extending on the above points and the empirical analysis undertaken in the worked example of Said. In developing this theoretical vocabulary, I argue that digitally mediated and posthumous images of Martin move beyond the limitations of political and iconic representation. I appropriate the concept of the operative image to contend that digitally mediated images not only perform representational or illustrative functions that reflect social and political realities but are also discursively ‘operationalised’—as instruments and agents in activist practice, as products and producers of sociopolitical work—to render acts of police brutality and political injustice visible in new ways. Here, digitally mediated images play a performative and constitutive role in creating social identifications, antagonisms, and political contentions as part of their operational dynamics.

This operational role is performed through processes of communicative action, digital commemoration, and memetic trajectories that see images frequently spread beyond the initial forms and intentions of their producers, often operating against them in counter discourse and iconoclastic struggles that seek to challenge the iconisation of martyr narratives. Through this framework, I investigated how digital images were discursively constructed (visually and semantically, through appropriation and reappropriation, and mediation and remediation) by people and spread through digital affordances. I show how communicative practices produced new possibilities for ‘doing politics’ and ‘being political’; how digital images operated by galvanising and mobilising dispersed individuals as part of an affective operation, that is, the popular struggle for justice. Thus, digitally mediated images do not simply show things, rather, they do things. These ‘things’ are operationalised

44 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

through ritualised communicative practices that entangle acts of symbolic digital commemoration, politicisation, and mobilisation as a means for people to challenge dominant discourses and traditional ways of doing politics.

The theoretical vocabulary of ‘operative images’ (Farocki, 2004), thus, permits reflexive orientation to study digital images in use, that is, to study how they are deployed by social actors and operate as discursive devices that organise meaning. In this thesis, I emphasise the importance of studying digital images that are mobilised for protest purposes within their constitutive context and the dynamic sociotechnical environment within which they are embedded. I did this in the study of Martin through an examination of digital images in use by evaluating what was made both visible and sayable through visual conventions and accompanying textual commentary in the form of captions and comments (i.e. as social media posts). This enabled me to examine the fluid nature of digital images and the multiple functions they engender. Through which, I was able to unpack nuanced practices and genealogies of association that were attached to particular images, as well as to identify digital traces of social and affective resonance.

From the analysis, I found there was no single construction of Martin as the martyr; hence, no one trope can capture the nuances of popular discourse and complexity of social movement phenomena. Rather, I found that the discourse of Martin’s martyrdom shifted between multiple, intersecting, and competing constructions that were articulated in a variety of forms and genres across time. The thesis argues, then, that Martin’s digitally mediated martyrdom is understood as an operative framework through which a system of tropes are made manifest in and through digital images that function within larger public discourses of social justice, human rights, and popular will. The thesis calls, then, for a reconsideration of martyrdom—in the context of digital activist cultures—as an emergent process and an operative framework that (re)configures meaning, (re)politicises social action, and galvanises popular mobilisation by developing genealogies of association among digital images in ways that constitute the political productiveness of the martyr figure.

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 45

2.4 MARTYRDOM AND MEDIATION

The term and meaning of martyr is not self-evident—e.g. posthumously commemorated martyrs who have died as victims of violence and who were not in a position to choose between life and death—nor is martyr an automatically ascribed appellation. Martyr is a title that is bestowed by people through social attribution on those deceased who are deemed worthy of the concept. Martyred persons and the constructions surrounding that person’s status as a martyr requires interpretation, thus, martyrdom is a concept that assigns meaning to the death of a person. Social actors bestow meaning on martyr deaths through the invocation of victimhood discourses that reinterpret the death of the martyred person through narratives of innocence and morality (Gölz, 2019). Only by constructing the martyr as a figure of victimisation and innocence can the suffering of their death be portrayed in moral terms, and the result of the actions that caused their death be defined as an injustice, or a wrongdoing, that could, and should, have been avoided. Martyr narratives, therefore, are products of social action and the figure of the individual martyr is appropriated to perform a particular role as a carrier for distinct discourses that are always contextually and socially contingent.

The figure of the victim is strongly tied to that of the ‘unintentional’ martyr and connects the moral standards of society with the unjust suffering of an innocent, who should have lived (Gölz, 2019). Thus, the witnessing audience plays an important and constitutive role in narrativising, shaping, and ascribing meaning to martyr deaths. Importantly, such acts take stage in the public sphere to legitimise the martyr’s popular status, however, the status of a martyr is never uncontested. The martyr figure, therefore, becomes both a public figure that carries the values and virtues of society, and a collective metaphor through which the living look back at the dead and see in the image of the martyr the witnessing of their own potential vulnerability to death (see Hashhash, 2006). The productive capacity of the martyr figure is not limited to the events that produce their death, however. Rather, martyrs are collectively and performatively constructed (Ghannam, 2015), and this occurs in a multitude of media- saturated cultural, social, and political contexts (Sumiala & Korpiola, 2017).

Martyr figures operate as sites of demarcation between meaning and identity, as well as sites of social entanglement and mediation (Dehghani & Horsch, 2014). As such, martyr figures are hybrid figures that oscillate between positions of religiosity

46 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

and secularisation. Importantly, the figure of the martyr performs boundary work that creates, or makes visible, social and political divisions; martyr figures operate not only as markers of injustice but also as agents that embody an ideology that makes possible, or articulates, the prefiguring of desired future societies. Unlike the visual mediation practices that produced images of canonised Christian saint martyrs or the prototypical Islam martyrs, advances in media and digital technologies have both democratised the cultural production of the martyr figure and enabled for new creative capacities for the (re)making of martyrs. Crucially, these advances have reconfigured who can be claimed and venerated as a martyr, and the social processes and mediated practices through which this occurs.

Communicative practice is central to the concept of martyrdom and includes narrative construction, memorialisation, and commemoration. Without these elements, the martyr has no existence (Hatina, 2014, p. 7). Fundamental to the concept of martyrdom is witnessing. Linguistically the term martyr derives from the Greek and Latin term to witness. In Arabic, it comes from the root shuhaha that means “to witness” or “to testify” (Buckner & Khatib, 2014, p. 369). As a communicative practice witnessing of the figure of the martyr is made manifest through visual culture, that is, in commemorative rituals and representations that traditionally have included martyr funerals, posters, murals, photographs and televised media coverage (see Allen 2006, 2009). Within contemporary visual culture, manifestations of martyr narratives continue as a reoccurring theme. Yet, incidents of martyrdom in the twenty-first century, and specifically since 2009, were not initially witnessed by global publics through mainstream media, but via digital and social media technologies (see Horsch, 2014). The emergent affordances of digital technologies have, therefore, brought forth new possibilities for witnessing, communicating, and mediating martyr narratives in activist discourse, and permit for the commemoration of martyrs in deliberately global forms.

Martyr death is a visually mediated communicative practice (Sumiala & Korpiola, 2017). As argued by Sumiala (2012), public death events are processes of collective ritualisation performed by people in and through digital media technologies to create and orchestrate “civic mourning rituals”. Thus, people actively participate in the process of public ritualisation (Sumiala, 2012). Importantly, ritualised communication practices not only bring into being communities who

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 47

express identification with “the suffering and loss, but also identification with the hatred, violence and its perpetrators” (Sumiala 2012, p. 106). These emotional bonds afford for the formation of collective identifications and solidarities in grievance communities, and digitally mediated images of victims play a central role in sustaining these connections posthumously. Moreover, communicative practices enacted through digital affordances transform mediated martyr narratives, spatially and temporally, to create “a new kind of digitally re-spatialised simultaneity among its witnesses” (Sumiala & Korpiola, 2017, p. 55). This simultaneity extends spaces of witnessing beyond the local and physical and into global and imagined, which facilitates a new type of “mediated sociality” (Sumiala & Korpiola, 2017, p. 55) whereby imagined communities are constituted by witnessing mediated martyrdom in and through digital and social media technologies.

Every act of witnessing involves some form of mediation, and digital media technologies act as a surrogate for absent audiences, that is, media witnessing is conceived as a performative act that occurs in, by, and through forms of media (Frosh & Pinchevski 2009, p. 1, original emphasis). Since the study of witnessing is not new, communicative practices of witnessing have undergone a radical transformation in recent years because of emergent digital affordances (Mortensen, 2015). The act of witnessing and the production of witness testimony have been democratised as a participatory practice and transformed as a habitual and reflective act that takes shape as “connective witnessing” (Mortensen 2015). Connective witnessing serves as a contemporary method for visually documenting acts of brutality and perceived injustice; it is applied conceptually throughout both accounts of Said and Martin to examine how unjust death is made visible and contestable, and contributes to the construction of injustice symbols (Olesen, 2015). Images taken on mobile phones circulate online and enable for connective witnessing to condense the space between the individual and the collective, as well as enable people to participate in the sharing and appropriation of digital images for political expression and action (Mortensen, 2015).

Connective witnessing has emerged prominently as a form of ritualised civic action in Iran (in 2009), across the Middle East and North Africa (since late 2010), in the Justice for Trayvon Martin movement in America and the contemporary transition for Black liberation in the rise of the BLM movement (since 2012), and

48 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

demonstrations in the Palestinian Great March of Return (since 2018), among others. In all of these contexts digitally mediated images of broken and brutalised bodies served as central mechanisms of witness testimony through which people exercised political agency and personalised political representation in the pursuit for social justice by claiming the authority over the production and circulation of witness testimony beyond mainstream media or state control. In turn, this helped mobilise and orchestrate popular uprisings against injustice. Moreover, in each of these cases multiple ordinary individuals appeared, posthumously, as martyred bodies who were transformed in death because of the premature, brutal, and politically charged nature of their deaths.

Digitally mediated images of these aforementioned martyred bodies became the material relics and iconographies of their flesh (Schwartz, 2015), preserving them in the immediacy of their deaths and archiving them as material resources for appropriation in consequent acts of political expression and action. Subsequently, these bodies were transformed from their victimhood, as bodies that were recognised as grievable (Butler, 2009) and ‘made to matter’ through ritualised acts of commemoration and collective identification. Importantly, they were discursively made politically visible and secular by the people who called for action in their names, notably, through the appropriation of digital images of the victims with the associated use of hashtags like #WeAreAllNeda (Iran), #WeAreAllKhaledSaid (Egypt), #WeAreAllTrayvonMartin (America), #WeAreAllRazan (Palestine). These hashtags, among others, were also expressed as slogans in popular discourse and emphasise how martyr narratives drive processes of collective identification, and operate as mobilising and unifying forces of social action.

In Frames of War (2009, p. 71) Judith Butler draws on the Abu Ghraib images of unjust death and bodily suffering to argue that the image not only structures how reality is registered within political consciousness, but how reality is interpreted. In operative terms, images born out of conflict, war, and suffering govern the visual dimensions and discursive frames through which certain lives are communicated as human and constituted as mattering, thus lives recognised as “grievable”, while other lives are not recognised as human and are not entitled the dignity of human rights, thus the loss of such lives are rendered “ungrievable” and unpresentable (ibid., p. 74). Butler contends that the image that projects grievability,

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 49

both shown and circulated, becomes the “public condition under which we feel outrage and construct political views to incorporate and articulate that outrage” (ibid., p. 78). The questions regarding images of death and injustice in the digital era, therefore, are not only about what they show, representatively and symbolically, it is about how images reveal what they show, how social actors deploy them to operate discursively and to mobilise.

Throughout both accounts of Said (see section 2.5) and Martin (Chapters 3, 4, and 5), Butler’s concept of grievability is applied to examine how, posthumously, these unjust victims are made to matter as grievable lives, and ultimately martyrs, through communicative action that is performed in and through digitally mediated images. Through this application, the thesis explores the ways in which the affordances of digital and social media technologies have fundamentally and radically altered the role that images play in (re)shaping public visibility of conflict and (re)producing meaning and action (Blaagaard, Mortensen & Neumayer, 2017). And ultimately, how instances of unjust death are rendered visible in new ways that redefine the “field of representability” (Butler, 2009, p. 73), or as visual culture scholar Nicholas Mirzoeff (2017) refers to, and is applied in the thesis, as the “space of appearance” (this concept is formally introduced in section 2.5).

Due to the proliferation of digital and social media technologies, Johanna Sumiala and Outi Hakola (2013, p. 5) argue that, more than in any point in history, the contemporary period is saturated with images of death and suffering, and which rapidly travel across media contexts locally, regionally, nationally, and globally. Hence, the affordances of digital and social media technologies enable anyone with access to them the ability to create and circulate images of death. Lilie Chouliaraki (2015) argues the “digital witnessing” of death and conflict reporting produced in and through digitally mediated images raises new challenges for journalistic practice, the viewing audience’s relationship to such images, and the power relations within which images are embedded e.g. who dies and whose life is made to matter and constituted as grievable (Butler, 2009). Central in these instances of digital witnessing are ordinary people and activists who are either on the ground producing first-hand visual testimony of death events through camera-enabled mobile technologies, or online participating in the circulation and mediation of images of death across social media platforms. In turn, these individuals operate as social actors

50 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

who make death public in ways that mobilise emotion and invite affective responses (Chouliaraki, 2015).

Such practices bypass the traditional norms that govern the mainstream media production and control over how images of violent death and conflict are made public and rendered visible. Zeynep Devrim Gürsel (2016, p. 2) refers to the intermediary role played by professional journalists and media personnel who control and police the movement and visibility of images to news audiences as “image brokers”. Image brokers (as discussed in the example of Said, section 2.6, and case of Martin, Chapter 3), she contends, are not necessarily the producers or authors of images, rather, they are the individuals making the decisions behind the images that are encountered (or not) in mainstream media; image brokers thus “collectively frame our ways of seeing” (ibid.). This informational control is increasingly challenged by activists and ordinary people, however, as they participate in the process of capturing, uploading, and circulating images of death and injustice on social media, and that produce new cultures of connectivity and global information flows (Mortensen 2015, p. 1403). Such practices reconfigure the relationship between personalised political expression and connective and collective action. This form of “connective witnessing” (Mortensen, 2015) plays a constitutive role in not only making death visible, but in making death matter i.e. giving otherwise invisible deaths a space where they can appear as grievable lives.

2.5 DIGITAL MEDIATION

As I have shown, martyrdom has long been a used as a symbolic and mobilising force, it has always been mediated, and it has continuously been a visually oriented and ritualised practice. What, then, do the affordances of digital and social media technologies permit for the visual continuum and deployment of the narrative and symbol of martyrdom in the contemporary context?

First, I will describe what I mean by ‘affordances’. The term affordances is an important concept within media and communication studies and is broadly used to describe the relations between digital and social media technologies and its users. Affordances, however, neither originates within the field nor is it unique to the field of media and communication studies. Affordances has its origins in ecological

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 51

psychology (Gibson, 2015), it was later used in design studies (Norman, 1988). Within the field of human computer interaction, affordances has been used to describe what the material artefacts of technologies enable people to do (Gaver, 1996). Sociological approaches have used the term to discuss the ‘social affordances’ that technologies permit for the shaping of social relations (Wellman et al., 2003). Similarly, ‘communicative affordances’ (Hutchby, 2001) have been used to describe the social construction and context of technologies as well as their material restraints and possibilities, and the opportunities for action that emerges between those relations. It is evident there is no universal consensus on the definition nor application of the term, it is ambiguous and sometimes used in conflicting ways even with the field of media and communications studies.

Within social media studies specifically Taina Bucher and Anne Helmond (2017) trace the intellectual history of affordances and the way it has been operationalised to analyse the different types of communicative practice and social interactions that emerge in and through various technical features. They highlight ‘imagined affordances’ (Nagy & Neff, 2015) which incorporates relations between the material, mediated, and emotional aspects of human-technology interactions, as well as ‘vernacular affordances’ (McVeigh-Schultz & Baym, 2015) that describes processes of materiality, sense-making, and vernacular uses of technology in a relational and experiential economy that exists across platform boundaries. Bucher and Helmond (2017, 2016), themselves, conceptualise affordances by means of understanding the action opportunities made possible to users by the means of technology with the inverse consideration of what users do to and with technologies.

I use the term affordances throughout the thesis to anchor my investigation in what people do communicatively in and through the sociotechnical capacity of digital and social media technologies. That is, by linking media content with everyday communicative practices that shape the dynamics of how publics and activist cultures come into being, interact, and perform action. The concept of affordances permitted for investigation of the ways people produced, edited, shared, and further transformed digital images, while simultaneously studying the discourses that emerged in and through those sharing and communicative practices. From the study’s findings, I make the argument that the established and emergent affordances of digital and social media technologies have changed the nature and practice of

52 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

contemporary martyrdom, that is, through the sociotechnical environment that they afford to connect human and non-human actors together, orchestrate social relations, and enable possibilities for communicative action (Fenton 2016, p. 27) (see discussion of ‘space of appearance’ later this section for further discussion). Since martyrdom has always been a ritualised practice it is necessary, then, to critically rethink how the complexity of emergent affordances of digital and social media technologies impact and shape the possibilities for martyrdom as a digitally mediated performance of ‘ritualised action’ (Couldry, 2003, 2012).

I draw from Nick Couldry (2003, p. 23) to consider affordances as permitting mechanisms that generate the “‘ritual space’ and which in turn therefore generate the possibilities of specific media rituals”. Each social media platform has its own particular affordances and culture of use, features, and functionalities such as hashtags, likes, shares, and comments (Bucher & Helmond, 2017) that enable or limit the possibilities for communicative action and social interaction. I focus on the communication processes of creative, connective, and collective action that are enacted through the affordances of digital and social media technologies. Social media platforms do have their own agendas and politics (Gillespie, 2010). That is, they increasingly and technically choreograph the content and character of public discourse (Gillespie, 2017). It is not the mission of this thesis to analyse how digital and social media technologies, as intermediary agents, mediate public discourse and regulate content. Rather, I focus on how people navigate these limitations through processes of agentic communication and practices of self-mediation. In the concluding comments of Chapter 6, I address how social media platforms enact social and political power through content moderation and algorithmic filtering that choreograph regimes of visibility and invisibility, and I discuss the implications for social justice activism and visual culture.

Mediation, appropriation, remediation and reappropriation

Mediation is a central theme in the thesis because it is of crucial significance in understanding martyrdom as a communicative practice and mobilising force (Sumiala & Korpiola, 2017; Buckner & Khatib, 2014). The thesis takes as a starting point the position that contemporary social movements are communicative media in and of themselves (Melucci, 1996), i.e., the medium of a movement is the forms of

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 53

action produced by social actors who create media through affective expressions that include hashtags, slogans, bodily performances, clothing, images, art, and communication networks that subvert mainstream control over the production of symbolic content to make visible social contestations, lived experiences, and to perform commemorative rituals. Thus, mediation is a practice that both extends beyond, and predates, the internet and the affordances of digital and social media technologies.

I use the term digitally mediated or ‘digital mediation’ because the site of my study is situated in the digital space, and I am interested in what difference digital affordances enable for contemporary modes of communicative practice in relation to the phenomenon of martyrdom. In referring to images as ‘digitally mediated’ and practices as ‘digital mediation’, the thesis also takes a material approach and examines the intersection of, and continuity between, practices, communicative rituals, and embodied forms of protest from physical spaces to representations in digital spaces, which Wendy Willems (2019) argues often mutually reinforce and constitute each other. In practical terms, this enables the studying of protest artefacts such as graffiti, protest placards, and bodies performing in action that move through physical spaces and are remediated in digital spaces. This also applies to internet memes that are increasingly circulated beyond the confines of online spaces to be reappropriated and remediated in physical forms of protest communication. I extend this line of thinking within the discussion on memetic protest below; the analytical value of this approach is articulated in the worked example of Said (section 2.8) and explanatory case of Martin (Chapter 4 and 5); and I highlight here that this analytical approach is critical for understanding contemporary digital activist cultures and political communication (see Kraidy, 2016; Willems, 2019; Mina, 2019; Askanius, 2013).

In the field of media and communication research, the concept of mediation has been described as the social and cultural processes which define the interrelations between social actors and media process—in the production, editing, circulation, interpretation, and recirculation of media content—and supports the flow of discourses, meaning, and interpretations in societies (Couldry, 2008, p. 380). Within the field of digital activism and social movements studies, and for which the term is applied more directly in this thesis, mediation is considered as an encompassing

54 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

concept that brings together a range of media practices and social processes to communicate in and through forms of media, and to support social movement activities (Mattoni & Treré, 2014; Cammaerts, Mattoni & McCurdy, 2013). I conceptualise mediation as both a tactical strategy and an everyday and symbolic communicative practice of media appropriation, reappropriation, and remediation through which activists and social actors enact resistance and resilience to power relations and hegemonic discourses by discursively making visible social contestations, rearticulating meaning, and creating the conditions for collective action (Mattoni & Treré, 2014, p. 260; Melucci, 1996, p. 22). That is, mediation is a communicative practice enacted by activists and social actors who appropriate media technologies and content as a means to discursively communicate in their own terms, to create new spaces for communicative action, and for reappropriating the meaning and motivations for social action (Lievrouw, 2011, p. 217; Melucci, 1996, p. 109). Correspondingly, the term remediation is applied throughout the thesis to refer to the social, cultural, and material practice of constructing and circulating new expressions, social interactions, and rearticulating political meaning from already existing cultural artefacts and media content (Lievrouw, 2011, p. 218).

I was interested in systematically studying the digital mediation of visual forms of communication because witnessing of the martyr relies on seeing what is made visible. Digitally mediated images that highlight instances of violent and unjust death act as a rallying cry for popular mobilisation and creative resistance (Mirzoeff, 2017; Castells, 2012; Freelon, McIlwain & Clark, 2016; Steele, 2019). Importantly, Elisa Adami (2016) contends that the visual character of documentary images produced through the camera functions of mobile phones by activists during the 2010-2011 Arab uprisings constitute “poor images”. Poor images are composed of frozen scenes of action captured hastily, by hand, in the moment, they are often badly framed, out of focus, and of poor quality. Yet it is also the abstract nature and perceived authenticity of poor images that Adami argues “communicate a crude sense of reality” that both conveys the “chaos of an experience lived from within” and produces “new ways of seeing” experiences of conflict, contention, and unjust death from a different perspective, and in doing so reveals an “otherwise and previously invisible political subject: the oppressed” (p. 72).

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 55

In Chapter 5, I extend this line of thinking in my analysis of what I refer to as ‘post-mortem snapshots’ to consider the ways in which citizen-generated documentary representations speak to the veracity of digital culture in producing new ways of seeing unjust death. I employ the term post-mortem snapshots to refer to the practice of people using camera-enabled digital devices to take a photograph of an existing mediation and representation of a post-mortem image e.g. taking a photograph of a post-mortem image displayed on a television or computer screen. This constitutes the emergence of a new performance of documentary activism; a new witnessing testimony of martyrdom. Post-mortem snapshots too could be considered as poor images as they are often badly framed and poor in quality because they are a remediation or representation of an existing image captured through a camera-enabled digital device. That is, they are a reconfiguration of one medium in another medium (Frosh, 2019; Bolter & Grusin,1999). Moreover, as post-mortem snapshots travel through subsequent mediation and reappropriation they too risk becoming poor in informational quality if they travel, or are transformed, too radically beyond their intended means to a point where they lose significance and meaning (see also the discussion on memetic protest below for a similar argument). In my analysis I draw from Paul Frosh (2019) to consider the post-mortem snapshot “as a mode of witnessing and of world disclosure” (p. 73), and specifically I draw from Mette Mortensen (2015) to conceptualise it as a communicative practice of “connective witnessing”.

Memetic dynamics of protest

I argue that digitally mediated martyrdom represents the emergence of a new and transnational practice of protest that is increasingly being driven by memetic processes. That is, social actors participate in the creation, circulation, and transformation of martyr images through complex creative processes and recurrent acts of visual mediation, remediation, appropriation, and reappropriation that make unjust death visible in new ways. Similarly, what Limor Shifman (2014, p. 23) refers to as a “hypermemetic logic” where memetic content resonates and spreads creating a new popular vernacular of protest that “permeates many spheres of digital and nondigital expression”. The analysis presented in this thesis demonstrates that, posthumous, digitally mediated images of unjust victims of police brutality and

56 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

depicted situations of political injustice were operationalised by social actors as memetic texts through participatory social practices that were enacted through the affordances of digital and social media technologies; these memetic processes reflect a decisive shift from the creative practices and capacities of media technologies as engendered in the years prior to 2010-2011 Arab uprisings. That is, the figure of the martyr is memetically made; this practice is premised on digital participation and reappropriation of existing images that crafts new meaning into martyr narratives and provides digital traces of creative interaction that attests to the genealogy of digitally mediated martyrdom. I argue throughout this thesis, that these memetic logics persist beyond the individual examples of Said and Martin and are observable in transnational cultures of activism.

From the analysis conducted on Said and Martin I make the argument that the creative authorship of martyrdom is increasingly hybridised, decentralised, and being driven by memetic participation and creative reappropriation (see also discussion below on ‘creative insurgency’). Activists and ordinary people progressively participated in the appropriation of posthumous images of Said and Martin, respectively, to construct them first as injustice symbols (Olesen, 2015); existing images of Said and Martin, respectively, were further reappropriated for new purposes that transformed them from their victimhood and made them into martyrs through acts of creative insurgency (Kraidy, 2016). Processes of mediation, appropriation, remediation and reappropriation are, therefore, central to the memetic logics than underpin the making and political productiveness of digitally mediated martyrdom. Thus, exploring the memetic dimensions of digital activist cultures is an important aspect of empirical analysis and I will expand on this in the discussion that follows my conceptual application of the term memetic.

In applying the conceptual term memetic or ‘meme’ in this thesis, I wish to make clear that I am not drawing from Richard Dawkins’s conception—in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene—of the meme as a cultural counterpart to the gene and as an explanatory metaphor for how culture and ideas are replicated and evolve. Dawkins’s concept of memes as cultural replicators, and the theoretical underpinning of memes within the field of biological sciences more broadly, has a long and controversial history. As Shifman (2013, 2014) and Ryan Milner (2016) rightly highlight there are divergent scholarly approaches to meme studies, as are there conflicting vernacular

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 57

uses of the term meme within internet culture that differ from the academic study of memetics (Shifman, 2014, p. 13). Differing understandings of what, exactly, constitutes meme studies within cultural anthropology, sociology, and psychology have resulted in the term acquiring divergent theoretical applications and limitations, notably scholar Susan Blackmore who, in her 2000 book The Meme Machine, reduces people to mere devices that host and spread memes. Such deterministic arguments obscure understandings of human agency and people as actors and influencers in the cultural transmission of mediated communication. Within communication studies differing stances also emerge between internet memes and viral contents; this split stems from opposing framings of communication as transmission and communication as ritual (Shifman, 2014, p. 60). Shifman (2014, pp. 60-62) contends that studies of virality tend to embrace the ‘transmission’ model of communication, while a growing trajectory of internet meme studies embrace the approach advocated by James Carey in his 1989 book Communication as Culture who defines communication as ritual. Approaching memetic participation as a ritualised process is important for understanding contemporary digital culture. To be clear, this thesis applies the memetic lens from the field of media and communication studies, notably Shifman (2014) and Milner (2016), who place a central focus on people as social agents who actively participate in the creation, circulation, and transformation of memetic forms of mediated communication.

In the thesis, I take from Shifman (2013) an understanding of internet memes as “units of popular culture that are circulated, imitated, and transformed by individual internet users, creating a shared cultural experience in the process” (p. 367). That is, internet memes are “a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics [...] which b) were created with an awareness of each other, and c) were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the internet by many users” (2014, p. 41). While memes both extend beyond and predate the internet, Shifman’s approach enables a framework for understanding digital meme culture from a communication-oriented perspective, and with an appreciation that memes are diffused units of content that comprise memetic dimensions (content, form, and stance), and subdimensions of practices (participation structures, keying, and communicative functions) (2013, pp. 367-378).

58 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

I conceptualise the term memetic in this thesis in the context of complex cultures of communicative practices, social processes, interactive participation, and creative transformation, and as situated in the context and culture of contemporary social justice activism. To address these interrelationships, I draw from the scholarship of Milner (2016, p. 3) who invokes the adjective and adverbial forms of “meme—memetic and memetically—to emphasise the social processes essential to the creation, circulation, and transformation of collective texts, regardless of the individual text itself”. Moreover, Milner (2016, p. 2) describes memetic media as “aggregated texts, collectively created, circulated, and transformed by countless cultural participants”. Understanding what constitutes forms of memetic media, memetic participation, or memetic processes in this thesis necessitates an understanding of the logics that underpin memetic culture. That is, memetic media are multimodal combining multiple modes of communicative expression; the practice of reappropriating existing content is central to memetic culture; the capacity to resonate with multiple people is a fundamental characteristic of memetic content; memetic content operates through collective forms of social creation and cultural transformation; and memetic participation is crucial for understanding the dramatic spread and circulation of memetic content across cultures, spaces, and geographical boundaries (Milner, 2016, p. 23).

The prevalence of internet memes and memetic forms of contemporary political protest has been made manifest in activist cultures across the globe and in relation to various geopolitical contexts in recent years. For example, Shifman (2018) argues “testimonial rallies” are a particular meme genre that lend “memetic authenticity” through visual evidence of wrongdoing to mobilise protest against social injustices and serve as powerful weapons of affective political discourse. Olesen (2018) demonstrates how memetic forms of protest emerged around images documenting the unjust death of three-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, whose lifeless body was washed ashore on a beach in Turkey in 2015 when his family were trying to cross the Mediterranean to the Greek island of Kos on an inflatable boat that capsized. Kurdi’s death became politicised as a broader symbol of the refugee crisis, and images of his lifeless body served as protest resources for subsequent remediation and transformation into other visual forms and genres such as cartoons, graffiti, and internet memes.

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 59

Shifman (2014) explores the spread of memes in democratic and non- democratic settings, and contends that memes serve as accessible resources for political participation, representations of resistance against censorship, and for expressions of government distrust and criticism among citizens. Milner (2013) argues in his analysis of memes in the Occupy Wall Street movement that memes were often deployed as public responses to social issues and political events that combined diverse strands of populist discourse and affective sentiment. Milner, then, proposes the term populist memes as a conceptual lens for understanding how populist discourses are conveyed through artefacts that are deployed within social movements as a means to express both parallel and divergent viewpoints. Milner highlights how memes expanded the opportunities for political participation, and contributed to the spread of nuanced polyvocal debate from multiple perspectives. Memes, Milner argues, were “prolific in the public discussion of Occupy Wall Street” and specifically within the platforms of Reddit, Tumblr and 4chan (p. 2359).

Katy Parry (2015, p. 427) contends political memes that are mobilised as popular performances of political criticism are especially effective for transnational engagement within diverse audiences, and can produce distinct forms of ridicule or symbolic performances of collective struggles against oppression and injustice. In subsequent scholarship, Parry (2019) examines how posthumous images were mobilised online by social actors in response to the murder of British Member of Parliament Jo Cox in 2016. Parry demonstrates how discursive practices enacted through memetic images were critical in performing collective mourning rituals that produced a ‘bonding icon’ through which digital publics came into being and formed a political vision around. In the context of Australian Indigenous peoples’ activist culture, Ryan Frazer and Bronwyn Carlson (2017) demonstrate how Indigenous peoples engage with memes to deconstruct colonial power relations and perform anti-colonial politics, highlighting how memes bring into being the invention of a people and a political discourse that troubles the power relations of Australian colonialism.

As previously mentioned in the discussion of mediation, I do not locate the constitution of publics or processes of circulation as taking place exclusively within the digital domain. In this thesis, I take an embodied and material approach to appreciate how memetic culture operates at the intersection of, and continuity

60 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

between, physical spaces to representations in digital spaces and vice versa. For example, Christine Gruber and Sune Haugbolle (2013) show how memes that begin in the physical world (and prior to the internet) often travel far beyond their initial intentions into online spaces and back into physical protest events. Gruber and Haugbolle do this through an analysis of the visual political culture of the Middle East and demonstrate how symbolic icons become memes of resistance. Specifically, they examine how the figure of Handala, a refugee political cartoon created by Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali in 1969, became an iconic symbol of Palestinian identity and non-violent resistance. Handala has since been remediated and reappropriated by activists and Palestinian sympathisers alike across various forms of social media to highlight historic and ongoing social injustices. Handala was also remediated by activists of regional popular uprisings, including the Iranian Green Movement in 2009: activists adopted the meme of Handala as a mascot to undermine the Islamic Republic and to identify the Iranian opposition movement with the Palestinian cause (Rauh, 2013; Kurzman, 2010). In Egypt in 2013, activists reappropriated the icon of Handala to depict him making the gesture of the Rabaa sign (a four-fingered symbol of resistance against the military coup in Egypt). In America in 2014, political cartoonist Mike Flugennock transformed the meme into the “American Handala” replacing Handala’s figure with the illustration of slain

Black youth Mike Brown14 alongside the hashtag #JusticeForMikeBrown to call for solidarity between American victims of police brutality and Palestinians enduring comparable injustices and violent oppressions.

In a similar pattern of memetic reappropriation, Sandrine Boudana, Paul Frosh, and Akiba Cohen (2017) demonstrate that historic iconic images serve as malleable resources for memetic performances in the digital era. Examining how photojournalist Nick Ut’s 1972 image of a naked girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, fleeing the Vietnam War “Accidental Napalm Attack” has been memetically reappropriated, they warn that memetic derivatives of iconic images both have the potential to expand and threaten the political and cultural meaning of images. A notable example of the risk that “memes may kill the host” (ibid. 2017, p. 18) was made manifest in the case of Matt Furie’s 2005 original illustration of “Pepe the Frog” when it was

14 To view Mike Brow as the “American Handala” see: http://sinkers.org/stage/?p=1564

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 61

reappropriated in digital culture by alt-right groups and labelled as a hate symbol in

2016 leading to the #SavePepe campaign15 to reclaim the symbol. This is one example of the “boundary work” (Gal, Shifman, & Kampf, 2016, p. 2) that is required to maintain a coherent narrative in visual forms of communication in the “ongoing production, performance, and validation of values, codes, and norms through discourse” (ibid.). Importantly, the formation of collective identity is “a process of boundary work” (ibid.).

Key examples of boundary work manifest in this thesis in both the example of Said and, more explicitly, in the systematic analysis of Martin as both the meaning of his image and name are recurrently and consistently redefined and rearticulated to construct collective identification, and are defended in opposition to hegemonic and racist discourse. In my analysis, I take from Paolo Gerbaudo (2015) the term “memetic signifier” and apply it as a conceptual lens to understand the performative logics of boundary work (i.e. identity construction, participatory culture, and memetic texts) that are associated with the, posthumous, digitally mediated images of Said and Martin, respectively. I found the protest dynamics that were enacted in and through posthumously circulated and created digital images of Said and Martin were driven by memetic processes, which, on the one hand, permitted creative trajectories for political subversion, while on the other involved processes of projecting collective identification and resistance (see also section below on ‘collective identification’).

Gerbaudo argues memetic signifiers are the “manifestations of the new forms of collective identity that characterise protest movements in a digital era” (2015, p. 917). That is, the practice of people adopting an existing symbol or image (like the posthumous images of Said or Martin) as their own digital profile picture or avatar for political protest purposes, through which they express their collective identification with a movement and its cause. Protest avatars constitute memetic signifiers: they are symbolic visual artefacts, memetic in character, that are spread widely by social actors through social media networks due to their inclusivity and lack of heavy ideological baggage, and are conducive to processes of collective

15 For background and context on the #SavePepe campaign see: https://www.adl.org/news/press- releases/adl-joins-with-pepe-creator-matt-furie-in-social-media-campaign-to- savepepe#.WAkCn_krLcs

62 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

identification and mobilisation (Gerbaudo, 2015, p. 918). Social actors participate in the construction and adoption of protest avatars on social media technologies through digital affordances that can engender a memetic protest dynamic that spreads broadly and rapidly among digital publics. Yet, while affordances function as permitting mechanisms for ritualised performances of social media protest, these same affordances also make it easy to rapidly discard protest avatars raising important questions for the performative capability and political productiveness of this form of digital activism.

I demonstrate in my analysis of Said and Martin, respectively, how social actors participated in navigating such risk through sustained memetic processes of boundary work and discursive practices that were enacted in and through digital images. Conceptualising posthumously created and circulated digital images—that were adopted by social actors for protest purposes on social media—as memetic signifiers enabled an analytical tool for identifying digital traces of performative and memetic acts of collective identification that transverse digital and physical spaces. That is, the posthumous images of Said and Martin, respectively, were operationalised by social actors as memetic signifiers of collective transfiguration that reversed performances of individualisation in favour of collective articulation. This transpired through acts of memetic reappropriation and remediation, through which the posthumous images of Said and Martin, respectively, were spread spatially, sustained temporally, and transformed visually to construct new political identities in new political contexts.

Other key examples of memetic signifiers manifested in response to instances of unjust death and popular resistance. For example, in the aforementioned case of Indian rape victim Jyoti Singh (see section 2.2) whose death mobilised widespread protests under the slogan and hashtag “Nirbhaya” (meaning fearless, as Singh’s name was withheld from the media at that time) to protest the act of injustice. On Facebook and Whatsapp a digital campaign was launched and people across India replaced their profile avatar with a black oval dot against a white background alongside hashtags including #Nirbhaya, #JusticeForJyoti, #JyotiSinghPandey and #DeliGangRape to show solidarity and communicate social discontent (see Moorti, 2018). Similarly, Sumiala (2017) shows how communicative rituals of mourning emerged around the slogan and meme “Je suis Charlie” (“We are all Charlie”) in

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 63

response to the deadly attacks at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo’s office in France, in 2015, when 12 victims were killed by two terrorists who stormed the Paris headquarters. In the immediate aftermath of the killings people mobilised in the streets to show solidarity with the victims, and across social media platforms a transnational response saw people adopt the meme of “Je suis Charlie” as their protest avatar and along with #JeSuisCharlie in a symbolic performance of commemoration and ritual contestation (see also Sumiala, 2012). I draw and expand upon these aspects of ritualised communication and memetic protest dynamics within the analysis of both the worked example of Said and, more extensively, in the case study of Martin.

Creative insurgency

Creativity is an important line of discussion throughout the thesis because it provides the necessary link for understanding the creative practices through which Said and Martin, respectively, were transformed from their victimhood and made into martyrs through complex social processes. In my empirical observation I identified a range of creative acts of resistance that revealed how social processes drove the commemoration and politicisation of their posthumous identities. To make sense of these processes, I borrow from Kraidy (2016) the concept of “creative insurgency” and apply it as a consistent theoretical lens to explain the phenomenon. My analysis revealed that the visual dimensions of Said’s and Martin’s martyrdom were made manifest in a diversity of forms, internet memes were one visual genre, thus, a theory that could account for the broader dynamics of the phenomenon was necessary. Creative insurgency permits an analytical tool for tracing how digitally mediated images that are mobilised for protest purposes travel into other forms including photographs, street graffiti, political cartoons, protest placards, material culture and protest attire, snapshots, slogans, hashtags, various works of art, and bodies performing in protest. These are all manifestations that are communicative in their own right, and in their own native either physical or digital spaces of communication. But their global publicness, the possibility of their re-spatialised dimensions, and temporal archiving or transformation for subsequent performances of protest, is constituted through their uploading and circulation in online spaces; in their form as a digital image.

64 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

This troubles our understanding of activism and embodied protest in the digital era, and of the social processes through which images and material objects, like protest masks (see section 2.8.6) and hoodies (see section 4.2.2), become politicised and digitally remediated in particular contexts. Kraidy (2016, p. 12) argues “technology publicises corporeal dissent, but the body is the indispensable political medium”. The body is an important medium through which politics is performed; spraying graffiti, recording acts of injustice through camera enabled mobile phones, chanting protest slogans and making demands, performing die-ins, and marking collective affiliations through hashtags and the wearing of clothing or protest attire, all of these acts rely on the body as agent (see Doerr, Mattoni & Teune, 2013; Willems, 2019). Indeed bodies are at the heart of my study, both the posthumous bodies of Said and Martin, and the living bodies of their families, public figures, media personnel, activists, and ordinary people who perform as social actors to sustain, ritualise, commemorate, or contest them in visual culture. Since, as Kraidy (2016, p. 223) argues, the human body is central to the ways that people represent themselves and their adversaries, and demand justice, then examining how bodies are operationalised through digital images as a communicative medium and are recurrently mediated to make manifest claims of injustice is essential.

I argue throughout the thesis this means not only paying attention to the symbolic and representational functions of digitally mediated images of unjust victims, it means paying attention to the agentic or ‘operative’ practices and social processes that are enacted by people who perform radical action in and through digital images of unjust victims. In my analysis, I argue these practices of radical dissent constitute acts of “creative insurgency” (Kraidy, 2016) because they combine artful and subversive tactics of resistance that are mobilised as politicised and public responses to systems of injustice . I found that social actors operationalised the posthumous images of Said and Martin, respectively, in rebellious and subversive ways that transformed them into visible symbols of popular dissent and instruments of injustice, and through which people called for justice in their names. These acts constitute forms of creative insurgency because they are “wilful, planned, and deliberate” (ibid. p. 14) and the practice of creative insurgency “expresses rebellion as much as it shapes it” (ibid. p. 16). Creative insurgency, therefore, emerges out of social interaction and social actors perform as creative insurgents when they “fuse

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 65

familiar and foreign, old and new [...] to graft new meanings onto recognisable symbols” (ibid.). Moreover, creative insurgency “celebrates heroes, commemorates martyrs, and sustains revolutionaries [...] it depicts bodies murdered, maimed, or tortured and contributes to an evidentiary chronical of political abuse” (ibid. p. 17).

As discussed in the empirical analysis, these are some of the operative practices of creative dissent that transform the posthumous bodies of Said and Martin from their victimhood and into their martyrdom. And, it is through these social processes that the martyrdom of Said and Martin come to represent something larger than their own particularity; they become the embodiment of the pain of the nation and signify the popular struggle for social justice. The creative authorship of martyrdom is important because it demands attention and rearticulates meaning; it creates political visibility and makes popular culture political.

Connectivity and collectivity

Connectivity and collectivity are necessary conceptual and interwoven tools to the theoretical framework of digitally mediated martyrdom because they characterise the interdependent or dialectical ways the figure of the martyr is deployed in contemporary social protest movements as an operational identity. Importantly, connectivity and collectivity provide analytical lenses to interpret how people intentionally participate in connective processes of collective communication and identity construction. These processes recast the narrative construction and operative potential of the martyr figure from its past uses. I grasp the importance of recasting the concepts of connectivity and collectivity in this thesis, by departing from purely infrastructural interpretations of digital technologies to instead appreciate the symbolic character of technology use within protest cultures.

In my analysis I found that hashtags, phrases, symbols, and importantly digitally mediated images, were constructed and circulated as part of an emergent and evolving process that brought into being and connected individuals to communities of collective identification and resistance. These social processes and discursive practices typify digital protest culture, and constitute how social actors are actively involved in and contribute to both connective and collective endeavours through which individuals identify as belonging as part of a larger and common

66 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

protest culture. In drawing together the, otherwise independent, concepts of connectivity and collectivity I approach issues of digital culture together with social identity. In this thesis, I take the view that popular social justice movements are not the sum of many collective acts, rather, that social movements arise from collective phenomena and are constructed in and through the formation of common protest identities. Digitally mediated martyrdom, then, cannot be understood—in its full complexity as an inherently ritualised, collectively constructed, and visually oriented communicative phenomenon that relies on the affordances of digital technologies— without these analytical tools.

Digital technologies not only permit instrumental affordances for social media conversations, they also provide symbolic conduits for the flow and performance of connected protest cultures. Placing a central focus on the actual content that is conveyed through digital and social media technologies—e.g. the new forms of images, symbols, slogans, discourses, and hashtags—as well as examining how emotional and cultural processes become a terrain for the construction and contestation of collective identification (Gerbaudo & Treré, 2015, p. 869) is key for understanding how the ‘we’ is constructed and constituted through the very names of the ‘people’ through which claims manifest: “We are all Khaled Said”, “We are all Trayvon Martin”, “The people demand the fall of the regime”, “We want justice”. This is why it is necessary to bring together theories on collective identification and connective communicative action. Simultaneously, these concepts permit a critical perspective on the complex and interrelated dynamics that emerge through technical and strategic processes; together with identity-based, emotional, cultural, symbolic, and historical processes that are at the heart of the instances of Said and Martin. Together connectivity and collectivity provides the necessary foundation for explaining the meaning-making and participatory mobilisation processes that drive digitally mediated martyrdom.

Beginning with connectivity, Lance W Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg (2012, 2013) developed the technological theory of connective action to offer an organisational perspective on how contentious social movements emerge in the digital era. Their main argument is that traditional organisational mechanisms are no longer relevant in contemporary movements and that digital media have become the ‘connected’ organising agents that have replaced the primacy for collective

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 67

identifications in protest mobilisations (2013. p. 752). They argue that the logic of connective action “does not require [...] the symbolic construction of a united ‘we’” (2013. p. 748). As a theory that examines how the affordances of digital and social media permit for flexible, personalised, and participatory political action it is beneficial. Though, this literature’s focus on connectivity does not account for the different forms of content and the interactional dynamics that shape and permit the possibilities of digitally mediated protest. Equally, as Mortensen (2015, p. 1396) highlights, Bennett and Segerberg’s theory does not “include the cultural and historical aspects” that are embedded in processes of political participation and self- expression, and which, for this thesis, are significant for understanding contemporary practices of witnessing. Taking this as a point of departure, the thesis bridges Mortensen’s (2015) theory of connective witnessing with literatures that decentre technological determinism to illuminate transformations in the processes of collective identification that are enabled through connective digital affordances.

In this vein, the scholarship of Gerbaudo (2012, 2014, 2015, 2017) informs the theoretical position of this thesis. Gerbaudo analyses contemporary social movements by simultaneously examining the connective affordances that underpin strategic protest communication technologies, and together with collective processes of culture and identity performances that act as mobilising social forces. The connective and collective affordances of digital technologies are, therefore, understood in this thesis as providing strategic and symbolic tools that make manifest affective assemblages, or the “political passions” (Gerbaudo, 2012, p. 14) that drive processes of popular protest mobilisations. Gerbaudo refers to this process as the “choreography of assembly”, that is, digital and social media technologies meaningfully connect and shape how individuals “come together and act together”, and “choreograph collective action” (ibid., p. 4).

In this thesis, the affordances of digital technologies are made meaningful by social actors who appropriate them to discursively communicate in their own terms, and where affordances are deployed as part of specific protest discourses and connected protest cultures. Thus, it is relevant to see how some social media tropes and hashtags have been appropriated, for example, in contemporary Black activist culture: from the launch of #BlackLivesMatter as a hashtag on Twitter, to is official launch as a collective and transnational movement for the affirmation of Black lives,

68 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

and its combinatory and symbolic use on Instagram with #JusticeForTrayvonMartin memes into various discursive articulations including #WeAreAllTrayvonMartin and #WeWantJustice. In my analysis, these protest logics are typified in the ways digital images of Said and Martin were, respectively, appropriated and deployed by social actors who combined them with particular hashtags to give visibility to politically contentious issues and to communicate ideas to others.

Within activist cultures, hashtags function as mediated assemblages— between activists and their audiences—that perform discursive functions to invite symbolic interactionism, identification, and collective resistance. Zizi Papacharissi (2016) argues hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter (and countless others) serve as meaningful framing devices, as affective expressions that invite identification and connection, and render audiences into being across networks. Papacharissi (2015, see also 2014) discusses how social media platforms serve as connective conduits for soft “structures of feeling” and open up the discursive spaces where “affective publics” produce alternative narratives to give visibility to underrepresented viewpoints, lived experiences, and to contest hegemonic narratives. The affordances of such affective connectivity necessarily brings into being affective publics across local and transnational spaces, and these “mediated feelings of connectedness” (2015, p. 308) can help mobilise otherwise dispersed individuals within digital activist cultures. This contributes to the sustainment of online discursive spaces of resistance beyond embodied action on the ground. Similarly, these dynamics can be understood as public ruptures of “affective resonance” (Olesen, 2015) and “moral shocks” (Jasper, 1997) that are produced in and are circulated through injustice symbols (Olesen, 2015).

A main argument that I demonstrate through the empirical reasoning of the thesis is that collectivity does not precede the emergence of digitally mediated martyrdom, it is constructed through it. This is why theory that can account for the complex dynamics of collectivity that is constructed through political, social, cultural, and discursive processes of protest is necessary. To do this, I draw from social movement theorists Francesca Polletta and James M. Jasper (2001) in my application of the concept of ‘collective identity’ or ‘collective identification’ throughout the thesis. Polletta and Jasper’s theory of collective identity is defined “as an individual’s cognitive, moral, and emotional connection with a broader

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 69

community, category, practice, or institution” (2001, p. 285). They add (ibid.) collective identity, as distinct from personal identity, “is a perception of a shared status or relation, which may be imagined rather than experienced directly”, and is “expressed in cultural materials – names, narratives, symbols, verbal styles, rituals, clothing”. And “unlike ideology, collective identity carries with it positive feelings for other members of the group” (ibid.).

I continue to draw from Melucci (1996, p. 70) here also, and specifically from his categorisation of collective identity as being an “interactive and shared definition produced by a number of individuals” through which the process of collectivity is constructed and negotiated through recurrent and communicative processes that bind actors together through language, rituals, practices, and cultural artefacts. Importantly, Melucci considers collectivity as a system of relations and representations—as both a product of conscious action and a producer of self- reflection—that permits the temporal sustainability of a movement through the articulation of shared definitions, symbolic orientations, and bodies acting collectively (ibid., p.76). Melucci contends that central to the collective construction of a ‘we’ is necessarily a process of emotional investment and boundary work in defining affective commitments toward the collective (the ‘we’ or ‘us’) and against the adversary (the ‘they’ or ‘them’), which is a preliminary for collective action (ibid. p. 83). As demonstrated in the analysis of the thesis, collective phenomena are made manifest in and through digitally mediated images and emerge from popular articulations of injustice and shared conditions of precarity. These practices enact visibility to oppose the unjust deaths of Said and Martin, respectively, and transforms them in the process by making them matter, posthumously, as grievable lives (Butler, 2009).

Spaces of appearance

I interface Gerbaudo’s (2012) concept of the “choreography of assembly”, with Butler’s (2015) “performative theory of assembly” as a way to think about bodies that claim the right to appear and act together in exercising the right for a more just and liveable future. Butler reminds us ‘the collective’ that assembles to assert a right to the claiming of justice functions through orchestrated enactments of political performativity (verbal, linguistic, bodily), as well as through mediated

70 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

images that legitimise collective claims of police brutality and political injustice and make possible the conditions of appearing in the visual field (ibid., p. 20). Collective expressions, like “We are all Trayvon Martin” and “We want justice”, articulate the lived experiences of precarity and the right of those lives to persist, argues Butler (ibid., p. 83). In this sense the constituted ‘we’ becomes both productive and performative as they become discourses of power that claim the right to appear through their visual manifestations and create what Mirzeoff (2017) refers to as “the space of appearance”.

Mirzoeff’s scholarship interfaces with Butler’s performative theory of assembly to contend that “to appear is to matter [...] to be grievable, to be a person that counts for something” (p. 18). Thus, the space of appearance is about claiming the right to appear directly in public space, the exercising of the right to exist as a political, collective, and social subject. But digitally mediated spaces in which the martyr can be made to appear directly to global publics troubles traditionally held conceptions about what constitutes public and private space, and comprises a new space of appearance through which the martyr can be publicised and politicised. I mobilise Mirzoeff’s (2017) theory of the space of appearance to help explain how these dynamics contribute to making the posthumous bodies of Said and Martin matter. In the analysis of Said and Martin, respectively, I discuss how digital affordances enabled connectivity and processes of collectivity that permitted new possibilities for connective witnessing (Mortensen, 2015), as well as the enactment of ritualised communication practices that extended the spatial and temporal dimensions of their martyrdom. In turn, I explain how these dynamics sustained translocal and/or transnational resistance communities and the political productiveness of Said and Martin well beyond the immediacy of their respective deaths.

In developing his theory, Mirzoeff appropriates political philosopher Hannah

Arendt’s phrase ‘the space of appearance’16, but applies it in a decidedly different

16 In her 1958 book “The Human Condition”, Hannah Arendt claimed that all political action requires the “space of appearance”. Though, her conceptualisation of space was drawn from the idealised Roman notion of the public square and the classical Greek polis, the ancient Greek city-state, as the political realm of action and speech between free and equal citizens “where men [sic] are together in the manner of speech and action” (pp. 198-199), and as a space founded on the exclusion of women, children, enslaved humans, and non-citizens.

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 71

way to describe the space of action and performativity that is created when people come into being around public manifestations of violent injustice, and where visual documentation of such injustices are appropriated for present and future purposes of protest communication. Importantly, the space of appearance is created when ‘the people’ come into being through discursive manifestations that create a common, but not uncontested, space for collective resistance beyond state controlled and regulated spaces for political performativity and social action. Enabled through the affordances of digital and social media technologies, Mirzoeff (2018) contends there are now multiple spaces in which people can appear and maintain a sense of collective presence and embodied protest, through assemblages of digital co-presence like #BlackLivesMatter. As such, the space of appearance constitutes a new manner of being political, that is, it creates a new way for social actors to make visible what there is to be seen, in defiance of the police who say “move on, there is nothing to see here”, and then those social actors decide what there is to be said about it (Mirzoeff, 2017, p. 18).

The space of appearance, as applied in the thesis, relates to the ways activists and ordinary people operationalise, posthumous, digital images of Said and Martin as dialectical devices to speak to past injustices and make visible, and contestable, present and persisting injustices, and which creates a collective co-presence between physical and digital spaces. Thus, spaces of appearance operate as a form of counterpower that materialise online through discursive interaction—enabled through the connective affordances of digital and social media technologies and the recurrent creation, circulation, and transformation of digitally mediated images—that make the unjust deaths of Said and Martin visible in new ways. These acts refute invisibility by making Said and Martin witnessable as lives worthy of grievability (Butler, 2009), transporting their deaths spatially, temporally, and geopolitically as unintentional martyrs that represent shared precarity (Butler, 2009). In these spaces discursive struggles are fought over what bodies have the right to appear, how they appear, and ultimately who gets to be made a martyr. This alters the ways not only how people appear publicly to confront injustice, but how spaces of appearance are constructed in digital culture and in ways that expand the possibilities for the mediation of transnational human rights discourses.

72 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

The main argument of the thesis is that digitally mediated martyrdom represents the emergence of a new and transnational protest dynamic. That is, increasingly, posthumous digitally mediated images of unjust victims are deployed within digital activist cultures to make death globally visible, to make it contestable, and to mobilise popular resistance against systems of social and political injustice. These practices represent a radical shift in the ways the symbol and narrative of martyrdom is being deployed, creatively transformed, and made politically productive as a transnationally observable phenomenon. In section 2.2, I drew on the unjust deaths of Mohammed al-Durrah (Palestine, 2000), Oscar Grant (America, 2009), Neda Agha-Soltan (Iran, 2009), Jyoti Singh (India, 2012), Razan al-Najjar (Palestine, 2018), and connected their unjust death to similar patterns observed in the posthumous mobilisation of Hamza al-Khateeb (2011, Syrian Uprising), Mike Brown (2014, Black Lives Matter), and Alan Kurdi (2015, Syrian Refugee Crisis). These cases, among others, illustrate the emergence of new and concrete practices of popular resistance that represent how contemporary struggles over social injustice and human rights abuses are being fought. These practices challenge the dominant and traditional ways of ‘doing politics’ and ‘being political’. This requires a rethinking about how political activism is not only done, but of what the means are for being political; how digitally mediated images of unjust victims are deployed to operate discursively and to mobilise. Thus, a new theoretical vocabulary is required to understand these emergent protest dynamics.

The preceding discussion of the chapter has drawn from existing theories and concepts, and I have explained why these are necessary components that provide for the empirically informed theory of digitally mediated martyrdom. In the next section I mobilise the worked example of Said. Through this exploratory example the narrative of digitally mediated martyrdom is further developed. In doing this, I also build methodological approaches to collect digitally mediated images that circulate online, and my analysis furnishes an understanding of the ways in which Said was posthumously made to transition from victimhood to martyrdom.

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 73

2.6 EXPLORATORY EXAMPLE #WEAREALLKHALEDSAID

Warning: Graphic images contained in this section

Khaled Said is more than simply a deceased victim of state-sanctioned violence, he is the martyr of Egypt’s January 25 Revolution. Said’s posthumous image served as a politically productive protest resource that helped mobilise an indignant population of Egyptian youth into popular revolt against the then Hosni Mubarak regime. The symbolic potential of Said’s posthumous image and youthful narrative was capitalised by activists and ordinary people who transformed Said in death into a symbolic weapon against the state, notably through the “We Are All Khaled Said” movement. It is the brutal and unjust killing of Said that is considered to be the spark that gave rise to the 2011 Egyptian Revolution (Buckner and Khatib, 2014, p. 368). The objective of the exploratory example of Said was to deliberate on the ways digitally mediated images, as previously operationalised, of Said were 1) posthumously appropriated by activists and ordinary people, 2) invoked discursively in conversation with the popular “We Are All Khaled Said” movement, and 3) transformed through recurrent creative practices for deployment as forms of vernacular resistance that helped mobilise popular protest during the 2010-2011 Egyptian uprisings. I proceed by first providing the background and the context to the exploratory example. I then introduce the qualitative methods that were employed to purposefully analyse selected resonant and recurrent digital images that were produced and shared in response to Said’s killing. Next, I present the analysis of six digital images of Said: a juxtaposed pre-death/post-mortem headshot, an internet meme, a political cartoon, a protest placard, street graffiti, and a face mask worn by a protestor. I conclude by reflecting on how digital images operate as sites of political struggle and highlight the significance of digitally mediated images within digital activist cultures and their deployment as mobilising modalities for popular sociopolitical expression and political participation.

Background and context

On 6 June, 2010, Khaled Said, a 28-year-old middle-class Egyptian youth and blogger, was at a local internet cafe in the Sidi Gaber area of Alexandria where he

74 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

was confronted by two plainclothes police officers who dragged him outside and brutally beat him to death. The motives of the incident remain unclear. While some news media and activist websites alleged Said had posted a video online that implicated members of the police in an illicit drug deal, such claims have also been contested (see Ali, 2012; Kraidy, 2016). Following the killing, Said’s brother, Ahmed, visited the morgue and visually documented the brutality of Said’s death using his mobile phone (see Figure 2.1). The post-mortem image shows Said’s bloodied and contorted face, his jaw dislocated, teeth broken, ears torn, and eyes fixed in a lifeless gaze. On 7 June, Said’s family uploaded the post-mortem image online alongside a pre-death passport image. Said’s passport image depicts him wearing a light grey hooded sweatshirt, Said appears well-groomed and the embodiment of an ordinary Egyptian youth. The juxtaposed pre-death/post-mortem image of Said provided graphic witness testimony to the brutal injustice committed. Once online, the juxtaposed image began to circulate among the Egyptian activist community and was spread rapidly via Facebook and in subsequent mainstream media coverage (Herrera, 2014). On 8 June, Google executive and activist Wael Ghonim encountered the juxtaposed image on Facebook, who saw in the brutalised image of Said “a terrible symbol of Egypt’s condition” (Ghonim 2012, p. 59). On 10 June, Ghonim anonymously launched the “We Are All Khaled Said” (Kullena Khaled Said) Facebook page and began a campaign, along with other administrators, to bring Said’s killing to public attention and to politically intervene against Egypt’s 30-year- old Emergency Law and police brutality (Herrera 2014, p. 53). The campaign rapidly gained traction, receiving more than five million daily views by November 2010 (Herrera 2014, p. 61) and became the most “popular dissident Facebook group in Egypt” (Lim 2012, p. 241). Central to the page’s emotional and political influence was the symbolic framing “We Are All Khaled Said” and the juxtaposed pre- death/post-mortem image of Said that served to be one of the “most gut-wrenching digital artefacts of the Arab uprisings” (Kraidy, 2016, p. 66). The page served as a site for posthumously commemorating Said and organising both online and physical protests between June 2010 and early 2011, notably the 25 January Revolution. Said’s symbolic status was not uncontested. In the days and months following his killing multiple character assignation attempts were enacted by, namely, the Alexandria police, Egyptian Ministry of Interior, and pro-Mubarak media that

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 75

attempted to criminalise Said’s posthumous identity. Counter-discourse activists became key agents in the formation of Said as an injustice symbol by refuting defamations made against Said’s character and operationalising digital images to transform Said posthumously as a universal signifier of injustice. Said became the “symbolic centre” (Olesen, 2013, p. 12) for public and widespread dissent in Egypt and transnationally.

2.7 METHODS AND DATA COLLECTION

The worked example of Said adopts a qualitative, exploratory, and inductive approach that is well-suited for examining the digital images that were shared in response to the killing of Said. A search strategy combining keywords and terms including Khaled Said (and the alternative spelling of Khaled Saeed), “We Are All Khaled Said”, and associated social movement hashtags such as #25Jan and #Egypt, were used to search for publicly available and resonant images on Google Images in June 2017. I employed internet-related ethnography methods (Postill & Pink, 2012) to study the chronology of protest images. Rather than predetermining a platform for data collection, this method was used to perform a close reading of the historical and ongoing discourse made manifest between the period of 10 June, 2010, and 25 February, 2011, as inflected through digital images circulated online in response to Said’s killing and their appropriation in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Hundreds of thousands of digital images were returned from the searches. As part of the verification process, digital images were traced to their site of online emergence to explore the production, circulation, and permutation of the images over time. Digital images were selected for their significance and recurrence, and were manually retrieved from Facebook, Twitter, and other mainstream media platforms. To provide for a meaningful and manageable dataset, a selection of six digital images and their various iterations were purposefully chosen for qualitative analysis. This process was informed by theoretical sampling that aimed for a credible empirical description of themes presented in my data, and to build a conceptual framework that could be transferred to other contexts. To analyse the digital images and interpret their meanings, the investigation was guided by critical cultural analysis

76 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

and performed an iconographical17 reading. Specifically, the critical, analytical, and transdisciplinary method of political iconography18 (Müller & Özcan, 2007; Müller, 2011) was applied to analyse and interpret the (visual and linguistic) content of digital images though a focus on their visual, political, social, cultural, and historical aspects. Each of the digital images were investigated (including their embedded linguistic elements, but not their accompanying textual commentaries as provided in the comments sections of social media posts) in terms of their representation, genre, discursive framing, symbolism, and visual antecedence. They were contextualised in regard to the social, political, material, and cultural context in which the digital images were produced and circulated. I present my analysis in the following sections and I begin with the initial pre-death/post-mortem image and discuss its significance as an injustice symbol (Olesen, 2015). Then, I proceed with an examination of image appropriations and variations as made manifest in several online and urban spaces.

2.8 DATA ANALYSIS

2.8.1 #WeAreAllKhaledSaid: Constructing and Appropriating the Digital Martyr

Figure 2.1. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It was a widely circulated image of Khaled Said juxtaposing his pre-death (left) and post-mortem (right) images. It was retrieved from Facebook.

17 Iconography is both an approach and a critical method to study, categorise, and interpret the content and meaning of visuals. Originally developed by cultural historian Aby M. Warburg (1866–1929) the method was further advanced by art historian Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968). Methodologically, iconography in its contemporary form has undergone further refinement and various iterations across disciplinary contexts (see Müller, 2011).

18 This study takes its inspiration from the political iconography method as originally recalibrated by Martin Warnke (1994). It specifically draws from the political iconography method applied by Marion Müller and Esra Özcan (2007); Marion Müller (2011); and combines it together with the refined iconography method for visual social media analysis as developed by Raymond Drainville (2018). As a method, political iconography combines iconographic and iconological methods to study contemporary mass-mediated forms of political visuals and visual political communication. It has no distinct stages; rather, it is an integrated process that aims to achieve a comprehensive interpretation of the analysed visual data (Müller, 2011, p. 286). It incorporates a multi-step analysis process that includes pre-iconographical description (object-orientated analysis), iconographical analysis (classification of visual and textual data, identification of key themes and meaning attribution), and iconological interpretation (developing a deeper meaning of the social, political, and cultural context in which the visual artefacts are produced and perceived).

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 77

Injustice Symbols As news spread of Said’s unjust killing, the juxtaposed pre-death/post- mortem image19 of him (see Figure 2.1) rapidly gained currency, locally and transnationally, as it circulated across multiple social media platforms and within mainstream media coverage. So much so that its public circulation became an event in its own right that contributed to a series of protest events and invited displays of solidarity against the injustice. Buckner and Khatib (2014, p. 368) contend that both the image and name of Said ultimately became synonymous with the 2011 Egyptian Revolution itself. Gerbaudo (2015) argues the image of Said performed a significant role in mobilising the political protests that toppled the Mubarak regime in 2011. While the gruesome pre-death/post-mortem image was morally shocking and invited affective responses in itself, the transformation of Said into an injustice symbol cannot be explained solely through the process of its publicity. Constructing Said as an injustice symbol required direct intervention and strategic communicative practices. The first step in this formation was performed by Said’s brother who performed connective witnessing to document and produce witness testimony making explicitly visible the unjust nature of Said’s killing. The subsequent juxtaposition of the post-mortem image alongside a pre-death image, and its digital circulation online, shifted the visibility of Said’s death from the private to the public sphere opening up a new space of appearance in which Said could be displayed— through digitally re-spatialised simultaneity—to global others who participated in both collective and connective forms of witnessing.

Secondly, the images of Said became politicised through symbolic juxtaposition, which infused Said’s killing with meaning and amplified the images as a single frame that served to morally shock. This transpired through the actions of Said’s brother who acted as an intimate injustice interpreter and translated the emotional significance of Said’s death by humanising him as a beloved son and brother, making him posthumously grievable and recognisable as a life that mattered before he was reduced to a brutalised corpse. This was strategically and symbolically

19 The pre-death and post-mortem images of Khaled Said can be seen at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Khaled_Mohamed_Saeed.jpg and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Khalid-Saeed.jpg

78 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

facilitated by juxtaposing the pre-death/post-mortem image, or as a ‘post-facto’ image—one that documents the consequences of unjust behaviour—alongside a ‘pre- event’ image—one that shows the victims before their untimely death (see Olesen 2015, pp. 24-25). Juxtaposed, the pre-death/post-mortem image discursively operated by dialectically infusing one another with innocence and injustice meaning; it afforded truthful authenticity and emotional authority to claims that could be made in Said’s name and the images served as a basis for recurrently enacting such claims. Importantly, the juxtaposed images afforded ‘particular’ identification among the Egyptian citizenry: Said became a symbol that represented shared discontent, precarity, and collective vulnerability. As connected witnesses engaged with the imagery it invited collective consciousness over the potential for other ordinary Egyptians to also be subsequent victims of the prevailing realities of Mubarak’s tyrannical rule, such as systematic and habitual instances of torture, police brutality, and potential death.

The ability to collectively identify with the commonality of Said’s death presented him as a ‘universalised’ injustice symbol that connected his killing to wider systems of injustice and human rights abuses. Said came to posthumously signify entire cultures and nations of other abused and broken bodies. This was made manifest and discursively operationalised, namely, through their appropriation on the Facebook page “We Are All Khaled Said”. Said’s pre-death/post-mortem image resonated, emotionally and politically, among locally and globally dispersed audiences who participated in recurrent performances of digitally mediated solidarity though the hashtag #WeAreAllKhaledSaid. For example, activists and ordinary people contributed to the public visibility of Said’s killing through politicised performances of selfie activism, a defining trait of digitally mediated and contemporary political action combining visual and discursive modes of expression operated through hashtags. Moreover, activists and ordinary people deployed the pre- death/post-mortem image with the hashtag #WeAreAllKhaledSaid as mediated assemblages of collective framing and affective expressions that invited identification and connection, and rendered audiences into being across social media networks. This highlights how visual and discursive practices enable for the construction and diffusion of new and collective protest identities. It also shows that Said was not simply a symbol deployed to mobilise action, rather, his posthumous

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 79

image became a product and producer of sociopolitical work. This proved a key aspect of the pre-death and post-mortem images as activists and ordinary people appropriated them as generative resources for subsequent memetic protest performances. They were rapidly transformed into other visual forms and genres (such as internet memes, graffiti, and protest placards) and operationalised as modalities for political protest purposes. I address these practices in the following sections and demonstrate how Said was transformed into a protest icon as ‘Egypt’s Martyr’.

Injustice Symbols and Their Reappropriation and Remediation

Photography has long served as a medium for producing eyewitness accounts of history. It constitutes a central characteristic of professional journalism and is a practice traditionally regulated by image brokers who act as gatekeepers by controlling the publication and dissemination of images (Gürsel, 2016). These practices are increasingly destabilised through digital affordances that enable both democratic and creative potential in the production and circulation of witness testimony. Importantly, these affordances also enable for existing digital images to be replicated, appropriated, and radically altered for new purposes. Thus, digital images are prone to variation and subversion, making them polyvalent and polysemic tools of communication (Gruber & Haugbolle, 2013, p. 15). This is evident in the appropriation of Said as a memetic symbol of contestation in Egypt and his transformation into a series of revolutionary ‘internet memes’ (see Figure 2.2), that is, “units of popular culture that are circulated, imitated, and transformed by individual internet users, creating a shared cultural experience in the process” (Shifman, 2013, p. 367).

2.8.2 Internet Meme

Figure 2.2. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It was an internet meme appropriating the pre-death image of Khaled Said with Arabic text overlaid reading “Egypt's Martyr”. It was circulated in mid-June 2010 and was retrieved from Twitter.

80 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

The anonymously designed internet meme20 appropriated the pre-death image of Said against a backdrop of the Egyptian flag with overlaid Arabic text that reads (top) “Egypt’s Martyr” and (base) “Khaled Said”. The appropriation of the pre-death image, combined with a national symbol and inscribed local vernacular, is both symbolic and strategic: it is an aestheticised image that portrays cultural proximity with national identification, liberation, and unity. The flag represents Egypt’s transformation after the Egyptian Revolution of 1952. Its tricolour (red, white, and black) arrangement represents strength, valour, and bravery and relates to the pan- Arab colours in popular use since the 1950s. The internet meme visually reinforces solidarity and collective union, and discursively confirms the iconic status of Said as revolutionary martyr. This reflects a form of visual secularism and a new politics of citizenism that appeals to popular unity against the regime.

The appropriation of the pre-death image and its variation as an internet meme reflects how activists and ordinary people are increasingly infiltrating the iconisation process from a grassroots level. In turn, this challenges which images gain visual hierarchy and the practices through which this materialises. This internet meme was used in a campaign by Ghonim, who asked people to trade their social media avatar (online profile image) with the internet meme as a display of collective identity, solidarity, and resistance. This also reflects the rise of a new power dynamic characteristic of popular social movements made possible through digital affordances: the participatory practice of adopting a protest avatar as a memetic signifier of collective identification, and the deployment of memetic media for coordinating protest against social injustice. This memetic protest dynamic also involved iconoclastic struggles as posthumous images of Said competed for cultural hegemony and independent iconic recognition. As activists and ordinary people appropriated images of Said they were invariably transformed visually and materially, spatially, and temporally.

2.8.3 Protest Banner

20 The internet meme of Khaled Said depicted as Egypt’s martyr can be seen at: https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/28749

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 81

Figure 2.3. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured Egyptian youths holding a placard as they protest against the brutal killing of Khaled Said (in portraits) in street demonstrations in Cairo on 20 June. It was retrieved from Agence France-Presse (AFP).

If appropriations are a defining trait of iconic images in digital culture (Mortensen, 2017, p. 1143), equally are the communicative practices of reappropriation and remediation, that is, the use of existing digital images for new purposes in different media contexts. These practices transverse media, play a central role in shaping public discourse, continue the material circulation of digital content in offline contexts as well as the digital remediation of physical objects and bodies into online contexts. Importantly, these practices redefine how visibility, publicness, and collective protest is constituted spatially—both digitally mediated and physically embodied—and these spaces of protest interconnect and mutually shape each other.

In Figure 2.3, both the internet meme and the post-mortem image are reappropriated and remediated for use in physical protest performance21. In turn, embodied protest performance is captured through connective witnessing and is remediated digitally and reappropriated in (and beyond) an activist and journalistic context. This practice also contributes to the temporal displacement of digital images of Said by extending their transmedia lifecycle. These images are operationalised discursively for new purposes through the placard’s visual-textual configuration: the post-mortem image (right) is framed linguistically with “Emergency Law”; the internet meme (left, with its embedded Arabic framing reading (top) “Egypt’s Martyr” and (base) “Khaled Said”, outwardly its Arabic framing (left) reads “Martyr of Emergency”); and the overarching English framing reads “Made in Egypt by Mubarak Police”. This framing combination of visual, Arabic, and English performs specific communicative functions that enable activists to speak as witnesses to different audiences. Arabic enables the performance of an authentic Arab identity, while English performs an imagined universal identity. The visuals operate

21 The image of Khaled Said (depicted in portraits) on a protest placard (taken by Khaled Desouki/AFP via Getty images) can be seen at: https://www.gettyimages.com.au/detail/news- photo/egyptian-youths-demonstrate-in-the-heart-of-cairo-on-june-news- photo/103723446?adppopup=true

82 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

subversively by undermining the legitimacy of Mubarak’s police state and raising global awareness of the human rights abuses enacted under Egypt’s Emergency Law.

The remediation and reappropriation of the internet meme and the post- mortem image of Said in this manner initiated an interaction between digital protest and embodied action that manifested as a visual political act of counter-discourse to oppose state authority. These practices discursively constitute the struggle for power and control over the symbolic modes of political visibility and the material production of what and whom can be rendered visible and sayable. In doing so, people participated in not only transforming existing digital images of Said, they contributed to the production of a new kind of memetic martyr image that travels and is recurrently transformed visually, spatially, and temporally to produce new meanings and new political contexts.

2.8.4 Graffiti Stencil

Figure 2.4. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured Khaled Said’s pre-death image appropriated as a graffiti stencil on the urban walls of Cairo in 2010. It was retrieved from Middle East Eye.

The analysis thus far has demonstrated the importance of analytically situating digital images and digitally mediated communicative practices alongside physical space and embodied protest. Highlighting the continuum of and intersection between the digital and physical manifestations of Said’s pre-death image, Figure 2.4 demonstrates that materiality matters in processes of activist communicative practice and extends the space of appearance and political visibility in physical space. In this figure, the pre-death image of Said travels into further use as a graffiti stencil22 on the urban walls of Cairo. This communicative practice is suggestive of further aestheticisation of the pre-death image as the dominant political martyr image. It shows the transcendence of Said’s fleshy bodily mortality into acquired symbolic

22 The graffiti stencil of Khaled Said’s pre-death image (taken by Amro Ali) can be seen at: https://www.middleeasteye.net/gallery/pictures-khaled-said-five-years-state-egyptian-street-art

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 83

immortality and reflects a secularised martyr resurrection, as well as the centrality of artistic creativity in politicised communicative practice. This practice can be conceptualised as what Kraidy (2016) calls ‘creative insurgency’, which connects bodies, symbolic and material resources, as well as communicative practices across digital and physical space to drive creative forms of dissent. As a practice of protest, activists and ordinary people acted as creative insurgents by fusing together existing digital images and new symbols to inscribe the making of Said’s martyrdom with new meanings.

Figure 2.4 exemplifies this as it symbolically binds the martyred body of Said with corporeal embodied insurgency; it draws from an existing digital image and inserts it into new contexts; it takes from an old practice (graffiti traces back to ancient Egypt) and reaffirms it as a new vernacular of resistance; it commemorates Said as a martyr, asserts political representation, and reclaims public space. During the 2010-2011 Egyptian uprisings (and beyond), a distinct political texture emerged within the urban landscape, where city streets and walls became canvases for creative dissent. Graffiti stencils depicted the image of martyrs and then evolved into more elaborative martyr murals commemorating and resurrecting the dead. The image of Said was omnipresent in these performances. For example, his image was reappropriated on the exterior of the Egyptian Ministry of Interior to commemorate the first anniversary of his killing in June 2011. Graffiti performances operated subversively to unsettle power structures and frequently became sites for iconoclastic struggles between activists and the state as authorities repeatedly censored and removed insurgent art. Such attempts were met with counter-discursive acts of organised visual activism and several online initiatives began documenting and archiving revolutionary graffiti in 2011 (see Khatib, 2013). In September 2011, the pre-death image of Said further travelled into use transnationally when German artist Andreas von Chrzanowski transformed it into a mural on a fragment of the Berlin Wall. Through such practices, the pre-death image of Said became both a symbolic and physical political instrument of protest. Acts of spatial and temporal creative insurgency reinforced the public ritualisation of Said’s injustice narrative by turning his pre-death image into an enduring image of martyrdom.

2.8.5 Political Cartoon

84 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

Figure 2.5. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured a political cartoon of Khaled Said designed in 2011 by Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff for the “We Are All Khaled Said” campaign. It was retrieved from Twitter.

The discursive veneration of Said as a martyr of the revolution also transpired in multiple performances of creative insurgency enacted through political criticism and humour. For example, political cartoons served as popular mechanisms for political mobilisation and as generative forces of anti-Mubarak discourse prior, during, and after the January 25 Revolution. The reappropriation of Said’s pre-death image in political cartoons served several key functions: the visual subversion of representations of politics and power relations; the dramatic reconstruction of Said as a heroic and supernatural figure in public consciousness; and for metaphorically resurrecting Said as an ever-present embodiment and public icon of the popular will of the Egyptian citizenry. A notable example of this manifested in a political cartoon designed by Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff23 (see Figure 2.5), which depicts the ghost of Said who has been avenged by the people of Egypt as the martyr of the January 25 Revolution. Metaphorically, the cartoon depicts Said as the superior cat- like figure who dangles from his fingers the inferior, mouse-like, Mubarak. The cartoon visually rearticulates the ordering of imagined power from Mubarak to the hands of the Egyptian people. The cartoon was made openly accessible through a creative commons license as part of the #WeAreAllKhaledSaid campaign in the lead- up to the revolution. Once online it memetically spread across social media and travelled into popular use in physical protest, as people downloaded the digital image and reappropriated it in material protest placards. Cartoons have long held a significant place within Egyptian political culture. Pascal Dupuy (2012) traces their use back 3500 years and identifies the cat and mouse metaphor as one of the earliest forms of political critique, with Egypt typically depicted as the cat and the European ruler depicted as the mouse. This metaphor is an enduring archetype of Egyptian political humour that must be

23 The political cartoon of Khaled Said by Brazilian artist Carlos Latuff can be seen at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Latuff#/media/File:Khaled_Mohamed_Saeed_holding_u p_a_tiny,_flailing,_stone-faced_Hosni_Mubarak.png

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 85

understood in the context of the prevailing socioeconomic inequalities and anti- Western sentiment that underpinned the January 25 Revolution (and broader Arab uprisings). Said seemingly embodies a liberated Egypt who ridicules Mubarak as a corrupt ally to European colonialism, to foreign economic interference, and to neoliberalism. This reappropriation of Said’s pre-death image served to critically reflect the socioeconomic and geopolitical conditions of Egypt at that time. Activists and ordinary people circulated the cartoon across social media platforms and deployed it in embodied protest as an affective modality for speaking back against the authoritarian regime and highlighting flagrant abuses of power. Latuff’s appropriation of the posthumous image of Said alongside the hashtag #Jan25 forges a new visual vocabulary that sustains online and offline sentiment of the emerging revolution and establishes presence as a popular vernacular of solidarity and defiance. Importantly, activists and ordinary Egyptians further appropriated and remediated the political work of a non-Egyptian cartoonist as a means for circumventing local repression and persecution. In doing so, it provided opportunities for popular performances of citizenship, as well as control over the everyday symbolic production of popular sentiment. The reappropriation of Said in Latuff’s cartoon also demonstrates how Said’s martyr narrative transcended the local context to acquire international critical engagement that linked the particularity of his killing with broader global social justice discourses and with acquired global resonance. These practices highlight the continuum of and intersection between digital images, popular culture and political critique, and emphasise how digital affordances enabled for Said’s pre-death image to be digitally re-spatialised and remediated far beyond the immediate context of its production.

2.8.6 Face Mask

Figure 2.6. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured an Egyptian activist wearing a face mask depicting Khaled Said on 25 January during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. It was retrieved from Facebook.

The preceding analysis has revealed the complex social process and ritualised communicative practices through which Said was posthumously constructed as an

86 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

injustice symbol and subsequently transformed, spatially and temporally, through diverse communicative practices into a popular martyr. I continue that thread here to analyse how Said’s pre-death image operated as a visual terrain for the construction of an embodied protest identity through which collectives constituted themselves as “We Are All Khaled Said”, allowing them to be externally recognised as a legitimate actor in the January 25 Revolution at Tahrir Square in Cairo. In the global protest wave of 2011, ranging from the Arab uprisings, to Occupy Wall Street, and the Gezi Park protests in Turkey and beyond, the Guy Fawkes mask was a universal symbol of revolt made popular by the hacker collective Anonymous (see Gerbaudo, 2017). While this also manifested as a popular practice in Egypt, a particular repertoire of protest emerged when people began ubiquitously adopting a black and white illustrative variation of Said’s pre-death image as a face mask24 during the January 25 Revolution and in subsequent uprisings throughout the country (see Figure 2.6). The masks were created by a youth collective to counter the growing use of the Guy Fawkes mask—which was viewed as a Western icon that should not be affiliated with Egypt’s revolution—and to unify the Egyptian citizenry through the distinct cultural-political marker of #WeAreAllKhaledSaid (see Adib et al., 2012).

In Figure 2.6, a protestor wears the face mask of Said with Arabic text running along the mask’s forehead reading “Khaled Said”. They stand elevated above the mass of protestors that depict other symbols like the Egyptian flag. The wearing of the mask of Said contributes to the multiplicity of ritualised communication practices and extends the commemorative and memetic protest dynamic from the digital space into physical embodiment. In its discursive operations the mask of Said performs both strategic and symbolic communicative functions that are marked by collective identification and local-proximity. Unlike the activists adopting the Guy Fawkes mask (for which one assumes a heterogeneous identity under the guise of a fictional character as an attempt to impersonalise their identity), protestors who adopt the mask of Said do so as a decidedly cultural- political act of identification and action. These practices fuse together the personal identity of the protestor with the politicised martyr identity of Said and transforms

24 The image of the protest face mask depicting Khaled Said (taken by Hossam el-Hamalawy) can be seen at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/elhamalawy/6774819801/

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 87

both in the revolutionary process. It points to the particular context of Said’s injustice and transcends it by representing something larger, future oriented, and more complex: the popular struggle for social justice.

2.9 CONCLUSION

This chapter has introduced the analytical framework of digitally mediated martyrdom and explained the theoretical vocabulary necessary for understanding how it was conceptually applied to analyse the phenomenon under study. This proceeded by interfacing literatures from across disciplinary boundaries, and by privileging literatures with a focus on digital activism, death and martyrdom, mediated and ritualised communication, and witnessing. I then mobilised the worked example of Said as an exploratory chronical through which to further develop the theoretical application of digitally mediated martyrdom, and as a starting point for building the foundational methodological work that is later progressed in the thesis (see Chapter 3). Through the analysis of Said, I have demonstrated that martyrdom may be increasingly understood as a visually oriented and digitally mediated communicative practice that is socially constructed by multiple actors, who, locally and transnationally, produce, circulate, and transform martyr narratives in and through digital images.

The worked example of Said empirically illustrates that the communicative practices of appropriation, mediation, reappropriation, and remediation perform central functions in the memetic making of Said’s martyrdom, and enable for the democratisation and secularisation of martyr images. In doing so, I have provided novel insights that illustrate the continuum between the digital and physical environment, and the ways in which digital images often transverse, intersect, and come to mutually constitute how visual activist culture operates. This understanding marks a definitive shift from the traditional ways that martyr narratives, as previously operationalised in activist discourse, have been visually mediated and made politically productive. It also reveals that the established and emergent affordances of digital media technologies reflect a shift from the communicative capacity and creative potential of activism as engendered in the Arab “hypermedia space” (Kraidy, 2007) to a “hyper-memetic era” (Shifman, 2013, p. 373) that is redefining

88 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom

the operational and communicative dynamics of contemporary forms of Arab digital activist culture.

To develop a better understanding of digitally mediated martyrdom, that is, to explore its implications and intersections between translocal and transnational activist practice, it is necessary to analyse how unjust death is made politically productive within embedded digital cultures of use i.e. within visual social media culture. Moreover, to not only explore what the visual variation of images afford, rather, what the combination of image and text, as a public social media articulation, reveals about the discourse of martyrdom and its trajectory as a mobilisation force. To do this, and to ground my argument that digitally mediated martyrdom has emerged as a transnational practice of activism beyond the Arab world, in the next chapter I further develop the methodological approach of the study and apply the concept to the study of Trayvon Martin and his posthumous appropriation as a martyr that has given rise to a new era of Black activism in America.

Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom 89

Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice

3.1 INTRODUCTION

In this chapter, I build upon my prior exploratory analysis conducted on the brutal killing and martyrdom of Khaled Said in the 2010-2011 Egyptian Uprisings (see Chapter 2) and the theoretical development of digitally mediated martyrdom as a modality of contemporary protest. I do this, here, by analysing the role that digitally mediated images, which circulate on social media, play in contemporary activist cultures within popular social justice movements in the post-2011 Arab uprisings landscape, and examine how the affordances of visual social media facilitate new ways of “resocialising the political” (Fenton, 2016) and repoliticising acts of injustice. I do so in this chapter through a focus on the killing of 17-year-old African American male Trayvon Martin, on 26 February, 2012, by 28-year-old Hispanic man George Zimmerman, a then neighbourhood watch volunteer, in Sanford, Florida, America. Reminiscent of how images of Said, posthumously, became a political protest resource in the 2010-2011 popular uprisings in Egypt and subsequent performances of activism in the case of “We Are All Khaled Said” movement, in this explanatory case study, I analysed the ways images of Martin, have, since his death, been appropriated and transformed across time as a contemporary vernacular of Black resistance and resilience in the ongoing struggle for Black justice in America.

In his death, Martin has become the martyr for a new generation of Black activism (Gambino & Laughland, 2015); his unjust killing served as the catalyst that gave rise to popular unrest through the #JusticeForTrayvon campaign and brought into being a national conversation about police brutality, gun violence and systematic racism against Black people that led to the founding of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in 2013. Digitally mediated images that reveal overt acts of racist violence and brutality inflicted on Black bodies have become a persistent feature of contemporary visual culture in America. Not discounting the long and troubled history of racism, violence, and brutality perpetrated against Black people in

Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice 91

America, this case study explores how digitally mediated images have been operationalised as a social performance of radical politics that seeks to render acts of police brutality and racial injustice visible in new ways. Thus, offering individuals, activists and activist groups with new ways for doing politics and being political.

Just as the racially targeted lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955 became a catalyst for the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, with Till’s murder trial further bringing to light the brutality of Jim Crow segregation in the American South, Martin’s death is emblematic of a history of violence toward Black Americans and speaks to persisting and contemporary issues of race, racism, and politics in America (Lee, 2017). This case study demonstrates there is nothing new about racism, brutality and violence perpetrated against Black people in America, it has a long and troubled history that dates back to enslavement. What it does highlight is the changing relationship between how images of injustice, police brutality, and the visual dimensions of protest are being captured, created, shared and contested—both materially and digitally—through the affordances of digital and social media technologies.

To comprehend the complex relationship between historical injustices of state-sanctioned violence against Black peoples in America, and the BLM movement against police brutality and toward the claiming of Black social justice, one must appreciate that contemporary radical Black politics has deep roots that continue to inform the present moment. Trying to understand present struggles outside the context of their histories is intellectually neglectful and reductionist. I appreciate, though, one chapter does not afford space for a comprehensive review of the history of slavery and civil rights in America, as such, in the following sections I have chosen to perform a contextual review with a focus on key events, figures and theories that have proven salient in the context of my particular study. Thus, throughout the course of the case study I draw from Black history, politics, culture, socioeconomics and scholarship to deliberate on the ways that the digital mediation of images of Martin, posthumously, becomes an operative framework through which other vulnerable bodies interpret, and perform resistance against, their shared precarity of the lived experience of police brutality, racism and systematic violence against Black people in contemporary America.

92 Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice

The chapter is divided into four main sections that focus on 1) situating the tradition of political martyrdom in the American context (see section 3.2); 2) providing the background and context for the case study (see section 3.3); 3) discussing how the Martin story was mediated in American mainstream and social media conversations (see section 3.4) and; 4) introducing the practical methods I applied to retrieve and collect publicly posted content to Instagram (see section 3.5).

3.2 THE RISE AND RESURRECTION OF POLITICAL MARTYRDOM IN AMERICA

Before I discuss the cultural and political significance of the martyrdom of Martin in the context of the contemporary BLM movement, I will first situate the concept of martyrdom within the American tradition. As outlined in Chapter 2, and demonstrated through the worked example of Khaled Said, the concept of martyrdom has taken on many different forms and functions in different cultures and religious traditions throughout history. In this section, I discuss how martyrdom, as a politicised concept and discourse of political action, evolved within American national consciousness and experience. The phenomenon of martyrdom, in this context, draws from religious traditions, popular culture, and political discourse. The phenomenon of political martyrdom discussed here both parallels and departs from it uses and functions as discussed in relation to the example of Said and in the context of the Middle East. Comprehending these points of parallel and departure are significant for exploring how and why the figure of the political martyr carries both transnational (and spatial) significance and cultural (and temporal) particularity.

In his 1990 book Crown of Thorns: Political Martyrdom in America Eyal Naveh argues that martyrdom in its religious context was familiar to many Americans. As a political concept, however, Naveh (1990, p. 9) argues martyrdom only entered into popular discourse in the mid-nineteenth century through the anti-slavery reform movement, otherwise known as the Abolitionist Movement. The 1939 book entitled The Martyr Age of the United States written by English author, Harriet Martineau, also attests to this history. The idea of political martyrdom, therefore, has historically formed part of the Black struggle for liberation and social justice. However, the figure of the ‘ideal’ martyr in the

Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice 93

Abolitionist Movement was strongly tied to heroic, non-violent, and primarily white individuals who were willing to sacrifice their lives in the fight to redeem the nation from the immoral sin of slavery (Naveh, 1990, p. 11). In this tradition, abolitionists developed a particular ideology of martyrdom portraying themselves as victims who were subjected to unjust violence, thus, increasing their potential for becoming martyrs. Naveh (ibid.) argues this ideology is analogous to biblical Christian martyrs, who preached non-violence, resisted unjust laws, and regularly self-sacrificed in violent struggles, with Jesus Christ being the supreme example.

Martyrdom in the Abolitionist Movement served as an ideological device and recruitment strategy that helped draw popular support to the struggle under the single cause of eradicating slavery (ibid. p. 12). Thus the importance of political martyrdom for abolitionists reiterated the discourse of liberation over violent oppression, as well as freedom in its broadest sense (ibid. p.16). Yet it was not until authorities executed radical white abolitionist John Brown in Charleston, Virginia, on 2 December, 1859, that a national martyr figure of the Abolitionist Movement came into being. The scripting of Brown’s emancipatory martyr symbolism began, however, six weeks before his execution through a series of letters he wrote from prison. On 16 October, 1859, Brown led a band of white and Black men to attack the federal armoury in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Brown was seriously wounded in the attack and was subsequently arrested. He was tried and convicted of murder, slave insurrection, and treason to the commonwealth.

Zoe Trodd (2015) argues Brown’s own presence in antilynching speeches, sermons, articles, and fiction came into being through Brown’s vast correspondence from jail and national attention that centred on Brown portraying himself in mythical and spiritual terms as a martyr and saint-like figure willing to die for the cause. Brown’s execution solidified the transformation of his martyrdom and popular mythologisation among movement sympathisers and Black Americans. The memorialisation and iconography of Brown’s martyrdom played an instrumental role in championing the Abolitionist Movement that, among other factors, led to the outbreak of the Civil War between 1861-1865 and ultimately the end of slavery in America. Brown was symbolically

94 Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice

resurrected as America’s most prominent and Christ-like martyr of anti-slavery who championed a universal cause through self-sacrifice. On the night of Brown’s execution, during a sermon in Boston, Reverend J. M. Manning proclaimed “The gallows from which he ascends into heaven will be in our politics what the cross is in our religion” (cited in Naveh, 1990, p. 27). It can be argued, then, that the martyrdom of Brown gave shape to a popular discourse of martyrdom in America and a political aesthetic that connected the ritualistic violence of Christ’s crucifixion with Brown’s own execution on the gallows.

The preceding paragraphs have outlined the narrative construction and significance of Brown’s political martyrdom in America. In the paragraphs that follow, I place this history of political martyrdom in conversation with the Black radical aesthetic and struggle for social justice that emerged in the post-Civil War era. A bridging of these histories will then furnish a narrative understanding of the continuum and transformation of political martyrdom in the contemporary present, with a specific understanding of this manifestation as evidenced through the martyrdom of Martin in the BLM movement.

During the Reconstruction period (1865-1877) the practice of lynching gained prominence in the American South as a violent infliction of punishment and was brought to bear, primarily, against Black Americans (Wells, 1983). From the 1880s and continuing into the 1920s, lynch laws were considered in Black popular culture as the resurrection of the spirit of slavery made manifest through the Ku Klux Klan and the reassertion of white supremacist violence in former Confederate states (Trodd, 2015, p. 37). Anti-lynching activism of this era, therefore, became a continuum of anti-slavery activism. Black anti-lynching activists viewed the ritualised violence as being rooted in the Christian practice of white southerners to eradicate the sin of Blackness through immaculate protection (Mathews, 2000, para. 13), to reverse Emancipation, and redeem the American South from its loss in the Civil War (Trodd, 2015, p 308). In her 2009 book Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890- 1940, Amy Louise Wood argues that white Christians not only defended the lynching of Black bodies in spiritual terms, but “infused the performance of it with Christian tropes and rituals” (p. 47).

Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice 95

United in opposition to lynching, Black anti-lynching activism and Black scholarship identified lynching as an exercising of white hegemonic power enacted through public Christian rituals. This gave rise to a popular counter- culture that reconceptualised the violence as an analogy to the crucifixion of Jesus. Yet, in this context Black victims became martyrs, reshaping the white Christian narrative to make Black bodies the “true inheritors of Christian salvation and redemption” (Bouie, 2015, para. 12). Matthews (2000, para. 14) argues white Christians could not see, as Black Christians did, that in the public spectacle and ritualised violence, that Christ had become Black and a symbol of collective Black suffering and martyrdom. This marked a formative period in which Black Americans reimagined the brutalised Black body and the martyr figure as both a religious and political discourse.

Despite the Second World War and its ongoing social and political effects in the years between the 1930s and 1950s, Naveh (1990, p. 171) argues that popular American political discourse did not celebrate another famous martyr figure through the conventions of sacrifice and suffering during this period. Rather Naveh (ibid.) asserts that it was not until the 1960s, notably following the assassination of famous political leaders including President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and his brother Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, that a new discourse of political martyrdom was resurrected in America. Due to the advent of national televised media coverage, never before had the American public been so saturated with the life, death, and martyrdom of a public figure (ibid., p. 172). However, unlike the death and martyrdom of John Brown, John and Robert Kennedy were not posthumously resurrected in popular Black discourse as white allies and martyr figures in the struggle for Black liberation.

It was, however, in the posthumous image of assassinated Black leaders including civil rights activist Medgar Evers (killed in 1963), radical leader and Muslim Malcom X (killed in 1965), and Black civil rights leader and Christian Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr. (killed in 1968) that a discourse of revolutionary martyrdom was forged within national Black consciousness. Resembling Brown’s prefiguring of his martyr narrative, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X perceived themselves as potential martyrs for the cause of Black liberation, and deployed the concept of martyrdom as a political weapon and

96 Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice

ideological device (see Naveh, 1990, p. 179). Thus, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X mobilised the concept of martyrdom through both religious ideology and political discourse, albeit from different political positions and the religious traditions of Christianity and Islam, respectively.

I briefly return to the political aesthetic of John Brown’s martyrdom and the iconography of the gallows in which he was crucified, here, to reflect on how it interjects with the spectre of the lynching tree upon which countless Black bodies were hanged and murdered. Importantly, these histories forged a new iconography of martyrdom in America and an anti-lynching protest aesthetic that found form in Black liberation discourse and Black theological thought during the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement. Like martyrdom, Black theology is conceptualised in various ways depending on the culture of thought and positionality of scholarship. Here, I will place in conversation two significant scholars of Black theology, James Cone and Anthony Pinn. In doing this, I draw together diverging schools of thought to articulate the political entanglement of historic Black liberation ideology, which speaks to both ideas of the scared and the secular. From this, I will then show how these ideas have evolved and been embraced in connection with the BLM movement through lived experiences and the materiality of the Black body that gives shape to the Black radical aesthetic of Martin’s martyrdom

As Christine Mitchell and David Williams (2017, p.3) discuss, Cone’s Chrisology centres on the idea that Jesus was historically Black, thus, it was a Black man that was nailed to the cross. This conceptualisation furnishes Coen’s narrative (2011, p. 158) that Jesus’ crucifixion runs parallel to the brutalised hanging of Black bodies on lynching trees. Cone (ibid.) professes “every time a white mob lynched a Black person, they lynched Jesus”. Through the discourse of Coen’s Black theology, lynched Black bodies are transformed through a sacred lens and are reimagined as the “recrucified body of Christ” (ibid.). In contrast, the Black theology of Pinn (2010) challenges the Christian-centred focus of traditional Black theological thought by placing the Black body, rather than a Black Christ, at the centre. In his 2010 book Embodiment and the New Shape of Black Theological Thought Pinn moves beyond metaphorical conceptualisations of the body to recognise the Black body as discursive and

Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice 97

material. For Pinn, the discursive and the material are inseparable, and are tied to the systemic enactment of racism and systematic white oppression inflicted upon the Black body. Such sentiment is echoed in the words of Black author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates who asserts in a 2015 letter written to his then 14- year-old son, Samori, that white oppression lands with great violence upon the Black body: “racism is a visceral experience, [...] it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this” (Coates, 2015, para. 7). Mitchell and Williams (2017, p. 6) argue Pinn’s human-centric framework crafts the emergence of a new Black theology that calls for an embodied response to anti-Black violence, one that resonates in the writings of the activists and scholars who invoke a different aesthetic of protest politics in the contemporary movement for Black lives.

Undoubtedly, the enduring martyrdom of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X continue to inform the contemporary movement for Black liberation. However, in positioning the discourse of martyrdom in the contemporary present and alongside the historic struggle for Black liberation, it is not in the same tradition that the martyr figure of Martin comes into being. The martyrdom of Martin is, however, more aptly parallel to the political aesthetic of ‘unintentional’ martyrdom that was forged to contest the brutal lynching of Emmett Till in 1955, who, had it not been for the tragic details of his murder, would likely have remained an unknown figure in American history. This particular political aesthetic that I am discussing here is one not predicated on a belief of a God or Black Christ, the ideology of dying for the cause, or the memorialisation of a previously known public figure. Rather, it is a political aesthetic that is predicated on asserting the value of Black life and the rightful protections of ordinary Black people from violent oppression. For a broader discussion on these themes, see the empirical analysis as detailed in Chapters 4 and 5.

The rise of this new martyr figure—that comes into being through the posthumous appropriation of Martin—calls to recognition the decline of the Biblical martyr tradition, all the while acknowledging that traditional white Christian symbology generates less appeal in contemporary Black protest politics than in previous generations in America (see Naveh, 1990, p.177). The

98 Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice

new political aesthetic through which Martin’s martyrdom is imagined has emerged as a continuum and further transformation of, most emblematically, the racial iconography of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement of the 1950s-1960s and 1960s-1970s, respectively. Equally, in attempting to analyse this political aesthetic—as I do so in Chapter 4 and 5—I reflect upon the influence of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s-1970s. This necessitates a drawing together with contemporary popular Black American culture, and the ways in which people express their lived experiences, feelings, and perceptions through a cultural framework and political discourse that has embedded within it notions of the sacred and the secular, and that both intersect and depart. Some of the most prominent Black political leaders and cultural figures to emerge from the formative years of the 1960s and 1970s include James Baldwin, Ella Baker, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Marsha P. Johnson, among others. They often denounced white Christianity and highlighted the links between religion, racism, and patriarchy in America. The works of these and other Black leaders helped inspire a new generation of Black activism and institutionalised the Black Freethought Movement (see Cameron, 2019, p. 120).

While scholars and activists have long grappled with the binary construction of the sacred and the secular in Black liberation struggles (see Sorett, 2016) the continuum of Black freethought has manifested in the social justice discourse of the BLM movement. While 79% of Black Americans identify as Christian, with 53% identifying with the Black Protestant tradition (Masci, Mohamed & Smith, 2018) the discourse of BLM is rarely articulated in distinctively religious terms (Lloyd et al., 2016). Rather than a theological language, it is a spiritual, or ritualised, vernacular of protest that pervades BLM and the popular struggle against state-sanction violence and anti-Black racism to which the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter refers. Emerging as a call to action in response to the acquittal of Martin’s murderer, Zimmerman, BLM was founded in 2013 by Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patrisse Cullors.

The queer and femme-led movement in support of the liberation of all Black lives began when Garza posted on Facebook an open love letter to Black people. Garza declared “we don’t deserve to be killed with impunity. We need to love ourselves and fight for a world where Black lives matter. Black people,

Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice 99

I love you. I love us. We matter. Our lives matter” (Clarke, 2017). Subsequently, the Twitter hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, was forged and a collective discourse to make Black lives matter came into being. It is a discourse, then, that restores a focus on the Black body, of the violence that perpetually falls upon the Black body through structures of white oppression, and of the need for ordinary people to join with Black activists in an embodied response to affirm that all Black lives must be made to matter, equally. Comprehending BLM as a spiritual vernacular of protest that seeks to build a global community through the collective struggle, then, is predicated on loving Blackness in its full humanity and recognising its future potential. Through this, BLM seeks to dismantle heteronormative beliefs, cisgender privileges, patriarchal structures, and hegemonic religious ideologies.

BLM, then, is not simply a continuum of historic Black liberation struggles. It is more complex and nuanced. It is not “your grandparents’ Civil Rights Movement” as Black rapper and activist Kareen Jackson (also known by his stage name as Tef Poe) proclaimed during a 2014 mass protest in Ferguson (Detroit Free Press, 2014). Rather, BLM embodies its own politics, multi-vocal discourses, strategies of resistance, philosophy, and iconography. Thus, when the aesthetics of BLM’s protest politics are cast—through the invoking of Martin’s martyrdom—against historic political aesthetics—that commemorated nationally recognised and radical martyr figures like John Brown, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcom X—it reveals the extent to which the figure of the previously unknown and unintentional martyr like Martin differs. This contrasting identifies the ideological limits for understanding martyrdom through a religious-political-centric framework that has been the case in the historic American tradition.

To analyse the radical political aesthetic of Martin’s martyrdom, and to understand the ways in which Martin’s martyrdom deviates from cultural conventions, a reconceptualising of the meaning and practice of martyrdom in the American present is necessary. To do this, I draw from the Black feminist atheism and humanist framework of Marquis Bey (2018). Through her framework, Bey removes social justice’s perceived default link to religiosity by departing from and moving beyond Christianity (primarily) to more readily validate the plurality of Black people, women, and/or trans folks, thus, all Black

100 Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice

lives. Bey’s framework closely follows in the Black humanist tradition of Pinn (2010), as discussed in the preceding paragraphs of this section.

Bey’s scholarship informs my approach and conceptualisation of digitally mediated martyrdom in the context of the contemporary and collective struggle for Black social justice in America. This enables me to place in conversation the spiritual vernacular that narrates the martyrdom of Martin, and broader discourses of BLM, in connection with the movement’s secular vision and focus on the materiality and subjectivity of Black life. This permits for an alternative theorising of the connections between martyrdom, Blackness, social justice, and religiosity in America that centres on the lived experiences of the Black body and embodied politics. Such an approach also enables me to consider how the precariousness of Black American life is discursively constructed through the martyrdom of Martin, and through a political aesthetic that is not abstracted from broader contemporary and global discourses of anti-Black violence and ideologies that speak to Pan-African liberation, Afrocentrism, and Afrofuturism.

To systematically apply my concept of digitally mediated martyrdom to analyse the discursive manifestation of Martin’s martyrdom, and in connection with the BLM movement, it is necessary to move beyond white and Western- Christian approaches that have historically informed how political martyrdom is understood in the American tradition. My own ontological positionality and understanding of political martyrdom in America departs from other approaches. For example, the embodied theory of martyrdom proposed by DeSoucey et al. (2008) subscribes to the Western-centric and Christian tradition of martyrdom that is predicated on the ritualistic willingness of an individual to die for a cause. While the authors go to great pains to demonstrate how the corporeality and materiality of the martyr’s body is put to use by “reputational entrepreneurs” for political, religious, and cultural purposes, the interpretative framework derives from historical cases of already publicly known individuals, Joan of Arc, John Brown, and Che Guevara. Thus, I argue, such scholarship limits the capacity for understanding martyrdom in the contemporary present, and outside of hegemonic and Western frameworks. Ultimately, such a theory is ill equipped for understanding the phenomenon of martyrdom that emerges in contestation to

Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice 101

the perpetual violence that unwillingly falls upon the body, namely the Black body, and where martyrdom is a posthumously awarded title that was not intentionally sought by the victim.

To be clear, in drawing from the work of Bey (2018) I am attempting to wrestle with and decentre hegemonic and religious frameworks that have, historically, dominated ways of understanding and interpreting martyrdom as a political practice in America. In assuming this ontological positionality, I am not rejecting notions of the sacred and the secular that come into play and intertwine with the phenomenon of martyrdom (as demonstrated in my empirical analysis). Rather, by decentring theological perspectives and Western-centric interpretations of martyrdom, I am able to engage with the possibilities and limitations of such approaches. Moreover, it permits a situating of martyrdom in the contemporary present as a complex and culturally-contextual protest dynamic. From this positionality, I am then able to more readily engage with the discursive practices and social processes through which struggles over meaning, subjectivity, identity, and power are fought. Ultimately, the scholarship of Bey (2018) informs how my concept of digitally mediated martyrdom is applied in the American, notably BLM movement, context. This permits me to engage with the complex plurality of the ways in which Martin’s posthumous image has been appropriated and transformed in conversation with larger discourses of the BLM movement. It becomes evident in my empirical analysis, then, that Black people do not see in the posthumous image of Martin a Christ-like martyr of their redemptive suffering. Rather, it is in and through the posthumous image of Martin that a collective consciousness of the precariousness and value that is placed on Black life is mediated and politicised.

In the preceding sections of this chapter, I have furnished a framework through which to understand how digitally mediated martyrdom operates in the American political and cultural context. In Chapter 4 and 5, I systematically analyse the political aesthetic of Martin’s martyrdom through this lens. Before I can discuss the empirical findings of the study, however, I will first situate the background of the case—the life, death, and martyrdom of Martin—in connection with its racial, political, and mediated underpinnings.

102 Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice

3.3 BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT

3.3.1 Who Was Trayvon Martin? Had it not been for his lamentable death and the controversy that came to dominate his story, it is likely the name and image of Trayvon Martin would never have registered within the global public consciousness. In his death, the story of who Martin was in life and why his life mattered always comes to us filtered through the flux of contesting voices and processes of reappropriation and remediation, whereby multiple social actors enter into a perpetual cycle of re-making, re-telling and re- purposing his story. Thus, we come to know of Martin cognisant that nothing about his character can ever be understood as being, as it once was, ordinary. Yet, knowing there is no unmediated representation of Martin and wanting to understand the ‘everydayness’ of his young identity, here, outward of dominant media accounts, I dedicate space to the voices that can speak intimately to the character and accounts of Martin’s life; parents Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin. Since the killing of their son, Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin have, at great pains, committed their voices to telling the story of Martin in his normalness as a teenager, and as a beloved son. In the co-written 2017 biographical memoir Rest in Power: The Enduring Life of Trayvon Martin they detail their personal account of the lifeworld of Martin and the tragic events of his killing. In what follows, I draw from the text to privilege their voices, and narrate through them, who Martin was and how his character should be understood.

Martin was buried on 3 March, 2012, in a mausoleum at Dade Memorial Park cemetery, Miami, Florida. Twenty-eight days before, Martin had celebrated his 17th birthday with his family (Fulton & Martin, 2017). He was buried wearing a white suit, with powder blue accents (a necktie and vest), and white shoes, and his body laid to rest in a baby-blue casket lined in white, with his name engraved on the casket. He was buried in these colours because these were the hues Martin had told his father he wanted to wear to his upcoming junior prom (Fulton & Martin, 2017, pp. 50-51). The details regarding Martin’s death have been heavily reported by mainstream media, what is less often reported, though, are the details about who Martin was in life. Trayvon Benjamin Martin was born in Miami, Florida, on 5 February, 1995, to Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, who were married in 1994 and later divorced in 1999, and he was the younger brother of Jahvaris Fulton. Martin,

Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice 103

was loved and provided for as a son and brother growing up in an ordinary Black American family of Christian faith (Fulton & Martin, 2017, p. 23). At the age of five Martin’s parents separated; he and his brother lived with Sybrina Fulton as the custodial parent and spent the weekends with their father. At the time of Martin’s killing, Sybrina Fulton worked for the Miami Dade Housing Agency as a program coordinator, and Tracy Martin was a truck driver; they lived in Miami Gardens nearby one another. Martin’s older brother, Jahvaris Fulton, was 21 years old at the time of Martin’s killing and was enrolled at Florida International University as an information technology major. There was nothing particularly uncommon about the Martin family, until the killing of Trayvon Martin. In March 2012, a grieving and indignant family became activists who fought to bring universal attention to the case, and established the social justice organisation, The Trayvon Martin Foundation, as a body dedicated to ending senseless gun violence.

At the time of his death Martin was of slim build weighing 72 kilograms and was five feet eleven inches tall. He was athletically inclined, an avid listener of music, adventurous, friendly, and particular about his image and attire, especially his Nike Air Jordan basketball shoes and his black or grey hoodie which he was rarely seen without (Fulton & Martin, 2017, pp. 12-13). He was known as “Slim” to his friends and followers on Twitter, and in his eleventh-grade school year at Dr. Michael M. Krop High School in north Miami-Dade where he was looking forward to attending his junior prom. Martin aspired to attend either the University of Miami or Florida A&M University, and dreamed of a career in aviation, which he first found his passion for two years prior to his death when he attended an Experience Aviation summer camp at Miami-Opa Locka Executive Airport. Martin had begun to experience trouble at school, though, skipping classes and was (at the time of his death) suspended due to being in possession of a bag of marijuana (see Peralta, 2012); an autopsy report revealed that Martin had traces of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC, found in marijuana) in his system at the time of his death. Sybrina Fulton had recently transferred Martin from Miami Carol City Senior High (where Martin had completed his freshman year and most of his sophomore year, and was achieving academically) to Dr. Michael M. Krop High School, a good school that was closer to home. Martin’s academic results began to decline as he

104 Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice

became more absorbed by his appearance, social activities, and meeting girls (Fulton & Martin, 2017, p. 14).

Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin had grown concerned with Martin’s behaviour and were working to rectify issues, reinforce the values they had always instilled in Martin and his brother, and to keep him focused on his future aspirations. Tracy Martin said his son did not have a criminal record and that Martin’s “life was not out of control; he [Martin] wasn’t a bad kid. He was a teenager, and teenagers sometimes do unexpected things” (Fulton & Martin, 2017, p. 24). Martin was moving through the stages of his youth, in the process of becoming a young man, with all of the restlessness and curiosity such a transition entails. In death, Martin may have become a widely recognised face of injustice whose killing gave rise to the movement, though, it is important to reflect on his character in life as someone who was a beloved son and brother, a friend to many, and a young person not dissimilar from many other young Black teenage boys growing up in America.

3.3.2 A History of Racial Tensions in Miami and Police Misconduct Martin was a youth of Miami, Florida, a multiracial, multilingual, multicultural and socioeconomically diverse city split into many different sections. Miami comprises a minority-majority population with Hispanics making up 70% the city’s population, and the ethnic makeup comprises 72.6% whites (including white Hispanic), 19.2% African Americans and 1% Asians among others (United States Census, 2010). Necessarily, Miami, Florida, is also a city of multi-faith with Christianity the most practiced religion (68%) followed by Judaism (9%), and Islam and other world religions having followings of less than 1%, while 24% of the population identify as atheists or do not identity with any religious affiliation (Pew Research Center, 2014). Miami, Florida, is often referred to as a cultural melting pot, though, it is deeply segregated along racial, ethnic, national identity, and socioeconomic lines (Brookings Institution, 2004), and has a history of racial and ethnic unrest (Sandler, 2013) with long-standing tensions between Black communities and police departments (de los Angeles, 2017). The roots of these tensions in Miami, Florida, were made manifest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the racial climate was marked by pervasive white-supremist violence (the Ku Klux Klan becoming visibly active in the 1920s and 1930s) and regular spectacles of police

Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice 105

brutality committed against Black Americans (Tscheschlok, 1996, p. 46). These violent and segretative practices were born from a history of ultra-negrophobic propaganda, and legal frameworks designed to disenfranchise Black Americans, notably the Black Codes laws of 1865 and 1866 ratified in the aftermath of the American Civil War (1861-1865), and the Jim Crow laws (1877) that governed race relations in the State of Florida until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s (ibid. pp. 41-44). In the 1960s and 1970s Miami, Florida, experienced an influx of Hispanic migrants, which saw Hispanics become the majority of the minority population significantly outnumbering the district’s Black population. This influx created socioeconomic tensions between the Black and Hispanic communities as they competed for jobs and housing, and occasioned considerable ethnic and racial tensions (ibid. pp.16-17).

While the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had ushered in an era of optimism for Black Americans it was short-lived and by the late 1960s, in Miami, Florida, the Black community had grown painfully aware of the limitations of civil rights advancements to deliver social and economic liberation. By 1968 in Miami, Florida, Black aspirations for economic, social, and political self-determination had deteriorated considerably and opposition to systems of white authority were escalating, notably against police officials who were viewed by the Black community as symbols and agents of white power, racism, and unjust oppression—owing to a long-history of stressed police-Black community relations (ibid. p. 15). These tensions paved the way for the 1968 Miami riots in the predominantly Black Liberty City neighbourhood which saw a mass rally of Blacks protest for three days against perceived white structural oppression. Unprecedented anti-white and anti-police violence returned to Liberty City during the deadly 1980 Miami race riots that emerged in protest to the death of Arthur McDuffie in 1979, who died from injuries sustained during an attempted arrest at the hands of four Dade County Public Safety Department officers, and their subsequent acquittal of manslaughter in 1980 (Dunn, 2016).

In January 1989, on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, four days of race riots erupted in the predominantly Black Overtown neighbourhood (just northwest of downtown Miami, Florida) after a Hispanic police officer, William Lozano, shot and killed Clement Lloyd, who was fleeing another police altercation on his motorcycle

106 Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice

and was carrying a passenger, Allan Blanchard. After being shot, Lloyd’s motorcycle crashed into a car and Blanchard was thrown to the pavement; he died the next day from the injuries sustained. Both Lloyd and Blanchard were unarmed, young, Black men. Lozano was charged with two counts of manslaughter and the trial set for November 1989. Requests were made by the defence for the trial to be moved from Dade County amid fears of potential deadly violence if Lozano was acquitted; the Dade Circuit Judge rejected moving the trial from Miami, Florida (Ovalle, 2014). The jury found Lozano guilty on all counts and sentenced him to seven years in prison. In 1991, The Third District Court of Appeal reversed the conviction ruling the Dade Circuit Judge should have duly considered moving the trial from Miami, Florida, amid fears of violence. A retrial was held in Orlando, Florida, in 1993 where the jury acquitted Lozano of all charges (ibid.).

Since Lozano’s trial, controversial police killings against unarmed Black boys and men in Florida—and within America more broadly—have not ceased, and, as across many cities in America, Black mistrust of the police and the judicial system runs deep in Florida (Brown, 2012). It was not until 2015 that another Florida police officer, Nouman Raja, would face manslaughter and attempted murder charges for fatally wounding a Black man and stranded motorist, Corey Jones, in what should have been a routine roadside interaction. On 8 March, 2019, the jury charged Raja with attempted first-degree murder sentencing him to a minimum of 25 years in jail. The Martin family’s attorney Benjamin Crump, also represented the Jones family in the trial and called the verdict a victory for Black Americans and “anyone who believes in justice” (Spencer, 2019). Yet, while the Raja verdict reflects a triumph for Black social justice in America, it is a rare instance in a long tradition of impunity that has historically followed a series of unjust killings of, primarily, Black boys and men across various geographical and social demographic areas in America; it is a painful history that many in the Black community still suffer from (Lawson, 2012).

This is evident in past cases where the criminality or injustice of brutal killings become minimised by the insertion of falsehoods or counter-narratives that serve to justify the killing of a Black body on the grounds the death was somehow warranted or aggravated by actions such as “whistling at a white woman” (Whitfield, 2001, p. 7) as was the case in the killing of Emmett Till and the acquittal of the killers by an all-white jury, or, in the contemporary context, for appearing

Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice 107

“suspicious” while wearing a hoodie and walking through a gated housing community as was the case with Martin and the acquittal of Zimmerman. The stereotypical Black-as-suspicious, as strange, thuggish and violent, has long plagued the American landscape (Jackson, 2006, p. 17), and the consistent scripting of the Black masculine identity as suspicious is both the embodiment and burden of being young and Black in America. This history and background are significant to consider in the context of the sociopolitical landscape of Miami, Florida, and America more broadly, and for understanding the racial dynamics that underpin the tensions that emerged in the case of Martin.

3.3.3 The Shooting of Trayvon Martin On the evening of 26 February, 2012, Martin, unarmed, was shot and killed by Zimmerman during a physical altercation. Martin had travelled from Miami to Sanford, Florida, with his father, Tracy Martin, to visit his father’s girlfriend, Brandy Green, and her son, Chad, aged 14, where they stayed in a townhouse in the Retreat at Twin Lakes development, a gated community. During the pre-game show for a National Basketball Association All-Star game Martin walked from the residence to a nearby convenience store where he purchased a bag of Skittles and a can of Arizona iced-tea. It was dark and raining that evening and Martin wore a hooded sweatshirt (commonly referred to as a hoodie). On his return walk from the store Martin was spotted by Zimmerman, who, armed with a licensed 9mm Kel-Tec gun, was driving in the area on an errand. Zimmerman, following Martin in his car, called the Sanford Police Department to report “a real suspicious” young Black male (McCrummen & Horwitz, 2012).

During this time Martin was on his mobile phone speaking with his friend, Rachel Jeantel. Martin told Jeantel he was being followed describing Zimmerman as “a creepy-ass cracker” (Brown & Liston, 2013). Jeantel told Martin to run. At this point Zimmerman, still on the phone with the police, tells the dispatcher that Martin is running and the dispatcher tells Zimmerman not to pursue him. Zimmerman ignored the command and pursued Martin on foot. Jeantel, still on the phone to Martin at the time, heard Martin say “why are you following me” to which Zimmerman responded “what are you doing around here?” (ibid.). At 7.15pm a physical altercation ensued and Jeantel heard the sound of the mobile falling to the

108 Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice

ground and Martin saying “get off, get off” before the call was cut. At 7.16pm a woman called 911 to report yelling and what sounded like cries for help. The call also records the background yelling and voices the woman is referring to, with forensic analysis later identifying Martin’s voice and last words as he pleaded for his life: “I’m begging you”…“help me”…“stop”, 45 seconds after the start of the call a gunshot is heard (McCrummen & Horwitz, 2012). At 7.17pm, Police Officer Timothy Smith arrived on the scene to find Martin’s dead body lying face down in a grassed area between two rows of townhouses roughly 64 metres from his residence (New York Times, 2012). Zimmerman sustained “insignificant” injuries to his nose and the back of his head during the confrontation (Liston, 2013), and admitted to killing Martin, but claimed self-defence. On the night of the shooting, Zimmerman was taken into the Sanford Police Department for questioning, but was not arrested as Police Chief Bill Lee claimed there was insufficient evidence to charge Zimmerman with Martin’s killing and cited Zimmerman’s right to defend himself with deadly force under Florida’s Stand Your Ground statute (Robles, 2012) (see below for a discussion on Stand Your Ground laws).

In the days following the killing, Martin’s parents, family attorney Benjamin Crump, and pro-Martin supporters grew in their discontent over the failure to arrest Zimmerman and insufficient mainstream media attention (Graeff, Stempeck & Zuckerman, 2014). While Crump worked to generate broader mainstream media attention and reframe Martin’s killing as a case of racial profiling, a Change.org petition was launched on 8 March calling for the arrest of Zimmerman. The petition attracted more than two million signatures and was followed by the “Justice for Trayvon” movement which saw popular protests held nationwide sparking renewed debate about race, racial profiling, Stand Your Ground laws, and gun violence (Pilkington and Luscombe, 2013). Stand Your Ground laws—drafted by gun lobbyists and conservative lawmakers—were legally adopted in Florida in 2005. As of 2020, 27 American states have enacted Stand Your Ground laws. The laws do not require that police officers or ordinary citizens retreat in the face of perceived threats, and justifies the use of deadly force “to prevent the imminent commission of a forcible felony” while providing immunity against criminal prosecution. Moreover, the laws authorise individuals and police officers to use reasonable and deadly force to protect themselves and others, irrespective of the potential for a safe retreat.

Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice 109

Critics have long said the laws create a culture of illegitimate vigilantism and foster a “shoot-first mentality that provides a low-cost licence to kill, especially when an armed confrontation involves race” (Obbie, 2015).

In the weeks and months following Martin’s killing Stand Your Ground laws, an already contentious matter of public and political debate, became a flashpoint of national contention in the discourse about race and criminal justice. On 11 April, 45 days after Martin was killed, Florida prosecutor Angela Corey charged Zimmerman with second-degree murder. On 13 July, 2013, Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges in the State of Florida v. George Zimmerman murder trial that began on 10 June. While Zimmerman’s legal team did not invoke Florida’s Stand Your Ground law as part of its successful defence against the charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter, Zimmerman was afforded protections of Stand Your Ground as its language is embedded within Florida’s self-defence laws under Chapter 776, Section 013 of the Florida Statutes (2018). As news spread of Zimmerman’s acquittal, social unrest ensued nationwide in street protests and online across social media. People appropriated dominant slogans “We Are All Trayvon Martin” and “Justice for Trayvon” as a way to identify with the injustice and as a rallying cry for radical change. These slogans, also operating as hashtags, were frequently employed alongside images of Martin on protest placards, in memes and in commemorative social media posts (Huffington Post, 2013; Wilson, 2013). On the day of Zimmerman’s acquittal, activist Alicia Garza posted on Facebook, “I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter…”. Garza and fellow activists, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors, helped popularise the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter across social media cementing the beginning of the contemporary movement for Black social justice (Baptiste, 2017).

3.4 THE MEDIATISED LIFE OF TRAYVON MARTIN

The contentious Martin-Zimmerman story dominated headlines in both American mainstream and social media conversations in 2012 and 2013, and became one of the most extensively covered, and polarising, stories that centred on issues related to race, gun violence, and the justice system in recent years (Anderson, 2013). A 2014 study conducted by Erhardt Graeff, Matt Stempeck and Ethan Zuckerman traces the

110 Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice

controversy of the Martin-Zimmerman case—across mainstream media and social media, and through online and offline events—from Martin’s killing on 26 February, 2012, until the arrest of Zimmerman on 30 April, 2012. Drawing from interview data, mainstream media stories, blog posts, online petitions, and social media content, the authors perform a chronological analysis of events and identify five periods of time that significantly shape the arc of the story’s progression in 2012: 1) 26 February to 6 March; 2) 7 to 15 March; 3) 16 to 22 March; 4) 23 March to 10 April; and 5) 11 to 30 April 2012. Graeff et al. (2014) establish that initial coverage of the story (phase 1) received little attention in the immediate days following Martin’s killing, and was chiefly framed by local (State of Florida) news media as a fight between two people in an area known for occasional violence (ibid., p. 4). A review of these early stories reveals media did carry the basic facts of the shooting, however, did not introduce the Sandford Police Department’s reliance on Florida’s controversial Stand Your Ground laws as grounds to determine there was insufficient evidence to charge Zimmerman; details that would later become central to the framing of the Martin-Zimmerman story.

While news attention to such a local crime story would typically begin to dissipate as the news cycle moves on, the Martin-Zimmerman story significantly differs in its news cycle trajectory (in phase 2) as it rose to prominence in national mainstream media headlines 10 days after Martin’s killing (Graeff et al., 2014). This spike in news coverage proceeds through a series of events and actors (see Appendix 1 for chronology of key events) including publicity of the Martin family signing the Parks and Crump Law Firm to take the case pro bono, with the appointment of Benjamin Crump, a prominent Black American civil rights lawyer, as the family’s attorney and Crump’s hiring of publicist Ryan Julison. The efforts of Julison and Crump were significant in shaping media coverage and framing narratives in this phase. Julison directly engaged mainstream media attention (including Reuters and television broadcast program CBS This Morning) and introduced key facts highlighting Zimmerman was carrying a gun without having undergone any firearms training, had shot an unarmed Martin, and had not been arrested. Concurrently, Crump worked to introduce racial framing into the case emphasising in a Reuters 8 March story that race was “the 600-pound elephant in the room” (Liston, 2012). Crump underlined the character of Martin as the victim and his actions as innocent

Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice 111

by saying “he [Martin] was a good kid” who “only has Skittles” while simultaneously reframing Zimmerman as the aggressor by saying “he [Zimmerman] has the gun” (Deggans, 2013). Crump further reinforced the victimisation of Martin by saying “why is this kid [Martin] suspicious in the first place? I think a stereotype must have been placed on the kid” (ibid.). From this period, race became a driving narrative in media coverage of the Martin-Zimmerman case.

From these key interactions with Reuters and CBS This Morning, Crump and Julison were able to generate more mainstream media coverage that led to greater public awareness of the story, as well as activist and online intervention. Following coverage generated by Reuters, one reader, Howard University alumnus Kevin Cunningham—who was discontented with the paucity of mainstream media coverage and pubic mobilisation to contest the injustice—created a Change.org petition on 8 March. On the same day, ‘Trayvon Martin’ appears on Google Trends for the first time. Graeff et al. (2014) find the creation of the petition played a significant role in driving widespread public attention to the Martin case and in mobilising people in embodied protest that would be later orchestrated by the Million Hoodies Marches and other rallies in cities across America, and online across social media communities and channels. Initial signatures to the petition came through listserv- based sharing and were amplified by race-specific media including Global Grind and activist organisations including ColorofChange.org and the Black Youth Project (ibid., p. 5, 2014). Here, Change.org staff also played a key role in supporting and giving visibility to the Martin campaign though direct efforts to engage Martin’s parents in the crafting of the petition’s language that became amplified through blast emails to Change.org’s national membership (Karpf, 2016). To increase the public appeal of the campaign Change.org staff also solicited support from a cadre of celebrities and public figures, which helped to generate a 900% spike in social media traffic to the petition between 12-15 March (Graeff et al., 2014). This phase of activity underlines the strategic role played by activist and race-based media in reorienting and amplifying the narrative of the Martin story from early on.

A number of significant events proceed in what Graeff et al. (2014) outline as the third phase of the Martin story’s progression. This includes a sharp increase in mainstream media attention to the story on 16 March, when Attorney Crump was successful in his quest to secure the public release of the audio of the 911 call that

112 Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice

Zimmerman placed while he was in pursuit of Martin with a gun. The audio establishes that Zimmerman described Martin as “real suspicious” to the Sanford Police Department and that Zimmerman ignores the request from the 911 dispatcher to not to pursue Martin. The release of this information into the public domain significantly increased the attention drive to the story online and across national mainstream media, notably broadcast media (ibid., p. 6). As news of the Change.org petition continued to spread and it gathered more signatories, additional support followed from individuals, celebrities and influential personalities including Reverend Al Sharpton, a prominent Black civil rights activist and founder of the civil rights organisation National Action Network. On 19 March, the social empowerment organisation ColorOfChange launched their “Justice for Trayvon Martin” campaign. Protest rallies began to be held across America, and abroad in London, UK, from 21 March as civil rights leaders, activists, and ordinary people took to the streets to demand “Justice for Trayvon”. The most notable of these marches was the Million Hoodie March in New York City, initiated (on Facebook) by digital strategist Daniel Maree. The march was attended by Martin’s parents and thousands of protestors— including support from demonstrators of the Occupy Wall Street protests—who took to the streets across New York City wearing hoodies, carrying Skittles, protest placards and chanting “we are all Trayvon” (Mother Jones, 2012).

Despite growing national mainstream media attention, Martin’s story had not yet made front page news on a number of leading media publications including the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times (Graeff et al., 2014, p. 7). However, on 22 March the Martin story did make headlines in the New York Times when journalist Lizette Alvarez (writing on mounting criticism of Sanford Police Department Chief of Police Bill Lee and public demands for him to resign over the handling of Martin’s killing) describes Zimmerman as a “white Hispanic” (Alvarez, 2012). The racial framing of Zimmerman as a “white Hispanic” was also advocated by other liberal media including CNN, for which it drew sharp criticism from conservative and right-wing media that argued such outlets were trying to contour racial narratives that spoke to divisive Black-white binaries. In mainstream media coverage that followed (in what Graeff et al. outline as the fourth phase), and across social media and offline, Zimmerman’s racial identity continued to be a contested subject matter and inconsistently shifted between him being referred to as either

Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice 113

white, Hispanic, or white Hispanic (Alvarado, 2013). The racial terms and boundaries placed on the character portrayals of Martin and Zimmerman, respectively, reflects both persisting and shifting tensions over race and the hierarchy of racial difference in contemporary America. From early on in the development of the Martin-Zimmerman story, the shifting narratives of race and identity became key drivers in challenging the public’s notions over who gets to be classified as white in America and for whom is granted access to the racial leavers of power and influence through which people are able to legitimise claims over innocence or guilt.

A notable example of this manifested in mainstream media debate on 23 March when Fox News contributor Geraldo Rivera decidedly chose to further racialise and negatively stereotype Martin through his choice of apparel on the night he was killed. Speaking on Fox and Friends Rivera said “I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman” (Daniels, 2012). Rivera also urged Black and Latino parents not to let their children go out wearing hoodies contending the hoodie was associated with criminal behaviour. The discursive manifestation of the hoodie as a racialised and negative symbol of ‘suspicion’ in American culture as contrast to its sociopolitical use as a symbol of solidarity—in the Millions Hoodie March and online alongside slogans of “I am Trayvon” and as acts of defiance alongside the mantra “do I Look Suspicious?”— solidified the ‘hoodie’ as part of the national conversation and battle over the framing of the Martin story (Burch, 2012). On the same day of Rivera’s controversial comments, American President Barack Obama was questioned by a reporter about the case during a press conference at the White House Rose Garden leading the president to comment publicly on the shooting of Martin for the first time in which he said: “if I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.” Analysis by Graeff et al. (2014) finds the statement by the president brought coverage of the Martin- Zimmerman story to a climax across mainstream media coverage, and generated extensive discussion online and across social media channels. On 25 March, a video campaign created by Howard University students entitled “Am I Suspicious?” was released and generated widespread online engagement and supplementary media attention. On 27 March, Pew Research Center (2012a) stated the Martin-Zimmerman story became the most closely followed news item by the public surpassing news coverage of the 2012 presidential campaign between 22 to 25 March.

114 Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice

More controversial framing over Martin’s character entered into public debate and took a sharp turn on 26 March as media published information highlighting Martin was suspended from school at the time of his death due to being in possession of an empty bag containing traces of marijuana (Robles, 2012). This led many conservative and right-wing media to reframe Martin as a troubled youth and a marijuana smoking thug. Such negative portrayals and narrative framing of Martin were echoed by pro-Zimmerman supporters online and in social media sentiment. These themes persisted as a central topic of controversy within mainstream media coverage well into the State of Florida v. George Zimmerman murder trial a year later when Zimmerman’s defence attorney, Mark O’Mara, released, on 23 May 2013, a series of images as part of the evidence files. A number of the images were retrieved from Martin’s social media accounts and mobile phone, and depict Martin riding a horse, appearing in shirtless selfies, wearing a scowling expression exposing his gold-capped teeth (wearing a grill which is a removable piece of jewellery that mimics gold teeth), blowing smoke and extending his middle finger to the camera, other images show an unidentified person holding a gun, and a potted marijuana plant (Orlando Sentinel, 2013). A series of text messages retrieved from Martin’s mobile phone between November 2011 to February 2012 were also released and included messages shared between Martin and friends discussing that Sybrina Fulton had told Martin he needed to move out and live with his father due to his recent issues at school. Messages also detailed Martin’s partaking in organised fighting, smoking of marijuana, and of his interest in guns with a particular exchange of messages discussing the possibility of Martin buying a hand gun (Alvarez, 2013; Daytona Beach News Journal, 2013).

While ‘thug-based’ narratives of Martin were being carried by conservative and right-wing media in late March 2012, concerted efforts were being made by progressive groups like the Center for Media Democracy and media, The Nation (Nichols, 2012), to draw attention generated by the Martin story and reframe the debate over the impact of the Stand Your Ground model legislation endorsed by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), for which many believed played a role in Martin’s killing (Bellin, 2012). Several months prior to Martin’s killing, the Center for Media Democracy had launched its anti-ALEC campaign through the

Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice 115

website ALEC Exposed25, following Martin’s killing the group was influential in drawing connections between Zimmerman’s justified use of deadly force under Florida’s Stand Your Ground statue and the role of ALEC in helping to pass these ‘model’ laws across multiple American states. This narrative gained popular traction with other progressive organisations and became a central theme carried by liberal media including the New York Times (Krugman, 2012), The Washington Post (Hamburger, 2012), Huffington Post (Berkowitz, 2012), and The Atlantic (Scola, 2012). Correspondingly, activists also instigated multiple Change.org petitions to challenge Stand Your Ground laws and on 26 March the petition signatures were delivered to the Florida Attorney General, Sanford Police Chief, U.S. Attorney General, and Florida’s 4th District State’s Attorney. Public pressure for the arrest of Zimmerman was mounting, and on 11 April Zimmerman was charged with second degree murder.

The day after Zimmerman was charged with Martin’s killing, the study by Graeff et al. (2014) identifies that front page newspaper coverage peaked as did Google searches for ‘George Zimmerman’. This period (until 30 April) is identified as the fifth phase during which news outlets “played up the human drama angle” (ibid. p. 13) and broadcast media including Fox News and MSNBC aired successive episodes of character attacks. A poll conducted during this period by Gallup (Newport, 2012) found news engagement between Black and non-Black Americans differed significantly with 52% of Black audiences playing close attention in contrast to 19% of non-Blacks who were paying equal attention. The poll also found views regarding the circumstances involved in the killing of Martin were significantly divided with 72% of Blacks compared to 31% of non-Blacks believing that racial bias played a major role in the events of Martin’s killing, correspondingly, 72% of Blacks believed Zimmerman was guilty while 32% of non-Blacks viewed Zimmerman as guilty. Another poll conducted in the same period by Pew Research Center (2012c) also found public opinion was deeply divided along racial, as well as partisan, lines. The poll highlighted that Democrats were following the events of Martin’s killing more closely (38%) than Republicans (19%), with 56% of

25 The Center for Media Democracy’s anti-ALEC campaign website ALEC Exposed can be seen at: https://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed

116 Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice

Republicans compared to 25% of Democrats stating that mainstream media organisations had granted too much coverage to Martin’s killing.

3.4.1 How Images Shaped the Martin-Zimmerman Story Sharp sociopolitical divides—centred on racial issues, gun violence and deeply felt views that the criminal justice system in America is biased against Blacks— continued to dominate the Martin-Zimmerman story in the lead-up to and during the State of Florida v. George Zimmerman murder trial. These contentions continued as focal themes in both public and mainstream media debate in the aftermath of Zimmerman’s acquittal as witnessed by the rise of the BLM movement since 13 July, 2013, and these issues remain deeply entrenched and pervasive in contemporary American culture. While the preceding discussion and analysis offered by Graeff et al. (2014) details how the Martin story was shaped by both online and offline media at different points of time, what is not revealed in the analysis by Graeff et al. (2014) is the centrality of images in shaping racially charged and competing narratives that sought to frame Martin as either victim or villain. This is where my study departs and considers that, from the outset of the Martin-Zimmerman story, images played a key role in shaping media narratives and public debate. It is important to emphasise, here, the role of images in shaping the arc of the Martin-Zimmerman narrative, were deployed within both mainstream media and popular public discourse through duelling scenarios that served to either reinforce or counter negative stereotypes, prejudice and racial bias. As Martin, deceased, was unable to defend his character and Zimmerman had sought to portray Martin as the aggressor through his account of events, it was through a series of images and competing commentary that Martin’s character came to be defined or aspects of his humanity were veiled. Initial coverage of the Martin-Zimmerman story was carried by multiple mainstream media reports with two images that were frequently juxtaposed26, a family snapshot image of Martin (see Figure 3.1) wearing a red Hollister T-shirt and a police mugshot image of Zimmerman (see Figure 3.1) wearing an orange polo shirt.

26 The juxtaposed images of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman can be seen at: https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2012/the-iconic-photos-of-trayvon-martin-george- zimmerman-why-you-may-not-see-the-others/

Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice 117

Figure 3.1. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured an image of Trayvon Martin (left) (retrieved from AP photo); and juxtaposed together with an image of George Zimmerman (right) (retrieved from Wikimedia Commons).

These images invited both contextual arguments and criticisms over their usage and function in shaping narratives of the story. The image of Martin depicts a fresh-faced and smiling teenager (aged 16) taken in 2011 six months before his death, while the image of Zimmerman was taken in 2005 when Zimmerman (aged 22) was arrested for assaulting a police officer (charges were later dropped) and depicts him as unshaven and emotionally unresponsive. A Poynter (Shepard, 2012) story details how news media organisations and photo editors grappled over the use of the above-shown images for a number of reasons. For example, initial criticisms over the images argued that Martin was portrayed in a favourable light, while Zimmerman was depicted as hostile. In addition to the above image (see Figure 3.1), other images of Martin were made available to media by Martin’s parents shortly after his death. These included images that depicted Martin in more innocent and leisurely moments such as him smiling and holding a baby, as a young football athlete, holding a snowboard at a ski resort during a family vacation, and a close-up image that depicts Martin looking into the camera with a neutral expression and wearing a light-grey hoodie, with the hood up; an image that would later become synonymous in both mainstream media and social media coverage of the Martin story.

Yet, the image of Martin selected most often for use in the initial coverage of the story was the image shown in Figure 3.1. More recent images of Zimmerman also became accessible in the days following Martin’s death and were published by the Orlando Sentinel including an image that depicts Zimmerman smiling and wearing a jacket, shirt, and tie. However, the Orlando Sentinel had obtained the image from an unknown source and did not provide permissions for its use by other media outlets (Shepard, 2012). According to interviews conducted by Shepard (2012) other news media, including the Miami Herald, wanted to publish the more recent image of Zimmerman (rather than the mugshot) in following coverage of the

118 Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice

story, however, as it did not have copyright permissions it published the mugshot image instead. The more recent image of Zimmerman was later distributed nationally by McClatchy-Tribune wire service and was picked up by other media and included in subsequent coverage.

3.4.2 Image Brokers While options were limited for photo editors regarding early images of Zimmerman, multiple images of Martin were available for mainstream media publishing. Yet, as detailed by Shepard (2012) controversy surrounded the use of these images as they (excluding the hoodie image) were perceived as not being recent, therefore, not an accurate portrayal of Martin’s physical representation at the time of his death. In such circumstances, it is customary that media institutions publish recent images in order to provide visually accurate and truthful representations of the subject to their audiences. However, while the hoodie image of Martin was recent, photo editors were fraught with concerns of the potential ramifications of its publishing; worried it could serve as a visual frame to criminalise Martin’s character. Yet, some mainstream media (including the Orlando Sentinel and the Miami Herald, among others) did opt to publish the hoodie image. Here, the professionals responsible for producing and circulating news images, and the institutions where that editing process takes place, can be understood as what Gürsel refers to as “image brokers” (Gürsel, 2016). Image brokers may not be the authors or producers of images, but they are the “people who act as intermediaries for images through acts such as commissioning, evaluating, licensing, selling, editing and negotiating” (p. 38). Image brokers facilitate the selection and placement of news images, and as such they enable or police the circulation of particular images. Ultimately, this gatekeeping processes makes available or restricts the availability of images for public witnessing, thereby image brokers can be understood as acting as mediators that help construct public opinion and mediators that shape public imagination (ibid.).

In the days and weeks that followed Martin’s death the hoodie became a counter-symbol against racial stereotypes and ‘suspicion’ and a popular symbol of solidarity in the fight for social justice. Subsequently, mainstream media coverage of Martin that followed was regularly accompanied with the hoodie image. By the end of March 2012, another image taken from Martin’s Twitter profile was published by

Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice 119

the Orlando Sentinel, it was the aforementioned image of Martin with gold-capped teeth. Debate ensued over its appropriateness for use and the potential for character misrepresentation—particularly since news had emerged over Martin’s suspension from school due to being in possession of marijuana. However, Kenneth Irby, founder of Poynter’s photojournalism program, who is Black, contested such concerns saying news media outlets should publish the image because he did not think it demonising. Rather, he claimed it depicted Martin as a contemporary symbol of youth as the wearing of a grill (a removable piece of jewellery that mimics gold teeth) is a popular part of mainstream American youth culture (Shepard, 2012).

3.4.3 Image Struggles Through the introduction of more images, public information and shifting political opinions, a more complex portrait of Martin and Zimmerman began to emerge as competing images were appropriated by different media and people in ways that either presented Martin as the innocent-looking victim or as a menacing and troubled youth. Images also emerged online of Martin that had been doctored, distorted, and even images purportedly of Martin were falsely attributed to him. For example, some right-wing bloggers, like Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report, Dan Riehl of RiehlWorldView.com, and Michelle Malkin of Twitchy.com wanted to show Martin in a different and more menacing light and scoured Martin’s social media accounts to find illustrations of him using slang and showing gold teeth, implying that Martin was a thug (Reeve, 2012). This resulted in Malkin publishing a piece—as an attempt to counter what she claimed was evidence of mainstream media bias (see juxtaposed images Figure 3.1)—by juxtaposing the image of Zimmerman smiling in a shirt and tie alongside an image of a shirtless Martin, wearing a beanie on his head and baggy pants hanging low beneath his boxer shorts, giving both middle fingers up to the camera. This juxtaposition fit the character portrayal of Martin as a thug-like- gangster and Zimmerman as the victim of liberal media bias. Yet, the image was not of the deceased Martin; the image had been incorrectly taken from the Facebook account of another teenage Trayvon Martin, a resident in a different American state, that just happened to share the same name (Twitchy.com later issued a correction and apology).

120 Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice

While the Martin-Zimmerman case did take some weeks before it gained national mainstream media traction, once it did there was outrage directed at both established and reported facts, the polarisation of opinions ensued and misinformation spread. Central to the narratives of these events were not just a few images as had been the case in the initial days of the story’s reporting, but a series of competing images (see analysis in Chapter 4 and 5) that were disseminated, in memetic fashion, across mainstream media channels and social media platforms, and offline through embodied protest and creative appropriation. Dependent upon individual interpretations, the images (both flattering and less flattering in nature) depict Martin as an angelic child, an everyday youth, a promising young man, or, as a troubled teenager, a suspicious youth, and a menacing Black thug. The images were deployed in mainstream media, by activists, and people across the social spectrum. They were appropriated in diverse ways and for varied purposes; the images operated as contentious, commemorative, and politicised devices through which Martin’s posthumous character was fought over. Eight years have passed since Martin’s killing and both images of him published posthumously and his character continue to be subjects of contested public opinion and digital reappropriation and remediation (see analysis in Chapter 4 and 5). Across social media, in particular, Martin has been reappropriated and remediated as either an innocent and undeserving victim of a race-related crime, and a martyr for the BLM movement, or, as a menacing Black thug deserving of his killing, followed by competing visual narratives that sought frame Zimmerman as either a guilty and racist predator, or recast his character as the victim and protector of Stand Your Ground laws.

3.5 METHODS AND DATA COLLECTION

This section sets out the practical methods I applied to retrieve and collect publicly posted content (posts) to the Instagram platform containing the hashtag #TrayvonMartin across a seven-year period (2012-2019). Building on the methodological framework applied to the exploratory case study of Khaled Said (see section 2.8)—where I searched for resonant images via a combination of keyword search terms on Google Images and traced digital images to their site of emergence on Facebook, Twitter, and mainstream media—I expanded my methodology to collect posts (digital images with accompanying textual commentary) from

Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice 121

Instagram, and I drew from a diverse range of social and mainstream media sources to analyse the case in context. The aim of the data collection method was to manually identify and select posts on the basis of their recurrence and resonance.

Table 3.1 Study and dataset overview

Study Timeframe 27 March, 2012, to 28 February, 2019 Data Collection Period 3 December, 2018, to 28 February, 2019 Approach Qualitative, chronological/hybrid observation Platform Instagram Keyword Search #TrayvonMartin Dataset 1819 posts Data reserved for close reading 943 posts

Platform Selection

I chose Instagram as the source for data collection due to 1) the centrality of the platform within the social media strategy of the BLM movement and its growing popularity within online (visual-based) activism more broadly (Mundt, Ross, & Burnett, 2018; Bailey, 2017); 2) the particular affordances and aesthetic preferences of the platform (as it privileges images over text) facilitated investigation into the ways in which the visual culture of activism and political expression was emerging and being transformed through the dominant vector of information being visual communication. This permitted exploration of the different forms and genres of digitally mediated images that were being constructed, contested, sustained, and transformed by people as part of an emergent discourse and specific culture of activist use; 3) the increasingly widespread use of the platform by people, notably youth aged 18-24 (Pew Research Center, 2018); 4) and, importantly, to address the paucity of research (more generally) on the platform to date (Highfield & Leaver, 2016).

I did not designate YouTube as a site of inquiry for my study as the criteria of content to be analysed did not include moving visual (video and audio) content. I did not select ephemeral or private multimedia messaging apps such as Snapchat and Whatsapp as my study was interested in understanding processes of publicly visible

122 Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice

and collective communication practices that emerged to contest dominant power and hegemonic discourses, and because I was interested in the persistence of communicative practices that sustain social movements and circulate digitally mediated images across time. Various studies have examined the killing of Martin and subsequent activism in the BLM movement from the perspective of visual culture and media studies (Fleetwood, 2015; Mirzoeff, 2017), mainstream news media framing (Madison, 2015; Fabregat & Beck, 2019), as frictions of hashtag activism (Rambukkana, 2015) and distributed framing (Ince, Rojas & Davis, 2017). Within internet and social media research studies have examined activists’ uses of social media (Freelon et al., 2016) and controversies of networked activism (Graeff, Stempeck & Zuckerman, 2014), and, a review of the literature in the field of digital activism (and in relation to contemporary social movements more broadly) primarily draws from Twitter and Facebook as the site of inquiry, and largely derives findings from quantitative and textual verbal analysis.

Manual Methods

Noting some of the limitations of the aforementioned studies, I adopted manual methods for this study as a means to develop qualitative and hybrid approaches well-suited for visual social media research, and because big data approaches were not well-suited for addressing the objective of this research. This manual approach also enabled me to navigate institutional ethical boundaries imposed on my research for which my ethical protocol was approved subject to the condition that my research did not use automated means of collection to retrieve data from Instagram as it was considered a breach of the platform’s Terms of Service, and would have been in opposition to the committee’s rules and statement of ethical research conduct. A number of scholars have noted the potential dangers and limitations of big data methodologies (see boyd & Crawford, 2012; Ekbia et al., 2015; Tufekci, 2014) as well as the ethical challenges (see Markham, Tiidenberg, & Herman, 2018; Zimmer & Kinder-Kurlanda, 2018). This study adopted a ‘small data’ approach that comprises a dataset (of Instagram posts) that is relatively small in its number of data points (posts) (see ‘selection criteria’ section below for discussion). This facilitated a qualitative ‘human’ reading and analysis of posts that offered a manageable and meaningful (rich) way, and ethical benefit, for the investigation of

Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice 123

the sociopolitical, sociotechnical, cultural, and historical practices and processes in context, and that were not abstracted from lived experience. Moreover, it permitted for the discovery of unpredictable patterns of discursive activity and visual practices throughout the process of data collection (such as when new hashtags and symbols emerged as key protest frames and where images migrated into new spaces and forms such as street graffiti and memes). In sum, adopting manual methods for this study proved fruitful for enriching the informational quality of the dataset, by enabling me to document the context of the post’s emergence and construction, while remaining agile in identifying new sources of interest and to make sense of emergent patterns. The stance of this approach renders the study incompatible for producing representativeness that big data methods can engender. Rather, this manual ‘small data’ approach aimed for in-depth coverage of the phenomenon under study.

Keyword Search Strategy

I employed a keyword search strategy using #TrayvonMartin to perform searches and I retrieved relevant posts via Instagram’s Search and Explore bar. At the time of data collection Instagram’s search and explore function enabled for searches to be conducted on people (users), places, top posts, and hashtags, but only permitted one query per search. It did not facilitate searches according to date or time unlike other platforms (e.g. Twitter) with more advanced search functionality. I determined #TrayvonMartin provided the most reliable way to search and retrieve meaningful posts (that would likely depict Martin either explicitly or symbolically); I decided this by reviewing posts that depicted Martin and identified accompanying hashtags. I noted multiple other hashtags incorporating Martin’s name (as well as spelling variations), however, the primary hashtag in use was #TrayvonMartin and other, secondary, hashtags were co-appearing alongside #TrayvonMartin. Secondly, #TrayvonMartin generated the most extensive number of posts (n300k+ at the time of data collection) in comparison to other hashtags appropriating part or all of his name. Additionally, to ensure the #TrayvonMartin hashtag provided for a broad enough capture of posts across time, I contrasted it against posts generated using the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag. I noted that the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag generated significantly more posts (n7.9m+ at the time of observation), yet, the hashtag was not generated until July 2013 (and more popularly adopted in 2014 following the killing

124 Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice

of Michael Brown), thus, employing it as the primary hashtag to search and retrieve posts would have omitted all posts made prior to its popular emergence. Moreover, after reviewing a number of posts using #BlackLivesMatter I observed many posts were addressing the broader contentions of the BLM movement and not exclusively being used to discuss or comment on the death of Martin and/or the contentions associated with his killing. I concluded #TrayvonMartin provided for the most consistent and reliable search term to collect meaningful posts that addressed the subject of investigation and adhered to the objective of the study.

Chronological Observation

I employed a hybrid approach to identify the posts to be collected for qualitative analysis. I did this through a combination of the scroll back method as applied by Brady Robards and Sian Lincoln (2017), and along with digital ethnography approaches of Sarah Pink et al. (2016). From this observational approach I was able to ‘scroll back’ through posts that were made publicly viewable to the platform in reverse-chronological order. This permitted for a close reading of the historical and ongoing discourse that was generated in response to Martin’s killing as inflected through visual social media. The parsing of posts in reverse- chronological order provided a valuable strategy for early identification of resonant and recurrent thematic patterns—and the emergence of key themes and iconographies—alongside the evolution of discursive activity, which informed how I came to identify the nature of posts to be subsequently collected in chronological order. To ascertain what posts should be retrieved for collection, I manually opened individual posts and reviewed the textual commentary provided by the person who posted the content. Additionally, I read subsequent commentary that was generated by other people (in the comments section) as they interacted with the post, and, I reviewed the metadata of posts including the date posted and likes generated.

The rationale for selecting posts was informed by an approach that aimed for a credible description of themes presented in my data, where the study’s findings would be transferrable to other contexts, and where an audit trail has been provided to enable another researcher working with similar data to come to comparable findings if they followed the same approach (for a discussion on what posts were selected and why, see Selection Criteria below). The posts forming the period of

Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice 125

research covers the timespan beginning on 27 March, 2012, (the first post publicly available at the time of collection and following Martin’s killing) until 28 February, 2019, (two days past the seven-year anniversary of his killing on 26 February, 2019, allowing for international time differences to capture commemorative posts made on and about the anniversary date). Using a longitudinal scroll back approach enabled me to track the trajectories of digital images as they emerged in posts (in what could be considered as being their initial or native form e.g. photograph) and note how images were dramatically transformed and remixed (considered as the visual variation of initial images) by people through the blending of visual practices, genres, and forms across time (and whereby such images frequently acted as social commentary in response to subsequent events and unjust killings).

This observational approach enabled me to study the recurrent role images played among digital publics on Instagram in negotiating the boundaries of Martin’s posthumous identity through various interactions of solidarity, antagonisms, contentions, and creative mutability. I observed the temporal precarity associated with Martin’s posthumous identity in that it remained in a state of social transformation operating between different modes of discursive processes, visual variations, and was fought over and rearticulated by multiple social actors. Hence, digital images of Martin operated through processes of emergent tension where subjective meaning and sociopolitical dispositions were continuously being articulated, contested, and negotiated by Instagram users. Necessarily, to better understand the multivocal nature of discursive tensions I remained attentive to what discourses were being generated, when and how, and through which digital images and in relation to other external events. This included discourses that alternated between contentious and commemorative, enduring and ephemeral, and spectacular and mundane. A benefit of this approach was that it avoided the collection of data through a predetermined period focused exclusively on heightened episodes of activity and thus captured a broader understanding of the native context and intricacy of the lived experiences, communicative practices, commemorative rituals and sociopolitical contentions of ordinary people.

Selection Criteria

126 Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice

This study relied on a critical cultural analysis (see section 2.7 Methods and Data Collection) of manually selected posts that either explicitly (in physical form) or symbolically (e.g. in creative representations, through material objects, or in textual reference) depicted Martin and contained the hashtag #TrayvonMartin across a seven-year period (2012-2019). To address the objective of the study and interrogate the ways in which digitally mediated social media images of Martin on Instagram were operationalised, posthumously, by people to perform different functions, I selected posts (1819 images with textual commentary) for qualitative analysis. Posts comprised the following criteria: 1) contained either pre-death portrait photographs or post-mortem photographs of Martin (and alongside others), or a combination of the two; 2) contained digitally mediated variations of pre-death portrait photographs and post-mortem photographs that took the form, for example, of memes, political cartoons, artistic interpretations, images of street art, and embodied protest; 3) included commemorative and/or contentious narratives that emerged as resonant themes; 4) comprised visual narratives and sociocultural markers that blended iconographic genres including activist culture, religious traditions, art history, and Black visual culture; 5) exhibited affective expressions (such as outrage, solidarity, and precarity) that provided a framework in which to understand the affective dimensions of protest; 6) contained contentious (multivocal) discourse (this included language, words, phrases, and symbols that articulated positions of opposition against injustice and articulated shared grievances, identities and objectives that centred on discourses of justice, rights, identity, and morality); 7) performed identity-based discourses of collective/popular identification that spoke to the construction of expressive and cultural, rather than purely instrumental, forms of protest communication to understand how people constituted themselves as (precarious and empowered) actors in the struggle; and 8) employed strategic repertoires of collective action and calls for social and political action (such as calls for people to sign Change.org petitions, wear their “hoodies up”, participate in protests events such as the Million Hoodie March, and to appropriate the hoodie symbol of Martin during social media blackouts).

In addition to the above criteria, a key set of posts I also decided to collect (and for each instance of their emergence and reappropriation across time) were those that featured post-mortem images taken by Diana Smith, a crime scene

Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice 127

technician for the Sanford police department, that depict Martin’s dead body at the crime scene on the night of the murder (for a detailed discussion of these posts, see analysis section 5.2.1 ‘martyred body’). Graphic images of Martin’s lifeless body (not covered with a blanket) were used as evidence during the court trial and were briefly broadcast on 25 June, 2013, by national broadcast media including MSNBC, HLN, and CNN during trial coverage. This visual slippage was subsequently captured by viewers who took snapshots of the coverage using mobile devices, with one person forwarding the content to media outlet Gawker.com which published the graphic image. The image was subsequently picked-up and recirculated by people across social media, generating extensive outrage. Other, less graphic, post-mortem images of Martin’s body (covered by a blanket) were also published by other media outlets, and again were picked-up by people and reposted across social media.

I decided to collect all posts (n238) that featured any or all of these post- mortem images. I did this because these images served as highly contentious sites of sociopolitical discourse and I wanted to understand the divergent stances expressed and actions taken by people regarding debates about the ethics of showing/not showing post-mortem images, sense-making processes, and image creation and sharing practices. For example, this enabled me to study discourses focused on discussing the ethics and implications of different mainstream media, and Instagram users, that chose to disseminate crime scene post-mortem images of Martin. From the discursive practices of people who posted post-mortem images to Instagram, I was able to observe how people engaged in sense-making practices to contemplate the gravity of Martin’s death. Such posts often comprised multivocal conversations that emerged through these images to engage in countering false or incorrect information to articulate the facts of the Martin case, this also brought into being competing and conflicting voices (e.g. pro-Zimmerman) that contested the circumstances of Martin’s death and the nature of his character. And, by studying how post-mortem images were being deployed by people on Instagram, I was able to follow the genealogy and trajectory of that genre of images as they permeated into other digital variations, while simultaneously observing patterns of discourse attached to that genre of images across time.

Post-mortem images served to be a valuable source for identifying how Martin’s innocence was established/contested and for tracing the visual ascension of

128 Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice

his posthumous identity from victimhood to martyrdom as narrativised through peoples’ communicative practices. This is discussed at length in the analysis section in Chapter 4 and 5.

Data Evaluation & Management

While I collected posts that met the aforementioned criteria, to maintain a coherent selection I equally had to make decisions (throughout the process of collection) of the posts that would not be selected for analysis. I focused on collecting posts that were relevant to meet the objective of the research and were in alignment with my study vocabulary that conceptually refers to digitally mediated images as being still and singular frames, as both artefact and artifice for articulating the visual language of protest. Thus, I omitted any multi-image posts and posts that contained GIFs and videos. Additionally, I omitted posts that appropriated the hashtag #TrayvonMartin alongside improper content e.g. marketing material and consumer goods. I also omitted posts that performed cultural trolling or propagandist/mythologising functions. In alignment with the ethical boundaries of my study, I did not collect racist or defamatory content posted by alt-right voices or hate groups that sought to delegitimise or defame Martin’s character. However, I noted multiple posts where pro-Martin supporters reappropriated controversial posts to perform counter-discourse against racist content. I chose to include some of these posts to perform a close reading of how new and contentious discursive practices and iconographies were emerging through acts of communicative resistance.

To comply with the conditions of ethical approval imposed on the study I only collected publicly available posts as data, meaning that people who posted content to Instagram had made the content explicitly accessible for public viewing at the time of collection. At the time of conducting the study, Instagram was an openly accessible platform, which meant that no platform authorisation—neither via means of user sign-in nor agreement to and acceptance of terms of use—was required for me to gain access to the platform itself and to manually collect content posted to Instagram. I selected posts on the basis they exhibited more than one of the above- mentioned features in simultaneity, and I determined it was not essential for posts to address all points of the sampling criteria equally. I did not set selection criteria in advance; rather, I proceeded through an emergent process that began developing

Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice 129

during the exploratory phase when I performed the reverse-chronological scroll back (noting key discursive patterns, themes, tropes, and iconographies), and criteria was necessarily revised continuously in order to accommodate for the discovery of new discursive patterns and visual variations.

During the scroll back process, I encountered a number of technical interruptions to the platform, which required for the data collection process to be completed in seven consecutive sessions occurring between 3 December, 2018, and 28 February, 2019. With this in mind, for each subsequent data collection phase the selection approach remained flexible and observant to what was transpiring within posts across time. This approach adopted a “data thickening” strategy (Latzko-Toth, Bonneau, & Millette, 2017) that facilitated a deeper understandings of nuanced and emergent communicative practices in context.

I proceeded with the data thickening approach by tracing posts in their native contextuality which enabled me to examine posts naturalistically in their indigenous setting (meaning as other platform users would see the same posts), and as opposed to automated or big data approaches that extract social media content from the environment of their emergence, thus, leading to the decontextualisation of the digital traces of posts. I conducted the process with temporal sensitivity whereby the process of data collection was longitudinal in nature and proceeded through a ‘slow process’ that facilitated deep immersion both ‘with’ and ‘in’ the content of posts, thus, permitting for comprehensive understandings and observant readings of posts. This approach enabled for flexibility in selecting important posts through a process of constant comparison (see Dye, et al., 2000; Glaser & Strauss, 1967) that proceeded by making initial observations and identifying preliminary themes in the first phase of data collection. To record and manage the dataset, posts were opened in Instagram, visually recorded as a screenshot and saved as a PNG file, assigned a number and allocated into a designated file. I then recorded the post number and its URL link into an Excel spreadsheet to maintain a coherent link between the post and its metadata; I also recorded initial coding notes within an excel spreadsheet. I proceeded with the second and subsequent data collection phases through a process of theoretical sampling to identify emergent themes and image variations in posts that were purposeful and relevant to the aims of the study. During each phase I iteratively assigned codes to each post, grouped posts into initial thematic categories,

130 Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice

continually refining those themes throughout all stages of data collection by constant comparison until I reached saturation. I then assigned posts into overarching themes and I used those themes to visually conceptualise and organise my data into five key discursive concepts.

For the purpose of presenting my data analysis I established the following five tropes: 1) ‘childhood saint and youthful innocent’; 2) ‘everyday teenager’; 3) ‘Black thug’; 4) ‘martyred body’; and 5) ‘young king’. In the next chapter, I structure the analysis around the first three tropes, and in Chapter 5 the remaining two tropes are discussed accordingly along with the conclusion. To present my analysis I have drawn out particular examples that illustrate how each of the tropes were made manifest in reaction to key events and contentions, and I examined individual’s discursive practices associated with these tropes across the dataset.

Chapter 3: Mediating Trayvon Martin: The Enduring Struggle for Black Social Justice 131

Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter

Warning: Graphic images contained in this chapter and the following chapters.

4.1 INTRODUCTION

“The history of Black liberation movements in the United States could be characterised as a struggle over images as much as it has also been a struggle for rights, for equal access” (hooks, 1995, p. 57).

Images of Black shooting victim Trayvon Martin endure within American visual culture and transnationally. This chapter examines the Martin case study following the framework of digitally mediated martyrdom that I established in Chapter 2, and through a contextual understanding of political martyrdom in America as established in Chapter 3 (see section 3.2) . I do so, here, by conceptualising digitally mediated martyrdom as an operative framework through which digitally mediated images are deployed by activists and ordinary people to perform communicative functions. Applying this framework, this chapter explores how digitally mediated images of

Martin have been operationalised27 by people and activists on Instagram in relation to the “Justice for Trayvon Martin” movement, and, in opposition to pro-Zimmerman and hegemonic discourse, as part of the enduring struggle for Black liberation enacted through the contemporary Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. I position the language of the enduring struggle with what late Black political theorist Cedric J. Robinson (2000) describes as the “Black radical tradition”. The enduring struggle is the collective struggle of rebellion and resistance that is born from history and continues into the present to abolish all forms of oppression; the image of Martin operates as a part of this revolutionary process in Black consciousness and speaks to the past and present political moment. The struggle is fast, in that it is radical; it is

27 I appropriate the concept of the operative image (Farocki, 2004) to contend that digitally mediated images not only perform representational or illustrative functions that reflect social and political realities, but are also discursively ‘operationalised’—as instruments and agents in activist practice, as products and producers of sociopolitical work.

Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter 133

slow, in that it is gradual. The image of Martin struggles for cultural hegemony as part of the long revolution; it is in the image of Martin that we see both the genealogy and the enduring struggle of Black resistance and liberation.

The objective of this explanatory case study was to examine how digitally mediated images of Martin were operationalised in everyday and recurrent visual discursive practices on Instagram, and in ways that permitted and produced new possibilities for the performance of resistance and solidarity. To do this, my study performed a chronological reading of key events following Martin’s killing until the seven-year anniversary of his killing on 26 February, 2019, (see Appendix 1:

Chronology of Key Events). From this reading I identified four key phases28 in the discursive construction and visual transformation of Martin’s identity from victimhood to martyrdom: 1) The killing of Martin and pre-murder trial controversy from 26 February, 2012, to 9 June, 2013; 2) The State of Florida v. George Zimmerman murder trial between 10 June, 2013, to 12 July, 2013; 3) the acquittal of Zimmerman and the establishment of the BLM movement on 13 July, 2013, until 8 August, 2014; and 4) the killing of Black, 18-year-old, Michael Brown by white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson on 9 August, 2014, and the continued struggle until 26 February, 2019.

The chapter is divided into sections to focus on the first of three tropes that emerged as significant themes in my dataset, and I structure and perform my analysis around key manifestations of those tropes. I first explore the trope of ‘childhood saint and youthful innocent’ and how it was invoked to script innocence upon Martin’s posthumous character. Second, I investigate the ways the trope of ‘everyday teenager’ was invoked by people as a form of collective resistance. Third, I discuss how the trope of the ‘Black thug’ is conceptualised in relation to my study, and was mobilised in both pro- and anti-Martin discourse.

28 The four phases I identify are distinct from those outlined by Graeff et al. (2014) (see section 3.4) and encapsulate the lifecycle of the Trayvon Martin story. Importantly, the tropes (as discussed in the analysis of this chapter and in Chapter 5) are mobilised across the dataset in response to various points of contention, memorialisation, media events, and subsequent deaths of other Black victims. The emergence and re-emergence of tropes, then, cut across-the dataset. For example, while some tropes, like the ‘martyred body’ (see section 5.2.1), have a particular point of emergence (in Phase 2) tropes are mobilised recurrently across subsequent phases. These points of discussion are further illuminated in the analysis.

134 Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter

4.2 DATA ANALYSIS

4.2.1 Child Saint and Youthful Innocent “Black boys are really Black men; they have forfeited their innocence from birth” (Yancy, 2017, p. 6).

Critical race theorist George Yancy (2016), who is Black, provides a sobering lens through which to reflect on the ways Black bodies are situated in a racially oppressive and violent history; where Black bodies come into being under a racialised gaze and are socially laden by white projections of presumed guilt already inscribed upon them. This logic speaks directly to a particular theme that emerged in my dataset: the reappropriation and digital remediation of images of Martin on Instagram (by activists and ordinary people) as a way to grant him what he was denied—the essential protections of childhood29 and presumed innocence; of the social right to be seen and understood as ‘just a boy’30. Writing on “racial innocence”, Robin Bernstein (2011) asserts innocence has been historically raced white and operates through cultural systems of white superiority that “links innocence to whiteness through the body of the child” (p. 6). This draws on ideas made manifest in Frantz Fanon’s book Black Skin, White Masks (first published in 1952), and, Ziauddin Sardar writes (in the 2008 edition) “whiteness, Fanon asserts, has become a symbol of purity, of Justice, Truth, and Virginity. It defines what it means to be civilised, modern and human” and “Blackness represents the diametrical opposite: in the collective unconsciousness, it stands for ugliness, sin, darkness, immorality” (Fanon, Markmann, Sardar, & Bhabha, 2008, p. xiii).

In contemporary American popular culture, the concepts of pure innocence and childhood vulnerability are attributed to whiteness, while Black youth are

29 The social category “children” defines a group of individuals who are perceived to be distinct, with essential characteristics including innocence and the need for protection (Haslam, Rothschild, & Ernst, 2000).

30 The term “boy” has been weaponised in white America, historically, as a derogatory practice to deny Black men of their manhood and actualisation of rights; in contrast to Black boys who can never be ‘just boys’. See: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/11/02/417513631/when-boys-cant-be-boys

Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter 135

excluded from these essential qualities. Thus, claims of Martin’s innocence must be realised as being constructed in opposition to regimes of white superiority, and, in the social construction of his posthumous boyhood innocence, Martin’s personhood becomes inscribed and socially constituted as a body that is made to matter by subverting Western aesthetic traditions of civility and Christ-like martyrs (see section 5.2.2 ‘young king’ for a detailed discussion on iconographies of martyrdom).

In this section, I discuss how the trope of ‘child saint and youthful innocent’ was invoked by people as they sought to inscribe innocence upon Martin’s posthumous character by reappropriating family snapshots of Martin into new contexts as personalised posts on Instagram. In doing this, people contributed to remaking and retelling the story of Martin’s humanity. The examples provided in this section illustrate that innocence is a historic and racialised construct that has been preserved for white bodies. In contemporary American culture, the privilege of white innocence operates as a license for racist exploitation by the media—e.g. who gets to be considered as ‘just a boy’ are those deemed worthy of rights and recognition as a citizen; it determines which lives have social value by shaping who is see as human. In mobilising this trope, people discursively repositioned the defining traits of Martin’s posthumous character as ‘pure’ and ‘innocent’, and this was performed through subversive and direct communicative acts that rebutted mainstream media and hegemonic claims that Martin’s appearance was “suspicious”, that he was a “thug” (see section 4.2.3 ‘Black thug’ for a detailed discussion on the use of the thug trope).

People participated in constructing Martin’s boyhood and innocence on Instagram through both commemorative and counter discursive practices in which they reappropriated initial snapshot images of Martin and their digital variations (e.g. memes, juxtaposed images frames, mixed-media artistic responses). For example, people memetically reappropriated initially circulated family snapshots of Martin, depicted in everyday and leisurely moments, as a young child and baby-faced youth as a way to speak through him and appeal to the moral emotions and consciousness of others. This included people posting single images to Instagram and adding commentary that invoked common discursive themes such as “rest in peace baby boy”; “he was just a child”; “he could have been your son, your brother, he could have been you”; “stop killing our children”. This discursive theme focused on

136 Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter

positioning Martin as an innocent boy, someone’s child, a familiar youth; as a boy who was not protected from violent bodily suffering, but a victim of it. This discourse was placed in binary opposition to the use of “man”, which was reserved for use in reference to Zimmerman who, as an adult, was deemed culpable of his actions by pro-Martin supporters. This particularised use of language in referring to Martin as a boy, or child, was deployed as a language of resistance to white oppression and racist discourse, and operationalised as a counter argument in pro- Martin discourse on Instagram to accusations made by Zimmerman, pro-Zimmerman supporters, and peddled by conservative and right-wing media. Such claims sought to frame Martin’s character in highly masculine and physically disturbing terms e.g. a ‘suspicious thug’, thus, Martin was positioned in pro-Zimmerman discourse as presumed guilty not of what he was doing, but presumed guilty for what he will do— the presumed threat of his being Black that allegedly caused Zimmerman to ‘fear for his life’. Thus, Martin’s Black body itself is constituted as criminal, weaponised, and something to be feared, and this inscribing of presumed guilt upon Martin’s posthumous character in pro-Zimmerman discourse reveals a deeply entrenched culture of racial profiling in American culture—one that dates back to racial slavery, colonialism, and was emboldened through Jim Crow systems that saw ordinary citizens engage in vigilantism and lynching31 of Black people on the grounds they were presumed threatening, thus guilty.

While single images of Martin were reappropriated in a multiplicity of Instagram posts shortly after his killing to refute the aforementioned hegemonic claims, I noted the emergence of particularised and personalised practices where individuals creatively participated in countering negative mainstream media stereotypes and defamatory discourse by producing alternative visual narratives; a contemporary practice in internet remix culture. Here, to exercise political and personalised expressions, people created and circulated digital variations on

Instagram by reappropriating existing memetic images32 of Martin. People did this by remixing images and creating juxtaposed compositions to rearticulate the story of

31 For context of how ‘lynch laws’ were weaponised against Black people in America see: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/wellslynchlaw.html

32 Photographs that invite extensive user-created responses, typically in the format of Photoshop-based collages; Shifman, 2014, p. 89.

Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter 137

Martin’s humanity, while simultaneously deploying him as a symbol in new contexts to affirm the precariousness of being Black in America. This genre of image composition is what Shifman (2014) refers to as “reaction Photoshops” (p. 102), where individuals creatively react to memetic images of ordinary people and reappropriate them as frozen moments in time, juxtaposed into new contexts. This particular genre of internet remix culture on Instagram invited memetic responses by people who employed a range of visual compositions to normalise Martin’s identity as ‘innocent’ and ‘non-threatening’, to assert that the circumstances of Martin’s killing were being taken out of context, that his posthumous identity was not being justly portrayed in public discourse, and that he was ‘just a boy’ who was robbed of his future potential.

An example of this discursive practice was made manifest following Martin’s killing, though, became a prominent practice from 2013 onward (a recurrent theme observed across the seven-year dataset) as a way for people to pay tribute to Martin’s memory in ritualised ways. The most notable observance of this practice occurred, annually, during the month of February: on the anniversary of Martin’s birthday (5 February), killing (26 February), and during the observance of Black History Month in America. Here, multiple family snapshots were juxtaposed to commemorate the memory of Martin alongside personalised commentary such as “you are gone, but never forgotten”, “RIP baby boy”, “you should have been celebrating your birthday, but you were racially profiled and killed”, “we won’t forget you”, “you had high hopes, but they were shot down”. Hashtags were comprehensively employed in such posts, with notable ones including #RIPTrayvonMartin, #NoJusticeNoPeace, #Innocent, #Unarmed, #Child, #JusticeForTrayvon. While this genre of posts paid tribute to Martin’s identity and spoke of what he ‘could have become’, people also frequently engaged in the practice of countering misinformation and defamatory content by providing commentary in their post to educate others of the facts and circumstances of Martin’s life and killing, thus, contributing to the memorialisation and sustainment of pro-Martin discourse on Instagram.

The most significant instance of this genre of reaction Photoshops in my dataset was the juxtaposition of victims who have died from unjust killings: the image of Martin alongside the image of Emmett Till. This included, initially, the juxtaposition of pre-death images of the two individuals and, later (see section 5.2.1

138 Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter

‘martyred body’ for discussion), the juxtaposition of post-mortem images. I note the practice of juxtaposing pre-death images was not limited to the framing of Martin and Till, rather it became a recurrent practice observed in response to subsequent other Black victims of brutality, notably beginning with 17-year-old Jordan Davis who was killed in November 2012 (see Appendix 1: Chronology of Events) and extended as an observed practice in response to the killing of Michael Brown in 2014, and continues in place for multiple other victims. I also note the practice of juxtaposing pre-death images of Martin also brought back into being other past victims of injustice, notably 22-year-old Oscar Grant who was shot and killed by a white police officer in 2009.

I focus my discussion on the juxtaposition of pre-death images that feature Martin and Till (see Figure 4.1) as this genre of reaction Photoshops (Shifman, 2014) served as key a discursive practice for people to support and amplify the claims of Martin’s innocence and to historically bridge past with present injustices. I do this here through a focus on a particular genre of images of Martin that were extensively mobilised in this practice: the family snapshot of Martin smiling and wearing a red Hollister T-shirt, and the image of Martin wearing a hoodie. The emergence of this particular practice on Instagram appeared in my dataset as early as 20 March, 2012, which I interpret as a public reaction to mainstream media narratives (contrasting the unjust killings of Martin and Till) that materialised days prior on 17 March (see Appendix 1: Chronology of Events), which then spread to blogs and entered into broader public discourse from 20 March onward.

The juxtaposition on Instagram of Martin’s image with Till’s image was a participatory driven and memetic practice where people engaged in the discursive construction of injustice framing. A common discursive theme associated with these posts referred to Martin as “the present-day Emmett Till” though which people asserted that Martin was one of many, and historic, young Black victims who have suffered at the hands of brutal and unjust violence, and who are denied the essential protections of childhood. They did this by reappropriating the snapshot of Martin smiling (in its initial colour format), wearing a red Hollister T-shirt, alongside a black and white image of Till, smiling, wearing a white-collar shirt and black tie. Commentary frequently associated with these posts expressed the visual similarities between the young and innocent appearances of Martin and Till, and articulated

Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter 139

popular belief that both individuals were racially profiled and killed on the basis of their Blackness.

Another prominent injustice frame juxtaposed the image of Martin wearing a hoodie (a fashion accessory of contemporary American youth culture) alongside an image of Till wearing a straw hat (a common fashion accessory of 1950s American culture). People deployed the image in posts to engage in call out culture against negative racial stereotyping, and expressed that clothing should not be weaponised to position Martin’s character as suspicious. The practice of juxtaposing digital images of Martin and Till was not confided to Instagram, however. I noted multiple instances where people deployed juxtaposed images offline and in material and embodied performances. For example, digital images of Martin and Till were recurrently reappropriated and remediated on protest placards and in street murals, which were then captured by people on mobile technologies and recirculated online, and on Instagram as digital posts.

Figure 4.1. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured a black and white image macro (a genre of internet meme) juxtaposing the images of Emmett Till (left) and Trayvon Martin (right) with overlaid text reading “58 years apart same struggle”. It was retrieved from Instagram.

On Instagram, the initial emergence of posts featuring the juxtaposed images did not appear as having undergone any significant digital modifications, other than where images of Martin, initially in colour format, were modified as black and white frames to match the visual aesthetics of Till’s 1950s black and white image. Yet, the practice of digitally reappropriating initial images was quickly substituted for more creative forms of politicised expressions and artistic practices of contemporary internet meme culture. Here, people began to frequently overlay images of Martin and Till with text, a practice that Shifman (2014) refers to as “image macros” (pp. 110-111), where digital variations were created and shared as posts with the intent for interpersonal communication and political participation.

This genre of internet meme enabled people to criticise historic and ongoing injustices in the US in more personalised and affective ways. One prominent image macro featured the juxtaposed images of Martin and Till and the overlaid text read “58 years apart, same struggle” (see Figure 4.1). This claim is illustrative of a

140 Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter

collective consciousness among Black Americans in their historic and enduring struggle for civil rights, and speaks directly to the popular sentiment (evident in my dataset among Black Instagram users) that presumed innocence, protections of childhood, and the delivery of justice, is a privilege granted, primarily, to white citizens. This sentiment, while evident in the immediate aftermath of Martin’s killing, became a recurrent trope in the years following his killing. For example, the trope was operationalised on Instagram, in multiple contexts, through the use of politicised memes as a platform to call out instances of mainstream media bias, white privilege, and the presumed innocence of white offenders. Individuals and activist groups did this by systematically juxtaposing images of white offenders alongside Martin and overlaying the images with binary text to make explicit claims about the stark contrast in sociopolitical realities and contradictory standards of media representation for Black and white Americans. Here, I privilege space to discuss four particular examples of politicised image macros, as demonstrated in 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2019, and I have done so on the basis of their significance, of the emotional and contentious reactions they engendered on Instagram, and because they demonstrate that memetic media often take on new functions and continue in popular discourse on Instagram in new and subversive ways.

Figure 4.2. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured a coloured image macro (a genre of internet meme) juxtaposing the images of Dylann Roof (left) and Trayvon Martin (right) with overlaid text reading “America be like: He was a good kid, he was A thug”. It was retrieved from Instagram.

On 17 June, 2015, 21-year-old white supremacist, Dylann Roof, shot and killed nine Black Americans during an evening prayer service at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina. In mainstream media reporting Roof was referred to as “a quiet, shy boy who mostly kept to himself. He didn’t get into trouble” (Borden, Horowitz & Markon, 2015); a “sweet kid” and “painfully shy” loner (Calabrese & Fieldstadt, 2015). Roof was not constituted in mainstream media as a terrorist in early coverage, rather, he was pathologised as a victim; portrayed as a “good kid” who was drawn into “internet evil” (Norton, 2015). In counter-discourse, pro-Martin supporters created and operationalised memes (in the form of image macros) to engage in media backlash

Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter 141

through which people expressed their outrage over Roof’s white privilege, and the diverging stances in the media portrayals of Roof as a “good kid” and Martin as “a thug”. One dominant image macro (see Figure 4.2) juxtaposed a mugshot of Roof, expressionless and wearing his orange prison uniform, alongside the image of Martin, smiling and wearing the red Hollister T-shirt, the overlaid text running across the top of both images read “America be like” with text running along the bottom of Roof’s image reading “He was a good kid”, while the text running along the bottom of Martin’s image read “He was a thug”.

Commentary of pro-Martin supporters associated with such posts engaged in direct expressions of outrage and mistrust of mainstream media, and people circulated the image macros as a means to call out media on their biased reporting. For example, popular sentiment took aim at particular mainstream media, including Fox News, for not smearing the reputation of Roof, as had been the case with Martin, and people highlighted the bias of mainstream media in its portrayal of Roof as a young innocent who had lost his way. Here, people berated mainstream media for its failure to portray Roof as a white supremist and terrorist, and heavily criticised mainstream media that represented Roof as a victim of psychological corruption. People made their discontent evident through popular expressions such as “a young white man kills innocent Black people and gets called a ‘good kid’, while an innocent Black youth gets killed and called ‘a thug’”, “in America, if you are white, you can’t do anything wrong”, “white privilege must be nice”, and notable hashtags employed in such posts included #WhitePrivilege, #AmeriKKKa, and #BlackLivesMatter. Expressions such as these articulate the idea that people with Black and brown bodies are often represented in mainstream American media discourses as terrorists and thugs who pose a threat to society, while people with white bodies are rarely given such labels because they are born with the privilege of presumed innocence.

Figure 4.3. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured a coloured image macro (a genre of internet meme) juxtaposing the images of Brock Allen Turner (left) and Trayvon Martin (right) with overlaid text reading “These are the first photos released by the media. The media needs to be held accountable to a higher standard”. It was retrieved from Instagram.

142 Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter

In March 2016, a heightened period of controversy emerged on Instagram during and in the aftermath of what was commonly referred to in mainstream media discourse as “the Stanford rape case”. Formally, the criminal case is known as the People v. Brock Allen Turner trial, which saw former Stanford University student and swim team member, Brock Allen Turner, sentenced to six months in jail on 14 March, 2016, for sexually assaulting an intoxicated and unconscious 22-year old woman on 18 January, 2015. In growing frustration of what pro-Martin supporters perceived as media bias and reliance on menacing stereotypes of Black victims, people operationalised counter memes on Instagram to highlight popular sentiment. Here, people asserted that if Turner had been Black the media would have used a mug shot to portray him, though, because he is white his reputation was privileged protection through the appropriation of his Stanford yearbook image. Despite the fact a mugshot of Turner had been created upon his arrest in January 2015, it was withheld by authorities from the media and public until after the trial in 2016; many pro-Martin supporters employed these facts in the commentary of memes to illustrate their claims of the stark contrast in racial disparities within the American justice system. While mainstream media did not have access to Turner’s mugshot it subsequently ran alternative images, notably Turner’s yearbook image (smiling and wearing a suit, shirt, and tie) as well as other images showing him in action as a competitive swimmer, here, Turner was frequently portrayed in the conservative media as an “all American college athlete”. Heavy criticisms were recurrently expressed by pro-Martin supporters on Instagram through politicised image macros that juxtaposed Turner’s yearbook image alongside Martin’s hoodie image. This provided people with a platform to explicitly criticise what they deemed as white privilege, institutionalised racism, and double standards within the American mainstream media system.

One central image macro (see Figure 4.3) in this debate juxtaposed the yearbook image of Turner depicted as the aestheticised, well-dressed, college student alongside the hoodie image of Martin. The overlaid text running across the top of the two images reads “These are the first photos released by the media”, with the text running across the bottom reading “The media needs to be held accountable to a higher standard”. Then, directly overlaid on the images of Turner and Martin, respectively, the text reads “I was caught in the act of raping an unconscious woman”

Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter 143

and “I was murdered after buying snacks from the store”. People operationalised this image macro incorporating hashtags such as #WhiteMalePrivilege and #BlackLivesMatter as a platform to discuss how the mainstream media perform image brokering in order to shape public perceptions of white innocent versus Black guilty narratives.

This builds on the historic and ongoing narrative of public distrust in the mainstream media among Black Americans, and which is made manifest in my dataset. Other notable examples of this sentiment have been observed in the usage of the #IfTheyGunnedMeDown hashtag (see Gross, 2017) which was mobilised in the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown in 2014. This was a result of backlash aimed at mainstream media over the decision to publish an image of Brown (taken from his Facebook page) showing him posing in a sleeveless Nike sports shirt and denim jeans, while making the hand gesture of a peace sign, rather than publishing the image of Brown dressed in academic attire at his college graduation. This led to defamatory allegations made against Brown’s character as a thug, who was making ‘gang signs’, and led to people on social media commenting on the similarities between how images were appropriated of Martin in mainstream media discourse. In a similar genre to the aforementioned image macros from my case study, #IfTheyGunnedMeDown became a memetic social media campaign where people tagged juxtaposed images of themselves in a positive/negative frame followed by the rhetorical question: “what picture would the media use to represent me?”.

Figure 4.4. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured a coloured image macro (a genre of internet meme) juxtaposing the images of Emmett Till (top left), Trayvon Martin (top centre), Tamir Rice (top right), Jordan Davis (bottom left), Mike Brown (bottom centre), and Brett Kavanaugh (bottom right) with overlaid text reading “Not a boy. He was just a boy”. It was retrieved from Instagram.

Controversy emerged on Instagram among pro-Martin supporters in September 2018 when a series of memes and political cartoons were operationalised in demonstration of, and in opposition to, American President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. The social media campaign #StopKavanaugh was launched after Kavanaugh was accused of committing sexual assault during his high school years, though which the discourse “boys will be boys”

144 Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter

was deployed by republicans and Kavanaugh supporters to seek reproach for his ‘misguided teenage behaviour’. On Instagram a central image macro emerged (see Figure 4.4) that juxtaposes six profile images (three on top, three on bottom), with five images featuring killed Black youths: Martin, Till, Tamir Rice (top row, from left), and Brown and Jordan Davis, alongside a current profile image of Kavanaugh (bottom row, from left). Each of the profile images displays the names of those represented written underneath, and across the middle of each of the images of the five Black youths a white label with red text overlaid reading “Not a boy” and on Kavanaugh’s image the label read “He was just a boy”.

Pro-Martin supporters reappropriated and repoliticised the image and name of Martin, alongside other unjust victims, as an intersectional injustice symbol through which people criticised Kavanaugh’s hostile record on racial equality and gun laws, and subverted the hegemonic discourse of white male politicians who sought to camouflage Kavanaugh’s past conduct as a justifiable episode of boyhood behaviour. Central to the contentions were hashtags including #WhitePrivilege, #Racism, #Inequality. Pro-Martin discourse took aim at the political hierarchy of the American justice system in its unequal imparting of power, by presumptive innocence, to protect privileged white men like Kavanaugh (even when guilty of grave harm), while Black boys and innocent victims, like Martin, are denied justice by presumptive guilt and are posthumously dehumanised by claims of personal responsibility and accountability made upon their character.

Figure 4.5. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured a black and white image macro (a genre of internet meme) of Trayvon Martin with overlaid text in red reading “Executed: An American boy”. It was retrieved from Instagram.

Backlash emerged on social media during Black History Month in February, 2019, when Esquire magazine, a general interest men’s publication, ran a feature story on what it is like to grow up in contemporary America as a teenager from different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds; the magazine chose Ryan Morgan, a white 17-year-old from Wisconsin, as the central focus of the story. Esquire selected Morgan, white, masculine, and heterosexual, as the representative face of contemporary American youth, and in doing so presented the editorial

Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter 145

viewpoint that ahead of bodies that are Black, brown, female or LGBTQ+, the story of a white boy constitutes as mattering more. On the magazine cover, a portrait image depicts Morgan sitting on his bed in a familiar scene of a middle-class bedroom, he is dressed in jeans, white sneakers, a checked shirt and wears a hoodie underneath. Overlaid on the cover image the headline reads “An American Boy”, the subtext reads “What it’s like to grow up white, middle class, and male in the era of social media, school shootings, toxic masculinity, #MeToo, and a divided country”.

Esquire received extensive criticism on social media over the decision to run a ‘white boy’ on its cover during Black History Month; the same month that marked both the seven-year anniversary of Martin’s killing and what would have been his 24th birthday. On Instagram, pro-Martin supporters circulated a remade, counter, version of Esquire’s cover (see Figure 4.5), it features the black and white hoodie image of Martin with red text overlaid at the top of the cover reading “Executed” and at the bottom “An American Boy”, with the subtext “What it’s like to die for being Black and male and end up a hashtag in the age of white-controlled media, legally sanctioned murder and an indifferent country”. The remade cover invited memetic responses of creative resistance by people who directed their outrage at Esquire by posting the content alongside commentary such as “There, @esquire. I fixed it for you”, “There’s a difference between being insensitive and just not giving a damn”, followed by hashtags including #TrayvonMartin, #BlackLivesMatter, #BlackHistoryMonth, and #ToneDeafMedia.

Another post that circulated was a screenshot of a post made on Twitter by American musician Mikel Jollett (with 221K Twitter followers), the text of the post read “Hey @Esquire, Trayvon Martin was also 17. He also grew up in the age of social media. He also liked video games and sports and had the right to make some mistakes. Instead of a magazine cover, he got a funeral. We know about Ryan's experience. We need to understand Trayvon’s”, and at the bottom of the post the cover image of Morgan is juxtaposed alongside the image of Martin, smiling, wearing his red Hollister T-shirt. People operationalised these posts as a modality to express their distrust of American media and to challenge hegemonic ideas over white, male, dominant representation of what constitutes American citizenship and humanity.

146 Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter

These practices can be understood as what Kraidy (2016) refers to as “creative insurgency” where pro-Martin supporters fuse existing visual materials to craft new meanings onto recognisable symbols, and which contributes to an archive of user generated protest materials that are intended for broad circulation in which to achieve social visibility and political attention. These digital variations, circulated as posts, afforded pro-Martin supporters the ability to participate in democratic political expression on Instagram. People did this by operationalising the content in direct and subversive ways through which they expressed discontent over the historic privilege granted to white American boys—boys who are afforded the protections of childhood and are allowed to grow up confused and to make mistakes. In contrast, pro-Martin supporters called to attention the fact Black bodies, primarily young, continue to be dehumanised in the media and are denied the same humanity; of the right for their stories to be told, for their lived experiences to be realised as mattering. Thus, this speaks to the popular contention (among Black Instagram users in my dataset) of the pervasive and institutionalised racism in American media that renders invisible the humanity of Black life, and in doing so denies Black youth rights to equal representations, as recognised citizens. It speaks directly to the indifference of mainstream media to represent the lived experiences of many young Black Americans, who are stigmatised and grow up in a perpetual state of fear of being racially profiled, and potentially killed, on the basis of their skin colour.

4.2.2 Everyday Teenager The previous section demonstrated how the trope of ‘child saint and youthful innocent’ was operationalised as a platform to claim innocence for Martin and speak out against issues of institutionalised racism and white privilege. This section focuses its discussion on the ways the trope of ‘everyday teenager’ was invoked by activists and people on Instagram as a form of collective resistance. Here, I discuss how the trope was mobilised through the hoodie as a socially malleable and hybridised artefact for collective identification and counterculture. I demonstrate this through observed instances that illustrate the ways in which the hoodie was operationalised to perform resistance against racial stereotyping, to challenge the hegemony of the criminal justice system, and as an intersectional identifier in other social justice campaigns. In my analysis, I conceive the notion of collective resistance though the

Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter 147

concept of collective identification, and I understand collective identification as not being rooted in pre-existing categories of social identification. Rather, I recognise the ‘collective’ as being constructed as part of an “emergent and evolving” process (Snow, 2001, p. 3) that operates through complex processes of social negotiation and orientation, and comes into being in relation to dynamic social protest events.

To conceive how these dynamic processes transpire and find form in the hoodie, I followed Willems (2019, p. 7) approach and acknowledged the intersectional processes, and continuum between the material circulation of digital content and the digital remediation of bodies and objects as occurring, increasingly, through socially mediated processes that transverse digital and physical spaces. As an interesting point of contrast between my case studies, I note that while the portrait image of Khaled Said (see Chapter 2 for discussion) came to be the dominant image to infer his identity as an ‘ordinary Egyptian youth’, and which also depicted Said wearing a light grey hoodie, I identify that Said’s wearing of the hoodie did not operate as a collective signifier of injustice, rather, it was the resonant symbolism that his image presented to other ‘ordinary’ Egyptian citizens. In the context of Martin, I identified that the hoodie attained social, political, and cultural currency when it was put into use in particular contexts, and where specific cultures of use were associated with it. This is illustrative of a particular culture of sociopolitical activism that is particularly associated with the American context.

In the sections that follow, I examine how the hoodie operated on Instagram as a material signifier that was both connected to, and abstracted from, the corporeal body of Martin. And I show how the hoodie was appropriated as a popular symbol in the collective struggle for social justice. I demonstrate how the hoodie functioned as a discursive device through which people made identity claims about Martin’s ‘authentic’ identity as an ‘ordinary youth’ who was unjustly profiled. Moreover, how people operationalised the hoodie as a strategic protest resource through which symbolic acts of identification, solidarity, and direct repertoires of resistance to racial injustice were made manifest. Following Martin’s killing, the hoodie became an omnipresent symbol of embodied and expressive forms of social, political, and cultural protest; it was worn by people in street demonstrations and during court proceedings by the Martin family’s legal team, it was appropriated extensively within everyday and formal artistic works, adopted by people as a protest avatar on

148 Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter

social media, became a central representation in activist expression, and was appropriated in conjunction with slogans and hashtags such as “I am Trayvon Martin” and #WeAreAllTrayvonMartin. Drawing from Hall’s (1992) definition of what constitutes an example of “good Black popular culture” (p. 28), here, I consider how the hoodie provided a popular canvas for mobilising a national political conversation about race, racial profiling, and gun laws in America. I do this through an examination of the ways the hoodie was appropriated on Instagram as a dialectical mechanism for connections to lived experiences, memories, cultural traditions, and expressivity to local tragedies and contexts, as well as to hopes and aspirations, which were made manifest through everyday communicative practices and experiences of ‘ordinary’ people, like Martin.

In the sections that follow I demonstrate resonant examples of how the hoodie was comprehended in its contemporary and contextual association with the killing of Martin. However, before I do that I will first, and briefly, summarise the historical significance and long held visual contradictions of the hooded garb to contextualise how it has emerged as a symbol of contemporary counterculture. Dating back to medieval times, the hood provided a means to conceal one’s identity and became associated with criminality, for instance with Robin Hood, though, it was also associated with monastic attire (known as cowls); in both ancient and contemporary religious culture, the hooded garb holds significance as a symbol of faith and affiliation; yet, removed from it religious context, it has also functioned as official regalia of the Ku Klux Klan in twentieth century American culture. In twenty-first century American material culture, the hooded sweatshirt entered into production in the 1930s by American clothing manufacturer, Champion (then called Knickerbocker Knitting Company), which produced the hoodie for practical use as sportswear. In the 1970s the clothing was embraced as fashionable style within hip- hop, skateboard, graffiti artistry, and urban street culture, and began to be negatively associated with hoodlum, thus, associated identification with the hoodie also began to invite social criticisms and increased profiling by police.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the culture of the hoodie became interwoven with subcultures of rebellion and resistance to mainstream culture. In current American culture, hoodies have been appropriated in a multiplicity of fashion genres and adopted—across the ethnic and social spectrum—as a popular form of everyday

Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter 149

attire. Though, the hoodie is a cultural identifier most closely associated with Black Americans, and has also become a stigmatised target of racism (Grinberg, 2012). Thus, the image of Martin wearing a hoodie invites a social recognition of the demonisation of countless Black youth who are stereotyped as they walk in urban streets wearing the hoodie. Here, the image of the hoodie symbolises that Martin’s killing is not an isolated incident, rather, it points to the historic and enduring precariousness of being Black and young in America, and where Black youths can be, and are, racially profiled and killed on the basis of their ‘suspicion’.

The Hoodie Selfie: Performing Everyday Resistance

Figure 4.6. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It was a selfie image showing a Black male youth wearing a light grey hoodie (with the hood up) with the words “I am Trayvon Martin” embossed. It was retrieved from Instagram.

Activists, celebrities, political figures, and ordinary people performed their resistance to the debate that Martin’s Black ‘hooded’ body was suspicious by transforming the hoodie into a counter narrative of solidarity, identification, and collective resistance. For example, the appropriation of Martin’s hooded selfie image in social justice campaigns engendered forms of embodied and symbolic protest in which people across America, and transnationally, began imitating Martin’s selfie by taking images of themselves wearing a hoodie and commenting alongside the image online “I am Trayvon Martin” (see Figure 4.6). Across American cities activists and activist organisations used social media to call upon people to participate in protest demonstrations including Million Hoodie marches, among others. People responded to the call; they wore hoodies, carried Skittles and protest placards saying “we are all Trayvon Martin” and “we want justice”. Here people documented their participation in protests by taking images of the demonstrations and posting selfies to social media.

On Instagram I observed how people operationalised posts of this nature as a method for communicating and coordinating protest events, sharing campaign information, and organising activities. For example, I noted a number of posts where

150 Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter

people directed others to sign online petitions, notably the Change.org campaign calling for Zimmerman's prosecution. I observed how people used the comments section of posts to inform others of practical protest information including appropriate forms of protest attire to wear, and by confirming times, locations, and transport options to attend protests, some also supported others by offering car pool options. Such posts also served as mechanisms for people to self-narrate the details of Martin’s killing and to inform others of the facts of the case. Here, I noted the emergence of personalised counter narratives that took aim against racist, defamatory, and false information; people also used the comments section to delegitimise conservative media bias, and to bridge historical acts of violence committed against Black people with present injustices. A trend that also emerged in such posts on Instagram in late March 2012 (and continued across the dataset) was the appropriation of quotes, name tags, and digital images of past prominent Black figures, activists, and artists, notably Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Malcom X, Tupac Shakur, Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin, and W. E. B. Du Bois, among others. Here, people employed the names, quotes, and digital images of these figures alongside their own personalised commentary in posts as way to stimulate collective consciousness of the need to continue the historic resistance against racism and police brutality in America.

Calls to action were echoed across social media platforms as prominent individuals and activists began calling for others to wear their “hoodies up” and post selfies of themselves to show support of the Justice For Trayvon movement. Celebrities and sports figures, including Florida-based National Basketball Association team Miami Heat, played a key role in generating awareness and support for the movement in the weeks that followed Martin’s killing. For example, on 23

March, 2012, Miami Heat player LeBron James posted to his Twitter33 account an image of the team posed together, wearing their hoodies up, heads bowed, and hands in the pockets of their hoodies. The post was tagged with #WeAreTrayvonMartin #Hoodies, #Stereotyped and #WeWantJustice. The post received extensive

33 The image in LeBron James’ Twitter post can be accessed here: https://bit.ly/3bXKzSg

Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter 151

engagement (n11k retweets) and was screen captured by other pro-Martin supporters and then cross posted to Instagram.

On Instagram, the practice of wearing a hoodie, calling upon others to do the same, and to mobilise in the streets became a memetic practice that formed an important cog in the development of shaping communicative practices and performances of creative forms of dissent and solidarity. Here I examine how the memetic practice emerged on Instagram as a way for people to highlight the racial profiling that young Black males face every day, and to perform political action; I refer to this as the ‘hoodie selfie’. The hoodie selfie can be understood as what Nikunen (2019a, p. 155) describes as “selfie activism”, which, she contends, is a process that is “connected and shaped by social practices and mediated materialities” and operates on both a discursive and symbolic level as a means through which people enact political participation, representation, and citizenship. In this way the hoodie selfie can be conceptualised as a collective identifier that operated through social practices and the affordances of technology-enabled forms of “connective action” (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012).

The Hoodie selfie combined with Skittles and iced-tea as other protest symbols

Figure 4.7. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It was a selfie image showing a Black youth (left) wearing a dark hoodie (with the hood up), juxtaposed with an image of the “Hoodie March for Trayvon Martin” poster (top right), together with an image of two bags of Skittles and a can of Arizona iced-tea (bottom right). It was retrieved from Instagram.

The hoodie selfie emerged on Instagram in late March of 2012 when people began posting images of themselves, hooded, with heads bowed down, wearing a sombre expression and attached the claimed “I am Trayvon Martin” alongside slogans and tags including “we want justice” and #JusticeForTrayvon in the comments section of the post. A common feature shared among a multiplicity of posts was the appropriation of Skittles34 and iced-tea as other protest symbols though

34 Skittles are small, round, fruit-flavoured, chewable, candies that are popular in America and other countries, and are widely recognised in conjunction with the marketing slogan “Taste the Rainbow”.

152 Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter

which people made embodied claims of Martin’s innocence and unarmed state (see Figure 4.7). Here, people posted images of themselves, hooded, holding Skittles and iced-tea in their hands, as Martin did on the night of his killing, they fixed empty Skittles packets across their mouths, performed symbolic rituals by pouring iced-tea and Skittles onto the ground, appropriated Skittles in works of art, created and circulated internet memes labelling Skittles and iced-tea as “Not a Weapon”, and attached Skittles to protest signs. In this way the memetic practice of the hoodie selfie converged with other everyday objects that became socially constructed, and made meaningful, as cultural symbols of tragedy, affective identification, and racial contention. People enacted creative insurgency by reappropriating the hoodie, Skittles, and iced-tea from the material culture of crime scene evidence and into artefactual testimonies of embodied and symbolic forms of protest that came to represent the systemic culture of racial violence in America. Such practices demonstrate the ways in which people transformed everyday objects—from the banal into the spectacular—through mediated and ritualised actions (Couldry, 2003, p. 51); whereby objects became popular symbols of identification in response to contentions events. Moreover, it reveals that the remnants of Martin’s killing extend beyond his corporeal body and image, and into other objects that were operationalised and habitually ritualised as emotional constructs. Or, as Jasper (2018) calls “affective commitments” that endured as people recurrently interpreted and imagined lived experiences of injustice, for which they themselves may have already experienced, or, could one day experience.

The aforementioned practices were popular among Black users on Instagram and featured men, women, youth, and children—from across different social, political, economic, and geographic areas—who performed their social identification with Martin as an ‘everyday teenager’, who could have been them in an everyday context. Though, the practice was not limited to Black Instagram users; non-Black pro-Martin supporters recurrently performed “political solidarity” (Nikunen, 2019b, p. 35) through hoodie selfies. However, white protestors, acknowledging their position of white privilege, performed solidarity action in ways that recognised social differences and historic racial inequalities in America. Here, non-Black pro-Martin

Skittles have also been appropriated in other social movements as a symbol of solidarity e.g. by LGBTQ+ groups and individuals.

Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter 153

supporters politically aligned themselves as allies in the collective struggle against social injustice by giving legitimacy to claims that Black youths are a vulnerable population that is systematically and habitually exposed to every day injustices in America. This demonstrates how the hoodie selfie became a digitally mediated discursive mechanism—as an artefact of social orientation and interaction—through which dispersed and diverse (racially and culturally) individuals mobilised around a popular form of activist expression, and which permitted the performance of collective resistance through a shared language of contention and affective identification.

Other practices revealed how Black protestors operationalised hoodie selfies as forms of political participation to highlight the racial dimensions of citizenship. For example, they employed the hoodie selfie as a modality through which they spoke out against the ways in which Black people, particularly young males, are forced to justify their presence in public space and are socially scrutinised and profiled in ways that ‘normalised’ white people do not endure in America. Here the phrase “I am Trayvon Martin” was posed with the question “Do I look suspicious?” in recurrent and juxtaposed expressions through which people communicated their fears of race-related discrimination and violence, emphasised their shared condition of precarity as a politically induced condition, and collectively imagined their vulnerability to potential brutal injustice as racialised citizens.

Here discursive claims found form in expressions of collective identification and common practices through which shared grievances, feelings of injustice, emotions and agency were necessarily interwoven. For example, fear-based narratives that spoke to presumed and personified threat were orchestrated in hoodie selfies on Instagram through slogans including “I am Trayvon Martin”, “am I next?”, “we are all Trayvon Martin” and “who is next?”. These socialised and personalised expressions illustrate how digitally mediated practices operate as interactive frames that bring into being dispersed individuals who coalesce around shared frames of recognition through which they contribute to the construction and the constitution of the collective ‘we’. Collective identification operates as a fundamental agent for efficacious social mobilisation and action (Simon & Klandermans, 2001). For example, the use of pronouns such as ‘I’, ‘we’ and ‘who’ speak to what Melucci (1996) describes as the constructive dimensions of collective action through which

154 Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter

individuals make sense of lived experiences and give meaning to their action by identifying a relational belonging to part of a community; here, as a cultural group rooted in a shared and imagined social condition that connects individuals as part of a collective.

Figure 4.8. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured black and white hoodie images that were appropriated by people on social media as a protest avatar. It was retrieved from Instagram.

In other counter-discursive forms of protest on Instagram, the digitally mediated symbol of the hoodie was adopted by people as a way to engage in performative politics in response to contentious events. One prominent example of this was observed on the eve of the State of Florida v. George Zimmerman murder trial verdict on 12 July, 2013, when a widespread blackout campaign was launched (also across multiple social media platforms). Promoted with the tag #Blackout the campaigned called upon people to blackout their profile picture until after the trial verdict in a display of support for Martin. People responded by adopting stark black squares, though, the most prominent strategy adopted on Instagram were profile image memes incorporating the hooded silhouette of Martin’s selfie portrait and black and white silhouette graphics of the hoodie profile, with the phrase “Justice for Trayvon” and tag #JusticeForTrayvon recurrently overlaid (see Figure 4.8). Posts of this nature frequently invited expressions of solidarity and calls for justice to be delivered. Some people also commented they would wear “all black” on the day of the verdict in a sign of solidarity.

People also participated in calling for action by appealing to others to join the campaign and blackout their profile avatars. The social media practice of adopting digitally mediated images and symbols of social movements in place of one’s own profile picture has been described by Gerbaudo (2015) as “protest avatars”. In the case of the “Justice For Trayvon” movement the adoption of the digitally mediated hoodie symbol as a protest avatar can be conceptualised as an emergent manifestation and “memetic signifier” (Gerbaudo, 2015) of collective identification, which brought into being dispersed individuals who imagined their sense of self as belonging to, and as actors of, the collective movement. Here people substituted embodied forms of hoodie protests by utilising the affordances of Instagram to

Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter 155

perform digitally mediated self-presentation as a means to construct their collective identity. Important to note here is that it was both the image and name of Martin that individuals subsumed to construct their collective identity, notably, when they declared themselves as “I am Trayvon Martin” and “we are all Trayvon Martin”.

In these performative acts people can be considered as subsuming their identity through memetic signifiers that stand in for Martin; such acts reverse the experience of individualisation through means of collective transformation. This illustrates how digitally mediated practices contribute to the persistence of collective signifiers and aids in the sustainment of the protest movement across time, and in multiple spaces (from physical to digital). Here, I conceptualise the interactive, and visually prioritised, features of Instagram as affording a connective space where people were able to claim the right to appear to one another as participants in a collective movement in what Mirzoeff (2018) refers to as digital co-presence. Here, digital co-presence afforded people on Instagram the ability to bridge physical, social, and digital spaces, and permitted opportunities for sustained engagement, politicised performances and counter-discursive practices. Importantly, such practices reveal the way pro-Martin supporters refused the erasure and disposability of Martin’s Black body; in doing so they created new forms of visuality that sought to redress and reconfigure relations of politics and power by asserting the primacy of their own bodies as visual markers of violation as part of a broader discourse.

The Hoodie as an Intersectional Symbol

Beyond its appropriation in the Justice For Trayvon Movement, the hoodie appears as an intersectional signifier of injustice and solidarity in response to multiple contentious events, and in other social justice campaigns in America. For example one internet meme emerged on Instagram in the form of an image macro in April 2012 as a call to action to repeal Stand Your Ground Laws in Florida and other American states. The image macro appropriated a side-on profile graphic of the hoodie with text overlaid reading “Stand Our Ground” and “Hoodies Up”. The image macro re-emerged in mid-July 2013 in response to Zimmerman’s not guilty verdict and when activist organisations including the Dream Defenders and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People drafted a set of policy principals called “Trayvon’s Law”, and the Trayvon Martin Foundation called on legislatures to

156 Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter

implement the “Trayvon Martin Act”. Notably in 2013, following the trial verdict, the hoodie became formally associated as a symbol of the BLM movement and this saw the continuation of hoodie selfies emerge on Instagram co-tagged with #BlackLivesMatter. In material form the hoodie was worn with the BLM logo as an official attire of protest and solidarity.

In 2016, the hoodie emerged in popular media culture when Black actor Mike Colter, appearing as Marvel’s first Black superhero, performed as Luke Cage in the Marvel/Netflix series with the same name wearing a bullet proof hoodie as homage to Martin (see Francisco, 2018). Subsequently, images of Colter wearing the hoodie were widely shared and circulated on Instagram. In 2017, digital variations of Martin’s image and hoodie were invoked by people on Instagram to perform political action in solidarity with the #TakeAKnee protest movement initiated by Colin Kaepernick a, Black, National Football League player. One prominent example posted to Instagram is an illustration called “Dub Thee”35 by the artist, Prince Eric Nichols, which features a masculine hooded figure (signifying Martin) with a crown floating above his head amid a gold sun disk (which evokes the image of the sun god of Ancient Egypt, Ra, considered King of the Gods and the creator of life), the hooded figure stands side-on, stretching his right arm out to dub, king-like, a kneeling Kaepernick on the left shoulder with an elongated crux ansata (the crux ansata is a recognised symbol of Coptic Egyptians who adapted the ankh36, an ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic and symbol of life, as a variant to the Christian cross). This post is also illustrative of the ways ordinary people and artists employ various cultural representations, belief systems, and ancient iconography from Egypt and Northeast Africa to invoke Afrocentrism (see section 5.2.2 for discussion). Once posted to Instagram by the artist, the post gained attention through likes and comments, and people shared it via reposts to their own account. Here, multiple discourses and tags were deployed as intersectional strategies to link #TrayvonMartin with the movements of #TakeAKnee and #BlackLivesMatter.

35 To access the illustration by Prince Eric Nichols see: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bey1Thdl7i4/

36 For an illustration of the ankh see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankh#/media/File:Ankh_(SVG)_blu.svg

Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter 157

In March 2018, the hoodie became appropriated as a symbol of solidarity and resistance against unjust gun violence in the #MarchForOurLives movement. Here people employed the hoodie and digital variations of Martin’s image in posts on Instagram and co-tagged the post with #BlackLivesMatter and other victims of lethal police brutality including #MikeBrown, #SandraBland, #TamirRice, and #StephonClark, among multiple others, to remind others that the struggle to end gun violence is collective and requires the ending of police brutality and white supremacy. In November 2018, during the American midterm elections, both the image of Martin wearing a hoodie and the image of Martin wearing a red Hollister T- shirt became further politicised symbols deployed in pro-Democrat discourse and were transformed into voting memes. For example, one image macro featured a cropped and close-up version of Martin, with his gazed fixed on the audience, the image is overlaid in a transparent red hue with white text reading along the bottom of the meme “Trayvon needs you to vote”. Another black and white meme3738 featured an illustrated version of the hoodie image of Martin (in the centre) and the surrounding text read “Trayvon Martin ...would have been 23 years old…could have voted”. Responses to both memes were mixed, for example some people circulated the memes to highlight their voting practices; others circulated them as a call to action for others to vote for the legacy of Martin; as a call to end Stand Your Ground laws; and to amend perceived structural and racial inequalities of the American justice system. However, while some saw this as a positive way to engage people in political discussions, others were angered and questioned if permission had been received from the Martin family in which to reappropriate Martin’s image for political purposes. For example, some sentiment expressed that taking the deaths of hypervisible Black people out of context to push a neoliberal agenda was “irresponsible and extremely violent”.

37 The image reappropriated in the meme originates from the For Freedoms campaign see: https://twitter.com/for_freedoms/status/1058489425070604288?lang=en

38 The work, titled “Trayvon Martin”, was created by artist Shaun Leonardo as part of the 50 State Initiative by For Freedoms, which has a mandate to promote political discussions through works of public art.

158 Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter

In January 2019, the symbol of the hoodie was further called upon in response to the #Covingtonboys39 controversy40 and to perform resistance against white supremacy. The altercation generated extensive mainstream media coverage and political attention with multiple and shifting narratives competing to frame white 16-year old Covington Catholic High School student, Nicholas Sandmann, as a victim and Native American activist, Nathan Phillips, as the villain, or vice versa.

Figure 4.9. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured a black and white image macro (a genre of internet meme) of Nicholas Sandmann wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat (bottom left), juxtaposed with a black and white hoodie symbol representing Trayvon Martin (top right) with overlaid text (as described on p. 160). It was retrieved from Instagram.

Here, people operationalised the symbol of the hoodie on Instagram in response to the wearing of what is considered as pro-Trump and white supremacist apparel: the MAGA hat (a red, baseball-style, hat with the slogan “Make America Great Again” written across the crown in white). Here the hoodie served as a modality for highlighting biases of conservative (and right wing) media, and provided a mechanism to call-out the prejudice of Republican politicians (directly targeting President Donald Trump). Prominent people also weighed in on the controversy on Instagram by invoking the hoodie by name. One notable example I observed was a post by Black Bishop and human rights activist, Talbert W. Swan, who cross-posted content41 from his Twitter account that read “[sic] I don’t care what the hell y’all say. If wypipo42 can view young Black boys in hoodies as dangerous, and even kill them because of it (#TrayvonMartin), don’t tell us we can’t perceive a

39 Simultaneously, two rallies, a pro-life March for Life and the Indigenous Peoples March, took place near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on 18 January 2019. An altercation between members of the Indigenous Peoples March and students from the all-male Covington Catholic High School erupted. Footage of a confrontation between 16-year-old Nicholas Sandmann and Native American activist Nathan Phillips was captured on mobile devices (presenting various viewpoints of the confrontation) and uploaded to social media where millions viewed the content.

40 For backstory see: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3kgz7b/heres-where-were-at-with-the-maga- hat-wearing-convington-boys

41 To view the original content on Talbert W. Swan’s Twitter account see: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bs9UY5Un0do/

42 WYPIPO is a slang term used to refer to ‘white people’ in popular African American vernacular English.

Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter 159

group of white boys in the modern equivalent of a klan hood, MAGA hats, as a threat”. This post was re-posted by multiple Instagram users. Other forms of popular counter-discursive practice emerge prominently in the form of two genres of memes. For example one image macro (see Figure 4.9) featured the silhouette hoodie symbol juxtaposed in the image’s top right with text opposite reading “[sic] Republicans said he looked like a thug because he was wearing a hoodie”, and in the bottom left of the meme image Sandmann features wearing a MAGA hat and the opposing text reads “[sic] Those same people are now saying you can’t assume someone is racist just because they’re wearing a MAGA hat”.

Figure 4.10. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured an image macro (a genre of internet meme) of three people wearing KKK hoods (top) with the overlaid text reading “These hoodies are acceptable”, juxtaposed with an image of Trayvon Martin wearing a hoodie (below) with the overlaid text reading “This hoodie gets you murdered”. It was retrieved from Instagram.

Another prominent image macro (see Figure 4.10) juxtaposed (top) an image of three individuals wearing white KKK hoods with white text overlaid reading “These hoodies are acceptable” and (bottom) a background image of Martin wearing a hoodie and in the foreground a crowd of other silhouetted individuals stand wearing hoodies, and the overlaid text reads “This hoodie gets you killed”. Both of the aforementioned image macros were recurrently circulated on Instagram and people operationalised them as modalities to call-out white privilege and racism. For example, comments regularly associated with these image macros generated discourses such as #Covingtonboys are considered as innocent of their actions because they were “just kids” who were wearing MAGA hats, while Martin was killed because of his perceived suspicion and was framed posthumously as a “thug” whose hoodie made him suspicious. Some posts appropriating these image macros highlighted racist discourses operationalised in mainstream media channels including CNN and Fox News. Other posts discussed the use of dehumanising stereotypes that deny Black youth the right to protections of childhood and presumed innocence saying things like ‘the students from Covington were “just kids” trying to relieve their anxious teenage energy’ and Black Americans “don’t get to be kids”. Another post appropriating the image macro said “Black boys in America don’t get to be

160 Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter

boys”. Another said “There are different rules for Black kids. There is constant speculation. Presumption of guilt from birth”.

These discursive practices also speak to claims of childhood and innocence (as discussed in section 4.2.1 ‘child saint and youthful innocent’) as a privilege granted to some (white youths) and denied to others (namely Black youths). Such perceptions find merit as a psychological study conducted by Goff et al. (2014) who established that Black boys are not afforded the protections of childhood and the privilege of innocence as equal to that of their other-race peers. The study finds that perceptions of innocence, as attributed to young Black bodies, diverges considerably from the age of 10 to that of non-Black youth. This led the researchers to claim that, in criminal justice contexts, Black youth are perceived as older and are prematurely treated as adults; are seen as more culpable of their actions than whites or Latinos, and; that the predictions of these outcomes increase in line with greater dehumanisation and stereotypical representations of Blacks. Subsequently, Black youth are less likely to be afforded the full protections of childhood while, paradoxically, white youth, benefit from the assumption of youthful innocence. This is evident in contemporary struggles against white supremacy and white privilege in America, and, as notably demonstrated in the aforementioned examples of representations of racial hegemony as seen in the #Covingtonboys who were framed as “just kids” wearing, not symbols of white supremacy, but simply MAGA hats, while Martin’s hoodie and posthumous identity was transformed from victim to villain through racial stereotyping.

4.2.3 Black Thug

Figure 4.11. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured a series of so-called ‘Thug’ images juxtaposed together that were taken from Trayvon Martin’s social media accounts (see p. 163 for a detailed description). It was retrieved from Instagram.

In the previous section I discussed and provided popular examples how the trope of Martin as an ‘everyday teenager’ was invoked through the hoodie as an embodied expression of collective identification in which to perform collective resistance. This

Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter 161

section discusses how the trope of the ‘Black thug’ (see Figure 4.11 for illustrative examples) is conceptualised in relation to my study, and was mobilised by people, both in terms of language and visual representations, on Instagram, as a modality to operationalise both pro- and anti-Martin discourse. In my analysis I observed how the trope of the Black thug was negatively mobilised in defamatory media framing, and in racist and white supremacist discourse as a vehicle for reinforcing negative stereotyped depictions of Blackness and to criminalised Martin, and Black youth more broadly. Here, I acknowledge that negative connotations associated with the term thug are not new. For example, Black scholar Ronald Jackson (2006) argues the trope of the Black thug has been used as currency in prolonged and exploited depictions of ghettoised Blackness in America as made popular through, primarily, film and music industries, which both reproduce and commodify the stereotypical ‘thug’ image through representations that depict Blackness as deviant, hypermasculine, and uncivil. In this context, Blackness is habitually scripted as a spectacle that is packaged for consumption by American citizens to be observed though a controlling gaze that distances the image of Blackness from everything “conventional and morally familiar” (Jackson, 2006, p, 106).

In the analysis that follows, I employed an ethical stance that sought not to reproduce negative and racist discourses. Rather, I chose to privilege examples that demonstrate how pro-Martin supporters actively reclaimed the concept of the Black thug on Instagram, and in the specific context of its use in the Martin-Zimmerman case. Through this, I examined the ways the trope was subversively operationalised to perform counter-discourse and to rearticulate and reappropriate the meaning and image of the Black thug in popular Black American vernacular and activist culture. From this perspective, I draw out and discuss particular examples that demonstrate how people positioned Martin as a Black thug in ways that characterise contemporary performances of Black masculinity, to articulate lived experiences, and to continue the symbolic embodiment of Black resistance culture.

Firstly, before I perform my analysis, let me state my full acknowledgment that the trope of the thug as attached to the Black body is complex and polysemous. There is extant literature addressing how the concept of thug draws from both historic and popular culture in America, it is a chronicle that I will not rehearse here suffice to acknowledge its complexity and to draw out the trope’s significance in

162 Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter

relation to how Blackness, Black identity, and Black representation is conceptualised and made visible, and contestable, in the context of the trope’s appropriation with Martin. To establish my intellectual grounding in the trope, to understand its linguistic origins, and to align my analysis with popular forms of Black consciousness, I draw from the voices of Black scholars in ways that permit me an understanding of the struggles required to detach the concept of the Black thug from its stereotypical and racially inscribed hegemonic representation. From this place of awareness I then examined how the trope was reclaimed in pro-Martin discourse in ways that repositioned Martin from the thug narrative, as a would-be criminal, thus, deserving of his death, and toward the systemic culture of racism, racial hierarchy, and institutional injustice that is perceived as criminal and the problem in Black activist culture.

The remixing, habitual distortion, and commodification of images of Blackness has led Black scholar Mark Anthony Neal (2013, p. 556) to argue that the image of “Blackness is literally under siege”. Equally, it could be argued the image of what constitutes an authentic representation of Blackness has always been under siege in American culture because the Black, primarily masculine, body is always scripted upon as a canvas that constructs and operates in a complex economy of difference. The struggle for the Black body to attain socioeconomic value, to gain cultural legitimacy and racial agency, in which to be perceived as anything other than foreign, exotic, strange, sexual, brute, violent, unfamiliar, and disposable, is one that is long, institutionalised, and conditioned by a violent history of white colonial discourse and white supremacist ideology. The white hegemonic mission is to project racial differences upon the image of Blackness in which to assert, and perpetually reinforce, the superiority of whiteness, to delegitimise the notion that Black life has value, and to present Blackness as a perpetual threat to the social order. This sense of threat has been conceivably, as Neal (ibid.) contends, best articulated in the use of the term “nigger” in popular culture, notably Black film, music and hip-hop culture. Neal argues the use of the term n****r presents an erosive threat to the authentic representation of Blackness, while, in contrast, the appropriation of the word “nigga” (ibid.) highlights generational and linguistic differences in how Blackness is constituted and made popular in Black American youth culture.

Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter 163

Thus, the term “n****r/n***a”, like “thug”, signifies a crisis of interpretation. Though, Neal attributes hip-hop culture as a space that critically negotiates the articulation of Blackness as attendant to the scripting of Black identity and masculinity. Neal argues, “n****r” refers to a notion of Blackness that has been employed as a staple in white supremacist discourse to render Black Americans as less than citizens (as in ‘just a n****r’). Here, Neal conceptualises the term n****r as immobile as it is fixed to notions of an “embodiment of Black racial subjects in the pre-twentieth-century South” (ibid.). In contrast, the term “n***a”, he argues, relates to the image of Blackness as fluid, mobile, malleable, urban and is realised prominently in the narratives of hip-hop (ibid.). Similarly, Black scholar Nicole Fleetwood (2011) argues that Blackness becomes visually knowable though performance and cultural practice, and for which Blackness is situated in the performing subject. Fleetwood maintains, like Neal, the contemporary visual manifestation of Blackness circulates because “it is not rooted in a history, person, or thing, although it has many histories and many associations with people and things” (2011, p. 6). As such, I comprehend the term thug as the racial epithet of n***a in Black American vernacular. In this sense, I comprehend that thug, like the concept of Blackness, “attaches to bodies and narratives coded as such but it always exceeds these attachments” (Fleetwood, ibid.). It is through this framework that I explore how the use of the thug concept is applied as a trope of contemporary Black youth culture, and notably, in relation to the concept of ‘thug life’ (as made popular in hip-hop culture) in its vernacular expression in popular Black American discourse.

While I demonstrate (in the sections that follow) resonant examples of how the thug trope was invoked in its contextual association with Martin, here, I briefly remind the reader of the centrality of appropriations of past prominent Black figures, activists, and artists within posts on Instagram (as previously mentioned in section 4.2.2). Here, I wish to draw attention to, and briefly summarise, the significance of the ways in which images, quotes, and lyrics, from slain hip-hop artist Tupac

Shakur43, were reappropriated and placed in conversation with pro-Martin discourse that invoked the thug trope on Instagram. I note, this was a significant and recurrent discursive practice observed across the dataset, and as such, it is one I directly

43 For background and context on Tupac Shakur see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupac_Shakur

164 Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter

address in the paragraphs that follow. The thug trope, in the context of Martin, has its origins attached to a particular set of images44, which were taken from Martin’s social media accounts (see Figure 4.11 for example), and reappropriated in racist, hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourse in ways that came to define how the thug narrative was constructed and made contestable.

I categorise this genre of images as ‘selfies’ that embody the thug persona, for example, by Martin appearing in shirtless selfies, wearing a scowling expression exposing his gold-capped teeth (a grill which is a removable piece of jewellery that mimics gold teeth), and blowing smoke and extending his middle finger to the camera. In conservative and right-wing media such images were used to portray Martin as a ‘thug-like-gangster’ in the court of public opinion, and this discourse was championed in posts on Instagram by racists and pro-Zimmerman supporters. For example, some pro-Zimmerman supporters employed this genre of images to defame and demonise Martin’s character as being thug-like, rebellious, and a marijuana- smoking-gangster. Such images were deployed as modalities through which to transpose Martin as guilty of being unsavoury, violent, and menacing as though to justify his murder as an inevitable destiny.

In pro-Martin counter discourse, people employed this same genre of images to subvert or reverse character attacks made on Martin by appropriating images alongside commentary that called-out the use of the thug trope to perpetuate propagandistic ideology. Here, pro-Martin supporters reappropriated the images as an everyday indexical practice that presented a counterpoint to the hegemonic and totalising images of Martin. For example, people reclaimed Martin’s ‘thug aesthetic’ by reproducing representational practices to produce normative discourses that positioned Martin’s ‘thug-like’ expressions as stylised and localised, as everyday performances of popular culture that entertained the notion of play in Black everyday experience. The practices were made manifest through commentary attached to Instagram posts, which included expressions such as “who hasn’t posted an image of themselves saying fuck it”, “people flip fingers all day everyday…he was just a

44 For an example of the images that were taken from Trayvon Martin’s mobile phone and social media accounts and were used to frame him as a “thug” see: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/03/what-did-trayvon-look-depends-your- politics/329893/ and https://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/23/justice/florida-zimmerman- defense/index.html

Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter 165

normal teen”, “…all little homies flick the camera off from time-to-time, doesn’t mean they deserve to die”. Other discursive practices employed racial language to call out the cultural hierarchy of performative social behaviour by saying things such as “soccer mums put their middle fingers up too…should they be shot too?”, “white people put their middle fingers up…does that make them thugs, or does that rule only apply to Black people?”.

Figure 4.12. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured Trayvon Martin in a ‘thug- styled’ selfie image with both his hands raised and middle fingers extended toward the camera. It was retrieved from Instagram.

I noted the significance and recurrence of one particular selfie thug-styled image of Martin (see Figure 4.12), which I highlight here to address how it was operationalised in particular examples in the paragraphs that follow. In regard to the broader genre of selfies, and in contrast to hegemonic readings, I interpret this image as being representative of Martin’s expressive compliance with popular mainstream American youth culture, and where the thug persona permitted Martin a strategic and aestheticised vehicle for commanding social credit through the performance of his aestheticised, properly masculine, and stylish Black urban youth identity. I do so with the understanding that the concept of the Black thug has been reconceptualised from signifying deviance and nihilism to invoking popular manifestations of authentic Black masculinity, youthfulness, and racialised alterity that provided Black youth a vehicle to push beyond homogenised and essentialised concepts of Blackness, and to reposition the thug concept as a stylised and reproducible commodity.

For example, Fleetwood (2011) explores the spaces between mass hip-hop culture and Black popular culture, and analyses how the consumer culture of hip-hop fashion blends with American symbols and authentic performances of Black masculine aesthetics to produce the Black masculine body as “a character who is at once an ultra-stylish thug and the ultimate American citizen” (p. 154). Moreover, Black scholar Jeffrey Johnson (2016, p. 35) asserts if we begin to queer white and hegemonic understandings to consider “the variant uses of the thug aesthetic, we become better readers of what actually occurs within the domain of discourse: Black

166 Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter

men are made deviant, only as much as our historical and mythological fantasies work to limit the possibilities of their performances of masculinity”. Here, understanding how the trope of the Black thug finds symbolic currency in relation to Shakur’s self-fashioning thug identity, permitted exploration of its use in relation to pro-Martin discourse in nonlinear terms, and to conceptualised how it was operationalised as a strategic trope for mobilising Black consciousness, and deployed in performances of counterculture. I note that Shakur was not the only rapper to fashion himself as a thug, though, Shakur, as Black scholar Michael Dyson (2001) argues, is considered the ultimate expression, or symbol, of Black masculinity and Black culture. As such, Dyson contends that Shakur is a posthumous figure that Black male youth can identify with because he represents youthfulness, beauty, expressiveness, and the articulation of the authentic Black lived experience. Thus, Shakur’s posthumous representation, as both an authentic and vulnerable Black subject, invites identification in Black consciousness of the collective perception of the shared vulnerability of Black life, and of the need to creatively assert Black agency and perform resistance against, notably, racism, police brutality, and anti- Black violence.

Figure 4.13. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured a black and white image macro (a genre of internet meme) featuring Trayvon Martin (top) in a ‘thug-styled’ selfie image with both his hands raised and middle fingers extended toward the camera with overlaid text reading “They don’t give a fuck”, juxtaposed with an image of Tupac Shakur (bottom) in the same pose with overlaid text reading “about us!”. It was retrieved from Instagram.

On Instagram people engaged in reclaiming the thug concept for Martin through the appropriation of Shakur’s expressive self-performances and lyrics from a number of songs. The most dominant representations of this can be seen in the reappropriation of the lyrics “They don't give a fuck about us” (taken from the song with the same title) and “Cops give a damn about a negro. Pull the trigger, kill a nigga, he’s a hero” from the track entitled “Changes”. Both songs were released posthumously in 2002 and 1998, respectively, and form part of Shakur’s popular ‘thug aesthetic’ as conceptualised in Shakur’s THUG LIFE ideology, which is an acronym for “The Hate U Gave Little Infants Fucks Everyone”. These narratives

Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter 167

featured prominently in pro-Martin discourse across the dataset, notably, with the practice emerging early in 2012 and becoming an established practice in 2014 and 2015, respectively. The growing prominence of these communicative practices can be understood as a reclaiming of the thug narrative as a language of resistance for Martin, but also for other victims of police brutality as witnessed, notably, with the brutal deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown and Tamir Rice in 2014, and Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, and Samuel DuBose in 2015 (all were either shot and killed by white police, or died while in police custody).

This is evidenced through recurrent practices of co-tagging the aforementioned victims, among others, in conjunction with #TrayvonMartin in the comments section of posts on Instagram. The emerging prominence of such discourse also finds currency in the discursive intensification of “Black Lives Matter” since 2013 and, more recently, I link it resurgence on Instagram with the publication of the novel The Hate U Give (Thomas, 2017) and its film adaptation in 2018. The book was originally conceived as a short story written in response to the unjust killing of unarmed, 22-year-old Oscar Grant in 2009, Oakland, California, by a white police officer, and later found form as a novel in response to the killing of Martin (among multiple other victims of unjust brutality that followed) (Philyaw, 2017). Of worth to note here is the linguistic reappropriation from Shakur’s original the hate you “gave” to Black author Angie Thomas’ the hate you “give” as a play on words that continues the collective consciousness in linking past with present struggles.

On Instagram such discursive manifestations found form in multiple forms of creative practice, notably in subversive memes and reaction photoshops. For example, one subversive image macro (see Figure 4.13) appears in black and white and features the juxtaposition of Martin (top frame) and Shakur (bottom frame), in both images the figure is central in the frame, gaze fixed to the camera, with both hands raised with the middle fingers extended. The overlaid text reads “they don’t give a fuck about us” and in the comment section of the post it reads “cops give a damn about a negro. Pull the trigger, kill a nigga, he's a hero” followed by the tag #JusticeForTrayvon. The image macro presents the spectre of death as seen in two bodies, though, they are bodies with different histories and contexts, yet, they appear to us as young Black bodies both slain. The collective gazes of Martin and Shakur

168 Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter

are fixed on us, as the witnessing audience, and they speak to us; the figures merge as collective signifiers through a combined language of resistance. The figures are reappropriated by people in ways that enable the bodies of Martin and Shakur to perform together, while also providing a performative modality for ordinary people on Instagram to articulate, through Martin and Shakur, their struggles in a common vernacular of resistance, and as evidenced in multiple, recurrent, expressions such as “fuck the system”, “fuck the police”, “they don’t give a fuck about us”, “the whole damn system is guilty”. Here, the thug concept operates in an economy of everyday performances of activism and linguistic articulations of Black resistance. It constructs dualistic meanings where people express their identification with the ‘thug aesthetic’ as a precarious existence, while invoking it as a practice of popular contestation and Black self-representation.

Interesting to consider also, here, are how the juxtaposed frames of Martin and Shakur provide a parallel between the post-mortem embrace of Shakur, as a symbol of resistance to oppression and injustice, and as mythological figure, and how this is reflected in the discourse that embraces Martin, as a posthumous figure of injustice, and a mythologised martyr (see section 5.2.2 ‘young king’) for detailed discussion), who is called upon to perform the continuation of the collective struggle for justice. Analysing Shakur through a political theology framework, Katie Grimes (2014) argues Shakur is a theologian of the crucified Black peoples of America, whose music at once speaks to a crucified people of the American past, while illuminating the vulnerability of Black bodies, as crucified people, in the American present. Similarly, Dyson (2001) argues for the theological significance of Shakur, by establishing him as a “ghetto saint” (p. 267) and prophet. I observed how a politicised practice of theology was exercised by people on Instagram in the merging of images of bodies hanging from ‘lynching trees’ as the crosses upon which they were crucified; in the reimagining of Martin’s hoodie hanging crucified upon the cross filling the space between the body of Christ, the body of Martin and the Black bodies of countless others yet to be crucified; I observed how the modern day site of crucifixion emerges in the spaces of Black hyper-incarceration and police brutality, and I note the complex and subversive terrain upon which popular culture is operationalised by people on Instagram in ways that seek to subvert or reverse stereotypes as rearticulations of power and self-representation.

Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter 169

Figure 4.14. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured a coloured image macro (a genre of internet meme) featuring Trayvon Martin in a ‘thug-styled’ selfie image with both his hands raised and middle fingers extended toward the camera with overlaid text reading “Fuck Zimmerman”. It was retrieved from Instagram.

Pro-Martin supporters continued to reappropriate the ‘thug aesthetic’ in multiple ways on Instagram. For example, reaction photoshops continued as a recurrent theme and were operationalised to challenge the perceived structural inequalities of the American justice system and to subvert power relations by delegitimising Zimmerman. People contributed to forms of participatory political culture, which Henry Jenkins (2006) refers to as “photoshop for democracy”, here, people combined images with verbal articulations to produce complex associations of powers and ideologies. One image macro reappropriated the selfie thug-styled image of Martin staring into the camera with both hands raised and middle fingers extended, the overlaid text reads “Fuck Zimmerman” (see Figure 4.14). This particular meme type demonstrates how people transform digital artefacts in ways that permit performative voice for the articulation of affective expressions. Sara Ahmed (2014) discusses how emotions operate in embodiment and language, and that emotions circulate through objects and between bodies in ways that transform other objects and bodies into “objects of feeling” (p. 11). Such objects stick and become “saturated with affect” and they spread as they circulate in the social spaces of what Ahmed refers to as the “cultural politics of emotion”. The saturation of affect and its circulation is made manifest in this particular image macro; where bodies, signs and language function as sites of both “personal and social tension” (ibid.).

This meme genre continued to be transformed in multiple articulations of emotional discourse, and across time, for example one image macro (reappropriating the same image) had overlaid text that read “Fuck you Zimmerman, my support never died”. Another one read “Fuck this justice system”. One variation read “You changed your profile for France, but not for me...this is for you”; inferring “fuck you” to those who sympathised with victims of terrorist attacks in the country in 2016, but did not do so publicly in response to Martin’s killing. In February 2019,

170 Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter

the meme was transformed into an illustration45 by Black artist Anthony Lee Pittman to pay tribute to what would have been Martin’s 24th birthday. The illustration depicts Martin with his fingers up, and a circular formation of text surrounds the perimeter of Martin’s head (like an Egyptian sun disk) reading “Rest in power, Trayvon” and it co-tags Martin with #BlackLivesMatter, #BlackHistoryMonth and #HappyBirthdayTrayvon, among other tags.

45 To view the illustration created by Anthony Lee Pittman see: https://www.instagram.com/p/BthNd_PhUrk/

Chapter 4: Making Trayvon Martin’s Life Matter 171

Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin

5.1 INTRODUCTION

This chapter presents the analysis on the remaining two tropes. I first discuss the fourth trope—the ‘martyred body’—where I examine how post-mortem images of Martin’s body were mobilised by people in ways that linked Martin’s existential and biological death with his status as a martyr that stands for, and stands in for, Black vulnerability and the pain of the nation. Next, I discuss the final trope—the ‘young king’—where I investigate how Martin’s ascension to martyrdom was made visually knowable through the iconographical and productive possibilities of Black cultural production. I explain how Martin’s martyrdom was constituted through visual discourse and performed through creative and cultural practices that combine classical forms of iconography (e.g. through ancient symbols and religious icons) together with contemporary forms of Black representation and visual practice. I conclude the chapter with a summary of my findings and I present my analytical conclusions.

5.2 DATA ANALYSIS

5.2.1 Martyred Body In the previous section of the last chapter, I introduced the trope of the ‘Black thug’ and I demonstrated how it was reclaimed in popular Black vernacular expression as a modality to perform counter resistance and assert authentic Black self-representation. In this section, I focus my discussion on the trope of the ‘martyred body’. My analysis details the discursive practices associated with post-mortem images of Martin in their remediation, circulation, reappropriation, and operationalisation as indexical markers that, simultaneously, call upon audiences to bear witness to affirm the truth of Martin’s death and suffering, while inviting collective consciousness that Martin’s broken body stands for, and stands in for, shared Black vulnerability and the pain of the nation. The discursive construction of Martin as a martyred body and victim, here, carries the narrative of Martin as an ‘innocent’ and ‘unintentional

172 Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin

martyr’, and not that of a martyr who has self-sacrificed for a cause (which, as discussed in section 3.2, has been the historic approach applied to interpretations of political martyrdom in America). Laleh Khalili (2007) argues the tropes of ‘innocent’ and ‘unintentional martyr’ serve to highlight the brutality of an adversary who inflicts death upon ordinary and familiar bodies. My analysis explains how Martin, as an ‘unintentional martyr’, represents the embodiment of historic and contemporary anti-Black violence and has been discursively operationalised as the archetypal Black victim of brutal injustice. On Instagram, I observed how post-mortem images of Martin were operationalised as personalised performances that constructed the imagining of collective Black vulnerability to senseless, habitual, killings, through which the martyred body of Martin provided for truth claims to be made and legitimised popular demands that called for justice, while simultaneously calling upon the solidarity and sympathetic discourses of other local and transnational witnesses.

As already established in Chapter 2, the concept of witnessing is central to the social process of constructing martyrdom. In this section, I explain how the martyred body of Martin was transformed for global witnessing on Instagram through processes of communicative action and social interaction. In doing this, I examined how forms of participatory and memetic communicative practices contributed to the construction and circulation of Martin as a martyred body. I observed how these practices created new forms of ‘digitally re-spatialised simultaneity’ (Sumiala & Korpiola, 2016, p. 62) among local and transnational witnesses, through which the trope of the martyred body brought into being new imaginaries of solidarity and sites of resistance. I examined the manifold ways people actively participated in remediating, reappropriating and repoliticising post- mortem images of Martin on Instagram as a discursive practice of media witnessing. Here, media witnessing is conceived as a performative act that occurs in, by, and through forms of media (Frosh and Pinchevski, 2009, p. 1, emphasis in the original). Specifically, I draw from Mortensen (2015) to designate this form of media witnessing as “connective witnessing”. Here, connective witnessing is conceptualised as a participatory, reflective, and political act performed by people, on Instagram, who bear witness to Martin’s killing in the media and “contribute to

Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin 173

the flow of information” (ibid. p. 1394) through media by producing and circulating new forms of witness testimony.

Figure 5.1. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured a graphic post-mortem image of Trayvon Martin taken at the crime scene. It was retrieved from Instagram.

The emergence of the trope of the ‘martyred body’ was made manifest in my dataset during the State of Florida v. George Zimmerman murder trial, during which graphic post-mortem images46 of Martin’s body were used as police evidence in the case and were broadcast to the American public by multiple national mainstream media during live, and subsequent, coverage of the court trial on 25 June, 2013. I identified two categories of post-mortem photographs that were published by mainstream media, and while both categories depict Martin’s dead body, lying prostrate in the grass at the crime scene there are differing levels of emotional distance provided for in the images. One category (see Figure 5.1) provides no emotional distance for the witnessing public as Martin is graphically depicted, at close range, lying face-up, his body completely exposed, the bullet wound in Martin’s chest is visible, and his eyes and mouth are fixed open suggestive of an end met in a state of alarm. The other (see Figure 5.2) category depicts Martin’s corpse covered by a yellow crime scene blanket47 providing the witnessing public with some form of buffer from the visual immediacy of Martin’s death. My dataset reveals the multiplicity of people who reacted to the seeing of post-mortem images by utilising the affordances of digital technologies to capture snapshots of the televised and published content and then uploaded it to Instagram in the form of personalised posts. In my analysis, I refer to this genre of content as ‘post-mortem snapshots’48 to reflect the discursive practices of people who used the affordances of digital and

46 The graphic post-mortem image of Trayvon Martin taken at the crime scene can be seen at: https://gawker.com/this-courtesy-of-msnbc-is-trayvon-martins-dead-body-753370712

47 The crime scene image of Trayvon Martin’s corpse covered by a yellow blanket can be seen at: https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/george-zimmerman-behavior-pattern-prosecutor-article- 1.1381957

48 Post-mortem snapshots refers to the practice of people using camera enabled digital devices to take a photograph of an existing mediation and representation of a post-mortem image e.g. taking a photograph of a post-mortem image displayed on a television or computer screen.

174 Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin

social media technologies to capture, fixate, and remediate existing post-mortem images for the consumption, circulation, and reappropriation by digital publics on Instagram.

Figure 5.2. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured a crime scene image of Trayvon Martin’s corpse covered by a yellow blanket. It was retrieved from Instagram.

There are two genres of post-mortem snapshots in my dataset: initial and reworked. Initial refers to post-mortem snapshots that appear in the form of their initial uploading/circulation or stand-alone form. Reworked refers to post-mortem snapshots that appear in juxtaposed, remixed, or remediated forms.

A significant observation I noted in my dataset was the manner in which post- mortem snapshots brought into being multivocal, sometimes conflicting and often contentious, discursive practices. For example, discourses that emerged around initial post-mortem snapshots often took the form of highly emotional and affective expressions such as shock, deep-felt pain, outrage, solidarity with the Martin family and, notably, ethical concerns were raised about the appropriateness of “showing” or “not showing” post-mortem images of Martin by a) mainstream media, and b) ordinary people on Instagram. While some people posted initial post-mortem snapshots alongside commentary to express their disbelief in the mainstream media publishing of Martin’s post-mortem images, they also contributed to the expanded witnessing and emotional narratives of Martin’s death by remediating and circulating the content; these posts received both sympathetic and contentious engagement.

Others purposefully posted and circulated initial post-mortem snapshots to express the need to “show” and make explicitly visible the brutal consequences of systemic racism, senseless gun violence, and the ongoing killing of Black youth in America. These posts were accompanied with forms of witness testimony such as “they are killing young Black men and if we don’t show it, they’ll act as if it never happened”, “we have to show the truth”, “he was stalked, he was murdered”. Other recurrent expressions associated with initial post-mortem snapshots drew parallels between historic lynching of Blacks and contemporary injustices committed against Black people by referring to Martin’s killing as “a modern-day Emmett Till”. Here, people referred to the actions of Till’s mother, Mamie Bradley, who in 1955

Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin 175

permitted the Black press to cover Till’s open-casket memorial service and to publish graphic photographs of Till’s brutalised body (see Raiford, 2011, pp. 87-88); some argued—like the public displaying of Till’s lynched and brutalised body that provided a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement—that if people “see” Martin’s dead body “as evidence” maybe justice will be served.

People also mobilised initial post-mortem snapshots to call upon the Black community to come together in nonviolent solidarity and to raise collective Black consciousness; some people commented “wake up” Martin “could have been you”, or “your son, brother, or family”, “this [dead] is how they want our sons”. Others identified with the injustice committed against Martin by reflecting on their lived experiences of racism and present precarity by commenting “this could have been me years ago, now all I see is my son”, “it could have been me, I used to walk to the store in my hoodie just like him”, “as a Black man I am terrified, as Black people aren’t we all?”. Numerous people also employed the initial post-mortem snapshots as modalities for discussing multiple dynamics of the trial and the justice system, making claims of innocence on Martin’s behalf, pointing blame at what they perceived as a flawed justice system, and calling out racist and right-wing media coverage.

These discursive practices reveal that initial post-mortem snapshots operate in different visual economies to that of traditional forms of ‘aestheticised’ post-mortem photography—which emerged through advances in photographic processes in the nineteenth and twentieth century and was performed as a cultural practice to memorialise and grieve the recently deceased (see Ruby, 1995). Rather, I argue initial post-mortem snapshots share some antecedents to the nineteenth and twentieth century lynching photographs that were reappropriated by antilynching activists and the Black press to undermine white supremacy, and for which an alternative form of lynching spectatorship was created to impel the American public to critically bear witness to acts of injustice and brutality (see Wood, 2009, pp. 179-222). Moreover, the aforementioned discursive practices were made possible by and enacted through the affordances of digital and social media technologies, and highlights how domesticated forms of witnessing (Ellis, 2000, p. 32) can be transformed into a public performance of connective witnessing (Mortensen, 2015) and performative connective action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012).

176 Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin

Correspondingly, the phenomenon of the post-mortem snapshot speaks to the veracity of digital culture in producing new forms of images that shift understandings of post-mortem photography beyond its documentary conventions and toward apprehension of the post-mortem snapshot “as a mode of witnessing and of world disclosure” (Frosh, 2019, p. 73). Here, the digitally afforded and discursive operations of initial post-mortem snapshots also constitute a change to earlier notions of witnessing—as discussed by Peters (2001, pp. 709-710) which he conceptualised as being divided into two distinct phases of ‘private experience’ (the passive seeing) and ‘public statement’ (the active saying)—by redefining whom has the authority to speak as a witness on behalf of Martin. This transformation in authority is afforded through digital and social media technologies that collapse the boundaries of public and private forms of witnessing and transforms “witnessing into a participatory and self-reflexive act that instantly turns experiences into representations” (Mortensen, 2015). Though, I note, the authority to speak on behalf of Martin as a witness to his martyred body remains a multivocal communicative process that is complex and contested.

The preceding analysis discussed the discursive operations of initial post- mortem snapshots, here, I explain how initial post-mortem snapshots were memetically and creatively transformed through digital remix culture (Shifman, 2014), and I refer to this genre as ‘reworked post-mortem snapshots’. For example, a recurrent practice I observed was memetic remixing in the form of juxtaposition and Photoshop-based collage. In reworked post-mortem snapshots that used juxtaposition people combined one other image or object to signify similarity or difference and to create new meanings, while Photoshop-based collage involved the practice of combining multiple images and/or objects to create a broader visual representation of witness testimony. For example, one reworked post-mortem snapshot (see Figure 5.3) juxtaposed a digital image of white American artist, Michael D’Antuono’s, 2012 oil painting “A Tale of Two Hoodies”49 (inspired by the Martin case) to highlight the issue of racial profiling of innocent Black youth in America with the associated commentary expressing “this happens only in America and it won’t ever change”.

49 To view the oil painting “A Tale of Two Hoodies” by American artist Michael D’Antuono see: https://artandresponse.com/agabond-com-michael-dantuono-a-tale-of-two-hoodies/

Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin 177

Figure 5.3. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured a Photoshop-based collage juxtaposing an image of the painting “A Tale of Two Hoodies” by American artist Michael D’Antuono (top) with the graphic post-mortem image of Trayvon Martin (bottom). It was retrieved from Instagram.

Others participated in creating injustice framing by juxtaposing pre-death images of Martin alongside post-mortem snapshots (see Figure 5.4) (see also Chapter 4 for a discussion on pre-death/post-mortem injustice framing). This category of images is what Olesen (2015) refers to as “injustice symbols” where forms of documentary-style pre-death/post-mortem images are juxtaposed to contrast the stark realities of victims before they were made victims, and against images that document the consequences of unjust and violent behaviour committed upon the bodies of victims. In the context of Martin both the discursive practice of juxtaposition and photoshop-based collage were exercised to lend credibility and emotional information to the claims of innocence supported in, and amplified through, pre- death images, while simultaneously dramatising the post-mortem snapshot of Martin to render visible the vulnerability of other Black bodies, notably Black male youths.

Figure 5.4. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured a Photoshop-based collage juxtaposing two post-mortem images of Trayvon Martin (top) and two pre-death images (bottom). It was retrieved from Instagram.

This genre of reworked post-mortem snapshots also engendered other forms of memetic and recurrent responses. For example, an emergent practice I observed in 2013 was the juxtaposing of initial post-mortem snapshots of Martin alongside graphic post-mortem snapshots of Till (see Figure 5.5); again, such discursive practices invoked historical and contemporary parallels between the injustice of Till’s killing and that of Martin’s. Commentary accompanying this genre of posts operated as witness testimonies and expressed popular sentiment that systemic racism and systematic brutality committed against Black bodies continues unabated in America.

178 Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin

Figure 5.5. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured a Photoshop-based collage juxtaposing a post-mortem image of Emmett Till (top) and a post-mortem image of Trayvon Martin (bottom). It was retrieved from Instagram.

The juxtaposing of initial post-mortem snapshots of Martin alongside graphic post-mortem snapshots of Till became a recurrent practice observed throughout the dataset and provides a counterpoint to the juxtaposed pre-death images of Martin and Till (as discussed in section 4.3.1); this genre of posts invited extensive discursive engagement both through likes, comments, and recurrent circulation across time. The juxtaposing of initial post-mortem snapshots of Martin alongside other post-mortem snapshots of victims of unjust brutality also extended as a prominent practice observed in 2014, and notably in the wake of Brown’s killing, and continued across the dataset in response to subsequent killings of multiple other victims of police brutality. The discursive practice of injustice framing became further transformed in 2014 through photoshop-based collages that reappropriated pre-death images of Martin and post-mortem snapshots alongside pre-death images/post-mortem snapshots of multiple others, notably Till and Brown (see Figure 5.6).

Figure 5.6. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured a Photoshop-based collage juxtaposing pre-death images (left) with post-mortem images (right) of Emmett Till (top), Trayvon Martin (centre), and Mike Brown (bottom). It was retrieved from Instagram.

The discursive practices of injustice framing I have discussed here, in the operationalisation of initial and reworked post-mortem snapshots, aid the construction of “moral shocks” (Jasper, 1997; 2018) among digital publics who are impelled to “re-feel” (Jasper, 2018, p. 103) the experience of injustice that Martin, and others, were subjected to. These shocks, Olesen (2013; 2018) argues, create “a chasm, an unbearable distance between normalcy and horror, openness and finality that exacerbates emotional responses of indignation, shame, and anger”. As such, this genre of post-mortem snapshots can be understood as circulating in “affective economies” (Ahmed, 2014, p. 8) meaning that the social and cultural practices that contribute to the circulation and remixing of post-mortem snapshots among digital

Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin 179

publics produces emotions and they become “objects of emotion that circulate” (ibid.). Thus, as initial and reworked post-mortem snapshots circulate they produce new socialities of emotion, which contributes to their “affective resonance” (Olesen, 2015).

Correspondingly, the discursive practices of creating and circulating reworked post-mortem snapshots as injustice frames is a claim to the “space of appearance” (Mirzoeff, 2017) in which it becomes possible for social actors to make witness testimony materially shareable in a space that condenses emotion and information, and that is not subject to the authoritative gaze of the police or mainstream media image brokering processes. Here, the space of appearance is brought into being and sustained on Instagram through participatory and recurrent discursive practices of connective witnessing (Mortensen, 2015) where people appear to one another in a form of counter power to make unjust death newly visible. This creates a connected space of appearance among digital publics; where the bodies of victims are sustained in death and are called upon in witness testimony to appear and reappear, thus, creating a politics that bridges the imagining of the past, with the present and a prefiguring of the future. As such, it reconfigures relations between the visible and the invisible, and between “the visible and the sayable” (Mirzoeff, 2017, p. 40).

In the analysis that follows I shift my discussion to focus on particular examples of variations to the aforementioned genre of injustice framing. Here, I note how injustice framing practices are further transformed when reworked post-mortem snapshots of Martin are juxtaposed alongside various images of Zimmerman that depict him in different contexts and expressing varying emotional dispositions. This genre of injustice framing invites different interpretative witnessing as the innocent victim and martyred body of Martin is contrasted against Zimmerman who is depicted, alive and free, and yet is the perpetrator of injustice. Here, the contrasting imagery discursively operates by dialectically infusing one another with innocence and injustice meaning. This can also be considered as a form of “adversarial framing” (Gamson, 1995), which relates to the attributional processes that seek to delineate the boundaries between “good” and “evil” and provides for consensus building and collective mobilisation. For example, two prominent examples of this recurrent injustice framing occurred on the announcement of Zimmerman’s acquittal

180 Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin

on 13 July, 2013, and were strategically constructed as modalities for mobilising political consciousness and collective action; one remix took form as a juxtaposition (see Figure 5.7) and the other (see Figure 5.8) as a photoshop-based collage.

Figure 5.7. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured a Photoshop-based collage juxtaposing a court trial image of George Zimmerman (left) with a crime scene image of Trayvon Martin’s corpse covered by a yellow blanket (right). It was retrieved from Instagram.

In Figure 5.7 the reworked post-mortem snapshot of Martin (with his prostrate body covered with a yellow crime scene blanket) is contrasted alongside a cropped headshot image of Zimmerman, wearing a suit, and tie, taken during trial proceedings. In Figure 5.8 three images are contrasted: in the top of frame a fully- exposed post-mortem image of Martin appears; in the bottom left a close-up and cropped post-mortem image depicts Martin’s face with a lifeless gaze and mouth partially open; the bottom right image features a photoshopped image of Zimmerman who appears to be in a courtroom, his head is turned looking back over his right shoulder toward an imagined audience with his gaze focused toward us as the viewing audience, in the background images of a judge’s gavel and the scales of justice appear, and the overlaid text across the bottom-half reads “George Zimmerman, NOT GUILTY”.

Figure 5.8. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured a Photoshop-based collage juxtaposing a graphic post-mortem image of Trayvon Martin taken at the crime scene (top) with a cropped version of the same image featuring a close-up of Martin’s face (bottom left), and alongside a court trial image of George Zimmerman (bottom right). It was retrieved from Instagram.

In other, similar but varied, Photoshop-based collages I observed how reworked post-mortem snapshots and images of Zimmerman were also contrasted alongside images of the murder weapon used by Zimmerman and together with images of the Skittles and iced-tea Martin was carrying at the time of his killing. The inclusion of the aforementioned items lends empirical credibility to claims of Martin’s innocence and acts as witness testimony to the unjustified use of lethal force by Zimmerman. The discursive practices I have analysed, here, can be understood as performing the key injustice framing tasks of “frame articulation” and “frame

Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin 181

amplification” (Benford & Snow, 2000). Here, frame articulation provides for identifying the act of injustice, its context, and imagined experience by assembling images of documented reality together in ways that enable people to rearticulate meaning by providing new forms of interpretation. Frame amplification provides for a directional locus of blame attribution by identifying Zimmerman as the culpable agent and target of moral indignation; and accenting salient events, issues and popular opinions. The combined elements of frame articulation and amplification function socially as visual synecdoches by bringing into sharp relief, strategically and symbolically, the larger struggle in which Martin’s unjust killing belongs: the enduring struggle for Black liberation and justice. Expressions and slogans such as “justice for Trayvon Martin, #WeAreAllTrayvonMartin, “no justice, no peace”, and “Black Lives Matter” illustrate these functions.

This section has discussed how the trope of the martyred body was made manifest through digitally remediated and reappropriated snapshots, which afforded for the material capture, circulation, and consumption of Martin’s corpse. These discursive practices rendered his broken body available for global witnessing and made the vulnerability of Black life painfully tangible. This underlines that the post- mortem snapshots operate as a distinctly cultural practice of connective witnessing that affords more than simple infrastructure for capturing and circulating information. Rather, to use Frosh’s terms (2019, p. 92), post-mortem snapshots can be considered as the “domains in which life and death are performed, experienced, witnessed and laid bare”. I followed the approach of Frosh (2019, p. 62) in my analysis to do more than look ‘through’ snapshots to see what they depict, by looking ‘at’ them to foreground how they operate as performances of “world disclosure” (ibid. p. 87) and as agents of political action in digital culture. Moreover, I discussed the ways in which post-mortem snapshots were operationalised as representational resources for transforming emotion into action; that is, communicative action facilitated through the affordances of digital and social media technologies that provided for the telling and retelling of Martin’s story. Such practices can be considered as providing for a digitally mediated “embalmed vision” (Troyer, 2007) of Martin’s corpse that preserves him for witnessing by future generations and refuses the erasure of his killing to remind others of their vulnerability to ‘ever- present violence’. This continues in the tradition of Black collective consciousness:

182 Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin

“never forget what can happen to a Black person in America” (Harold and Deluca, 2005, p. 276), and just as Till’s brutalised body illustrated that other Black bodies were at stake in 1955 (ibid. p. 280), Martin’s martyred body illustrates that Black bodies remain at risk.

5.2.2 Young King In the previous section I examined the discursive practices through which Martin’s martyred body was constructed as witness testimony and memetically circulated for global witnessing. In this section, I focus my discussion on the trope of ‘young king’ and explain how Martin was discursively reclaimed from his victimhood and has been transformed in his digitally mediated reincarnation as a martyr. I do this through an exploration of the ways Martin’s ascension to martyrdom, as the young king, was made visually knowable through the iconographical and productive possibilities of Black cultural production. From this, I then explain how Martin’s martyrdom was constituted through visual discourse and codified through creative and cultural practices that combine classical forms of iconography (through ancient symbols, religious icons and artistic practice etc.) together with contemporary forms of Black representation and visual practice.

In the context of my analysis, I situate the trope of the young king within the context of Afrocentrism, Afrofuturism, and within a tradition of anti-colonial vocabulary that connects contemporary and diasporic Black imagination with ancient Egyptian culture, symbolism and doctrine, and for which royalty, commemoration rituals, and belief in the resurrection after death were central themes. Thus, here, the trope of young king is conceptualised as a future-oriented ontological position that introduces a new Black vernacular to reconstruct and redefine modes of radical Black imagination and aesthetic political representation.

As I demonstrate in the empirical analysis, Martin’s death and martyrdom becomes reproduced as a social reality that operates in politically and aesthetically charged representations. The trope of the young king discursively operates by politically reformulating Martin from his victimhood and transforming him into a posthumously empowered cultural subject. The creative production and cultural orientation of Martin’s martyrdom recuperates Blackness as an essential resource for

Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin 183

use in instances of boundary work, and for the construction of the actuality of Blackness and the lived experiences of Black people. The social construction of Martin’s martyrdom involves practices and processes that subvert the gaze of whiteness and disrupt Western aesthetic conventions. As I demonstrate in my analysis, this transpires through creative practices and decolonising strategies, that are predicated on the centring of the Black subject and Black cultural aesthetics that operate as collectively constructed codes of representation and, thus, become the cultural capital that drives the making of Martin’s martyrdom and provide for its aesthetic contours. From this positionality, Martin’s martyrdom, therefore, is understood as a socially constructed and discursive practice that draws from, and builds upon, the intellectual, artistic, and cultural movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, namely, the Black Arts Movement, Black Power Movement, pan- Africanism, and the Civil Rights Movement.

As already discussed in Chapter 2, the concept of martyrdom draws from a long tradition of different religious and cultural traditions, and is a highly contested field within the respective religions (see Dehghani & Horsch, 2014). My conceptualisation of digitally mediated martyrdom follows, and builds upon, the intellectual framework established by Buckner and Khatib (2014). Through this framework I argue the social construction of Martin’s martyrdom transcends traditional religious connotations by invoking universal values and represents the popular and intersectional struggle for social justice to make all Black lives matter. This understanding also incorporates, here, a cultural situating of political martyrdom in the American tradition, as I have demonstrated in section 3.2. The production of martyr narratives, here, through the entwinement of creativity, politics, digitally mediated communication processes, and Blackness as aesthetics and identity, brings forward new political frames of interpretation and articulation, as well as new possibilities for mediating transnational digital solidarities (Sumiala and Korpiola, 2017).

I make the argument, here, that martyrdom in America, as a contemporary and distinctly political aesthetic, bears strong correlation with the politicised martyr narratives as made manifest in my exploratory analysis of Khaled Said in Chapter 2, and that derive from the popular struggles for self-determination and dignity as emerged during the 2010-2011 Arab uprisings (see Buckner & Khatib,

184 Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin

2013; Sumiala & Korpiola, 2017), as well as the Palestinian Resistance Movement since the Second Intifada (see Allen, 2006; Khalili, 2007). From this place of awareness, martyrdom is understood as a political discourse, which is socially constructed, ascribed, and publicly articulated by people (who claim martyrs in the name of their struggle for social justice). These processes decentre authoritative and religious hierarchies, as well as “normative definitions” (Dehghani & Horsch, 2014, p. 7), of who is able to be claimed and venerated as a martyr. On Instagram, I explored how Martin was ultimately made a martyr, as the young king, through digitally mediated and ‘ritualised communication practices’ (Sumiala, 2012, p. 89) that aided the construction and sustainment of imagined communities of collective resistance. From this perspective, in the paragraphs that follow I draw out and discuss particular examples that demonstrate how Martin was transformed from his victimhood, was visually and linguistically constituted, and discursively sustained, as a martyr of the BLM movement. Reflecting on these dynamics permits for the examination of the cultural forms and social practices through which digitally mediated martyrdom comes into being, and operates as a politically productive and transformative catalyst of social mobilisation.

In the eight years since Martin’s killing my analysis observes the countless images, artworks, and creative acts of performance that have commemorated Martin, and attest to his status as a venerated martyr and saint. Such works, including martyr posters and martyr murals, have been produced through both everyday artistic practices of people and professional artistic commemoration; when uploaded to Instagram they provide a genealogy of Martin’s martyrology and as they circulate among digital publics they become part of the digital archive that sustains Martin’s visual legacy. As one part of a chapter does not provide the necessary space to engage in a detailed discussion of such phenomenon, I have chosen to focus my analysis on resonant examples that illustrate the diverse visual vocabulary and artistic conventions that blur the boundaries between traditional and contemporary modes of representations, and does so in ways that both draw from, and decentre, Western aesthetic hegemonies to position Martin within the field of power.

My findings demonstrate that the transformative journey of Martin’s ascension to martyrdom operated through a variety of complex rituals and cultural practices, and which occurred in multiple stages that parallel the four phases of key

Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin 185

events identified in the chronology of events (see Appendix 1: Chronology of Key Events). My analysis begins with a discussion of initial visual themes that emerged in 2012 and I trace the iconographical evolution and permutation of images from 2013 until 2019. In doing so, I describe and explain the operative processes and creative practices through which the narrative of Martin’s martyrdom was socially negotiated, visually constituted, and discursively sustained through recurrent and ritualised processes of telling, retelling, and reinforcing.

Figure 5.9. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured a Photoshop remix depicting Trayvon Martin as an angel riding horseback. It was retrieved from Instagram.

On Instagram people engaged in transforming Martin from his corporeal bodily suffering and victimhood through the appropriation of religious and spiritual iconography. For example, a theme I observed as beginning in March 2012 were recurrent depictions of Martin as an angel, which took form primarily through Photoshop remix culture and illustration. While I note the multiple posts depicting Martin as an angel I also observed that such depictions both quote and divert from traditional religious conventions, namely Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, as well as Renaissance artistic conventions. For example, one Photoshop remix reappropriated a family snapshot of Martin that depicts him riding a chestnut-coloured horse in a farm setting, the remix (see Figure 5.9) depicts Martin wearing the same clothes (an orange Reeses T-shirt and black jeans), he has two white wings spread wide and rides horseback across a calm lake, in the backdrop a golden light is cast across the sky.

Another remix appropriates a family snapshot of Martin that depicts him standing alone, wearing a formal black suit with a pale green accents (tie, waistcoat, and pocket square), his hands are placed in front of his body grasping the suits’ lapels, the remix adorns Martin with two white wings that rest comfortably behind him, his body is outlined with a white spiritual-like aura and Martin is positioned against a dark backdrop with red abstract characters in the top of the frame. In another illustrative variation, Martin is hand drawn and depicted in the centre of the frame, his head bows sorrowfully and eyes are cast downward, he is wearing blue jeans and a light grey hoodie, with the hood up, as it intersects with a halo floating

186 Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin

above, Martin appears with two white wings positioned restfully behind him, in his left hand he holds a packet of Skittles, in the right a can of iced-tea, and text is written across the front of his hoodie asking “why me?”.

Each of the aforementioned examples, among similar other variations, were recurrently circulated, primarily, though not exclusively, between the period shortly after Martin’s killing until the beginning of the murder trial in June 2013. This genre of imagery was often combined with discursive acts of commemorative remembrance such “we won’t forget you” #NeverForget, “rest in paradise”, #RIP and “justice for Trayvon”. Visually, while this genre of imagery quotes from religious and spiritual representations, and could be argued to have antecedents with Archangel Michael (or St. Michael the Archangel, often referred to as a warrior angel), the iconography departs from Western conventions in a number of ways. For example, none of the posts that appropriated Martin with wings also depicted him wearing flowing white robes, appearing cherub-like in tradition with Renaissance art forms, or floating above the earth as to assume a place in heaven or in the process of ascension to heaven. Most significantly, Martin is not aestheticised by visions of whiteness, nor does he appear in spirit form, rather, he retains a moral authority in physical form signifying a conceptual presence between earth and the sky and imaginatively manifests somewhere between divinity and commonness.

Figure 5.10. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured a black and white illustration depicting Trayvon Martin with Coptic style circle-halo and red Skittles to symbolise the shedding of his blood. It was retrieved from Instagram.

Occurring in a similar timeframe in 2012 soon after Martin’s killing, I note the emergence of multiple posts appropriating halos or circular disks surrounding Martin’s head. For example, one recurrent line-drawn illustration (see Figure 5.10) is a black and white variation on Martin’s hoodie image, it similarly depicts Martin wearing his hoodie, with the hood up, and he holds the same gaze and facial expression as in the initial image. However, the illustration deviates by depicting Martin with his right arm stretched out toward the viewer as he pours out Skittles from a packet held in his left hand, the Skittles (coloured in red) spill into the palm of his right hand. Martin is adorned with a modern adaption of a Coptic style circle-

Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin 187

halo50 that is in contact with his body and surrounds his face and head to indicate that divine light flows from within him. The illustration signifies the beginning of Martin’s martyrdom; the red Skittles symbolise the shedding of his blood and the incorporation of Coptic51 artistic style symbolises a distinct variance from Western styles of iconography that portray halos usually in gold, and as crowns or discs that hover above the head of religious and saint-like figures. This same illustration travelled offline in 2012 where it was remediated as a streetart martyr mural in Oakland, California, tagged with “justice for Trayvon”, images of the mural were then captured on mobile devices and uploaded to Instagram where the images further circulated.

In another halo variation, which emerged in 2014 after the killing of Brown and became a recurrent feature in multiple posts across the dataset, a hand-drawn illustration depicts Martin (right) standing arm-in-arm alongside Till (middle) and Brown, all three are depicted wearing the same clothes as worn in their most prominent pre-death portraits, each are adorned with a gold halo that floats above their heads in a nod to Western-style religious iconography, in the background is a solid pale blue sky, they are smiling as if they are brothers in arms in heaven. A recurrent declaration made in response to this illustration referred to Martin, Till, and Brown as “three kings” and “saints”. In another multi-media halo variation that emerged in 2018, Martin is depicted as St. Trayvon Martin52 and is venerated in the annual canonisation of saints at the Church in the Cliff, a progressive Baptist church in Dallas, Texas. The church declared him “a martyr in resistance to white supremacy and gun violence, resistance to the injustice that God deplores”. In a post circulated on Instagram Martin is depicted among four other canonised saints in the 2018 Saint Series, he is wearing his red T-shirt with the Hollister logo removed and the image is cropped to follow the contours of his upper body, a decorative gold ribbon is placed beneath him that reads “St. Trayvon Martin”, and he is adorned with

50 See Yosra El Gendi and Marco Pinfari, (2020) for an example of scholarly work that details the contemporary iconographic and iconological content of politically-themed Coptic art.

51 The work of Egyptian artist Victor A. Fakhoury illustrates new iconographical trends within Coptic art that emphasises aesthetic practices of contemporary martyrdom together with symbolic elements drawn from Pharaonic Egypt. See https://nilescribes.org/2020/02/15/victor-fakhoury-neo-coptic-icons/

52To view the commemoration of Trayvon Martin by the Church in the Cliff see: http://churchinthecliff.org/st-trayvon-martin/

188 Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin

a radiant sun-like halo that connects to his body and has symbolic antecedents with Coptic art and ancient Egyptian sun-coloured spheres.

Figure 5.11. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured a coloured illustration of Trayvon Martin evoking the metaphor of the last supper (see pp. 187-188 for a detailed description). It was retrieved from Instagram.

As previously discussed, following the killing of Martin the hoodie became a memetic and omnipresent symbol of embodied and expressive forms of social, political, and cultural protest. On Instagram I note, beginning in March 2012, how the hoodie was also transformed through creative practice into a religious signifier of purity and power that draws from centuries of Christian art. For example, one significant and recurrent illustration (see Figure 5.11) depicts Martin in a scene from the convenience store from where he purchased the Skittles and iced-tea. He is standing amid isles either side that are filled with other foodstuffs and intersect in the vanishing point with the outline of his body, Martin is backlit by light emanating from three transparent windows (bordered by metal frames) of a celling-to-floor refrigerator containing milk and beverages, he is depicted wearing a light grey hoodie, with the hood up, his left arm stretches forward toward the viewer and in his open palm he holds a packet of Skittles, his right arm also stretches forward and holds a can of iced-tea.

The illustration is a metaphor for Martin’s last supper and has antecedents with Leonardo da Vinci’s Renaissance painting, the Last Supper, which depicts the night before Jesus’s crucifixion. Decoding the illustration, Martin’s light grey hoodie provides a visual comparison to the white robes that often define Jesus’s holy clothing, Skittles and iced-tea act as metaphorical signifiers of the Eucharist representing the body of Martin through the symbolic narrative of the body and blood of Jesus. Here, Martin appears to the viewer in the knowledge of the religious proverb “this is my body, this is my blood”. The Skittles and iced-tea can also be considered as allegories of martyrdom for which the holding of a palm frond acts as visual attribute of a victory of the spirt over the flesh of the body, and in ancient Egypt the palm frond represents immortality.

Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin 189

In another illustrative variation that emerged in March 2012 and depicts the hoodie as a religious garb, Martin is portrayed amid a heaven-like scene of blue skies and clouds, he wears an olive-green tunic as a flowing white robe is drawn up over his shoulders by Jesus who stands behind Martin wearing the same white robe. Written across the front of the illustration is “Trayvon’s new hoodie” signifying that Martin’s hoodie has been transformed into a metaphorical garment necessary for his entrance into heaven as a god. In a later illustrative variation that emerged in 2016 to commemorate the anniversary of Martin’s death, Martin is depicted as a monk wearing a cowl that covers his head. In a darkened monochrome drawing, Martin appears centre of the frame looking on at the viewer, his cowl is black, the image bears less visual familiarity with Western aesthetic traditions and pictorial illustrations of Jesus and a closer resemblance to Egyptian Monasticism and Coptic artistic traditions that depict the martyred St. Moses the Black. St. Moses was a Black Ethiopian, a reformed slave and sinner, who converted to Christianity and was venerated as a Christian martyr in northern Egypt in the fourth century, in modern adaptations of his martyr narrative he is interpreted as a Black saint of nonviolence.

Figure 5.12. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured Senegalese Afrocentric artist Omar Victor Diop in a self-portrait image of Trayvon Martin as part of his exhibition “Liberty: A Universal Chronology of Black Protest” (see p. 189 for a detailed description). It was retrieved from Instagram.

Skittles and iced-tea also emerged as abstracted symbols of Martin’s bodily death and martyrdom and became a recurrent theme used in artistic mourning and commemoration rituals. I observed the emergent practice occurring in posts on Instagram in July 2013 in the immediate aftermath of the trial verdict and its continuance as a popular memetic expression across the dataset. Skittles were appropriated in everyday and professional artistic acts of embodied death re- enactment through which people transposed their bodies in place of Martin’s serving as a bridging between the personal and the political and the urban space with the digital. For example, one image that was circulated depicted a group of youth, wearing hoodies-up with heads bowed as they gathered around Skittles laid on the ground mimicking the outline of Martin’s body position as portrayed in the post- mortem image. A can of iced-tea also surrounds the body outline and the post is

190 Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin

tagged with #IAmTrayvonMartin. In other posts in 2013 images depict people re- enacting Martin’s death through acts of embodied self-performance by laying face- up and prostrate on the ground surrounded by Skittles and iced-tea that spills from their bodies like the blood of Martin.

In 2017 another commemorative ritual emerged in posts depicting an artist, clothed like Martin with their hoodie-up, sitting on the ground with their right arm raised as they pour out a can of iced-tea onto the ground below that is covered in Skittles. In 2018, Senegalese Afrocentric artist Omar Victor Diop commemorated

Martin in a self-portrait image53 as part of his exhibition “Liberty: A Universal Chronology of Black Protest” in the United Kingdom. In a post that circulated on Instagram (see Figure 5.12), Diop reinterprets Martin’s killing by placing himself in the body of Martin, he is dressed like Martin, Diop lays in a fetal-like-position surrounded by Skittles in the pan-African colours of green, gold and red, contoured in the shape of a mandorla (a spiritual almond-shaped frame), beneath the Skittles is a can of iced-tea and green foliage spawns red flowers amid a background of solid black to represent Black nationalism. Also notable here is the representation of the red flowers as a common symbol of blood and martyrdom. The image symbolically refers to Martin’s resurrection as a martyr in the Black struggle and challenges a monolithic narrativisation of Martin’s martyrdom by placing a central and personalised focus on Black identity, diasporic imagination, and the enduring political struggle.

This genre of death re-enactment through Skittles can be understood as introducing a new “global visual economy” (Andén-Papadopoulos, 2014) in the performative rituals of bearing witness to Martin’s death as embodied commemoration for the purpose of reshaping and redefining Black political consciousness. Building on the work of Deborah Poole54 (1997) and David

53 To see artist Omar Victor’s self-portrait image entitled “Trayvon Martin, 2012” as part of the exhibition “Liberty: A Universal Chronology of Black Protest” see: https://www.omarviktor.com/liberty?lightbox=dataItem-j3u91l6m2

54 Recasting the idea of visual culture, anthropologist Deborah Poole deploys the term “visual economy” (1997) to call attention to the way “visual images [are] part of a comprehensive organisation of people, ideas, and objects” (p. 8). This anthropological approach to visual images suggests that they are cultural and productive resources, social systems of meaning, and material objects that circulate in an economy made possible by productive social and political power relations.

Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin 191

Campbell55 (2007), Kari Andén-Papadopoulos (2014) invokes the notion of the post- 2001 “global visual economy” to focus on “citizen-camera witnessing” that permits new performative rituals of witnessing and that brings into being and provides people “with a new form of capital in producing testimony that has the potential to challenge and provide a counter-gaze to that of entrenched powers” (p. 758). Thus, the visual economy produced by Martin’s death re-enactment imagery brings into being people in disparate places, who may/or may not be part of the same culture, but come to form part of the same global visual economy of witnessing. This genre of death re- enactment imagery produces significant capital through performative participation and establishes “the conditions of possibility for a political response” (Campbell, 2007, p. 361). In this way Skittles and iced-tea operate as an “iconography of the flesh” (Schwartz, 2015) and provide identifying markers through which people can leverage the narrativisation of Martin’s martyrdom by reproducing his body’s cultural power through representational resources that extend beyond his bodily death and serve as martyr relics to be appropriated in future acts of personalised martyr commemoration and memorialisation.

Figure 5.13. has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured a black and white remixed image of Trayvon Martin wearing his hoodie, and Martin is adorned as the “young king” with the crow motif (in gold) of late Black artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. It was retrieved from Instagram.

As discussed, much of the discourse that transpired in the initial period (Phase 1) after Martin’s killing frequently expressed acts of remembrance such as “we won’t forget you” and “rest in peace”. In Phase 2, during the court trial and in the aftermath of the broadcasting of post-mortem images of Martin, religious and faith-based sentiment such as “have faith that God will deliver justice”, “praying for justice”, and recurrent anti-Zimmerman sentiment, emerged as resonant themes. In Phase 3, in the immediate aftermath of the trial, recurrent phrases such as “justice is

55 David Campbell (2007) invokes the idea of visual economy to understand images as discursive artefacts that have material effects and that circulate performatively within “transnational relations of exchange in which images are commodities” (p. 361). Campbell (ibid.) states the “idea of a visual economy signals the practices through which a place and its people is enacted and our response made possible.”

192 Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin

in God’s hands”, “God has the final say”, “Trayvon is in God’s hands”, #GodsGotYou, can be interpreted as marking the beginning of Martin’s social resurrection and redemption from a denial of justice, and that Martin’s ultimate judgement will be witnessed and determined by a higher power. Within a few days after the trial verdict and the beginning of the BLM movement, Martin’s discursive construction and ascension to martyr status transpired through recurrent sacral and empowered expressions such as “rest in power”, “Trayvon lives on”, and Martin was explicitly referred to as a “martyr”. In Phase 4, I observed how Martin became discursively solidified and sustained as a martyr through recurrent and popular expressions such as “young king”, “king Trayvon”, “saint Trayvon”, and the “boy king”, which were regularly tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, #BlackHistory, and #JusticeForTrayvon, and I note that his martyrdom was visually constituted, and sustained, through the iconography of gold crowns and Pharaonic symbolism.

For example, I observed multiple posts that employed Pharaonic symbolism and remixed imagery of the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun’s gold death mask with the image of Martin’s face, referring to Martin as “the boy king”. Other posts employed ancient Egyptian symbolism, for example, by appropriating and repurposing Martin’s hoodie with Nemes56 crowns, depicting Martin holding a flail57 and crook, as well as other symbols that depict royalty and deity in ancient Egypt, these became recurrent themes observed across the dataset. Formal artists also took up these forms of symbolism in their work and images were circulated by people in everyday posts on Instagram. One example that gained resonance in 2016 is an artwork by Roger Anthony58 entitled “King Trayvon”. In 2017, Tracey Martin continued the visual legacy of his son in a tattoo59 designed by artist Van Johnson that depicted Martin as the boy king; images of the tattoo were recurrently circulated in posts on Instagram and multiple media outlets also reported the story.

56 For context and background on Nemes crowns see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemes

57 For an illustration of a flail and a crook see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crook_and_flail

58 To view the work “King Trayvon” by Roger Anthony see: https://www.instagram.com/p/BEmZh69RLSX/

59To view the tattoo of Trayvon Martin depicted as the boy king see: https://www.instagram.com/p/BcGkcRCA_h7/?utm_source=ig_embed

Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin 193

The iconography of gold crowns was made manifest, significantly, through the appropriation and repurposing of the crown motif (see Figure 5.13), a famed and reoccurring symbol in the Afrocentric work of the late Black artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Basquiat employed the symbol of the crown to subvert the Eurocentric gaze by invoking political metaphors and challenging the cultural hegemony of the West, and he did so by depicting Black men as kings, saints and heroes, and linking Black culture and African diasporic imagination (see hooks, 2006). On Instagram the crown operated between the worlds of street graffiti, high art, and everyday popular culture in ways that forged a distinct visual vocabulary between continued Black resistance, love of Black identity, and social reorientation to Afrocentric imagination. For example, the crown was remixed in multimedia and illustrative posts to pay tribute to Martin as a “young king” and to assert that Black men “derive from kings” and are “Black gods”. Moreover, the crown motif provided a Black vernacular for people to link Martin’s killing with multiple other killings of Black youth. This was performed through the recurrent reappropriation of Basquiat’s phrase “Most Young Kings Get Their Head Cut Off” (from his work “Charles the First”, 1982) alongside the tagged names of multiple slain Black victims, thus, reclaiming historic violent narratives of slavery and colonialism, as Basquiat did, and connecting them with contemporary acts of racist violence and police brutality. Therefore, the reappropriation of Basquiat’s crown, in relation to the trope of the young king, speaks to the significance of everyday digital remix culture and demonstrates the continued cultural embeddedness and political resonance of Basquiat’s work within American popular culture.

The concept of referring to, and imagining, Black men and women as kings and queens is also a historic and recurrent theme in Afrocentric and Afrofuturism popular discourse (see Williams, 2003); the BLM movement discursively extends these themes in its charter for Black liberation (see Black Lives Matter, 2019). I link the resurgence of Afrocentric and Afrofuturism tropes in popular discourse on Instagram with the rise of BLM, and in conjunction with other everyday and creative performances, along with contributions that manifest formally in museums and art galleries, in music and hip-hop culture, and in media and entertainment franchises such as Marvel’s Black Panther and Luke Cage series (see Thrasher, 2015; Musoni, 2018). In other words, while the trope of the young king and the construction of

194 Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin

Martin’s martyrdom draws from cultural practices, religious symbols, and institutional performances, it extends beyond traditional and formal canonisation processes and into everyday uses of digital and social media technologies that enable people to participate in what Sumiala (2012, p. 104) describes as “civic mourning rituals” that produce new cultures of resistance.

Importantly, the iconography of the young king operates as a symbol of empowerment that discards redemptive suffering and “pseudocrucifixion” (Bey, 2015) of Black bodies like Martin by rejecting Western religious conventions and white supremacy that place a white Jesus or God at the centre of suffering and power. It does this by providing an “embodied response” (Pinn, 2010, p. 150) through a radical political aesthetic that places Black bodies at the centre of power, both materially and discursively. In doing so it simultaneously acknowledges the lived bodily suffering of Martin, while refusing further racist violence being committed against him by not turning him into a Jesus-like martyr and abstracting him from the historical and contemporary context of the BLM movement. Thus, the trope of young king and Martin’s discursive ascension to martyrdom can be understood as a digitally mediated and ritualised process of social revolutionary intervention, or creative insurgency (Kraidy, 2016), that decentres Western-centrism and racial domination by placing a central focus on Blackness, Black identity, and Black imagination for collective Black liberation. Moreover, it can be understood as part of the enduring struggle for freedom against oppression that operates through “loving Blackness as political resistance” (hooks, 2014, p. 20), and does so in ways that transform ways of seeing Blackness and modes of being Black. As hooks (ibid.) argues, loving Blackness creates the necessary conditions for Black people to “move against the forces of domination and death and reclaim Black life”.

5.3 CONCLUSION

Martin was not immediately declared a martyr, not by his family, the media, activists or the public. Rather, the transformation of Martin’s victimhood to martyrdom required much work and multiple actors. The unjust circumstances of Martin’s killing, nor his representation alone provide sufficient basis for understanding how Martin was transformed, posthumously, and operationalised to awaken a new era of

Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin 195

activism that has transpired through the BLM movement. The martyrology of Martin was memetically made, over time, through complex processes of social negotiation, performance, rearticulation, and importantly through discursive practices of visual mediation and remediation.

In this and the previous chapter, I have provided a chronological reading of key events following Martin’s killing in 2012 until the seven-year anniversary of his killing in 2019; and I established the key phases and tropes through which Martin was discursively constructed and visually transformed, in his posthumous identity, from victimhood to martyrdom. I did this by first showing and explaining how people performed acts of “creative insurgency” (Kraidy, 2016), through the affordances of digital remix culture, in which to establish Martin’s innocence in the face of hegemonic and racist culture. I then demonstrated how “collective identity” (Polletta & Jasper, 2001) was mobilised through the hoodie as a socially malleable and hybridised cultural artefact. Next, I described how a ‘common vernacular of resistance’ was created through digital counterculture by subverting and reversing stereotypes into rearticulations of power and authentic Black self-representation. I then explained how people participated in the “connective witnessing” (Mortensen, 2015) of Martin’s killing through digital media as a reflective and political act by producing and circulating new forms of witness testimony that created a connected “space of appearance” (Mirzoeff, 2017). Lastly, I showed how Martin’s martyrdom was visually and discursively constituted through creative and ‘ritualised communication practices’ (Sumiala, 2012) and was sustained by digitally mediated forms of Black representation and visual practice on Instagram.

My analysis has traced the genealogies of images and observed the discursive practices attached to them; I have discussed the hierarchies of particular images and noted the temporality and recurrence of images across the dataset; I have explained how images were operationalised to perform different communicative functions at different times and in relation to different events; and I have described in detail the multiple reactions that various images elicited and how their discursive functions reshaped meaning. My analysis cultivates a chronological understanding of the ways in which creative, contentious, and commemorative discourses were constructed, sustained, and situated in an emergent cycle of conversation on Instagram. Moreover, I have described and explained the ways in which the narrative framework of social

196 Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin

(in)justice, race and racism has evolved through discourse associated with images of Martin in combination with the #TrayvonMartin hashtag, and situated within the BLM movement since inception more broadly.

Of crucial significance in these processes were the family of Martin, activists, public figures, and everyday people who kept telling, retelling, and remaking the narrative of his unjust killing, in and via digital media, and offline, for local and global witnessing. In doing this, they performed as “injustice interpreters” (Olesen, 2018) by providing the necessary emotional, cultural, and political interpretive functions in which to transform Martin’s death from a personal tragedy and connect it with larger systems of injustice through which Martin’s story was able to resonate globally, and affectively. My analysis demonstrates the meaning, significance, and trajectory of Martin’s martyrdom was firmly linked with how he was, posthumously, constructed and sustained as a martyr through socialised, creative, politicised, and digitally mediated communicative practises. Beyond the examples presented in my analysis it is important to note that Martin (as evidenced in my dataset) has been commemorated by other transnational movements and activist communities in multiple countries including across the Middle East, Asia, Europe and Australia; Martin has been memorialised in an extensive amount of works of literature, music, art and film, and his posthumous image and memorisation continues to evolve. This demonstrates that the temporal and spatial dimensions of Martin’s martyrdom is readily translocative and made possible through the affordances of digital technologies that permit for the cultural transcendence and material transposition of his martyrdom from the local and into the global context.

In understanding how the circumstances of Martin’s killing became transformed and operationalised, first, in the context of the “Justice For Trayvon Martin” movement and, subsequently, in the context of the BLM movement, it is necessary to conceptualise popular social movements not as spontaneous eruptions (see Blumer, 1969; Tilly, 1978). Though, they are regularly marked by visible and contentious events that spark mass protest, they are constructed and sustained through networks, affective commitments, and spaces that enable dispersed individuals to collectivise around common grievances, purposes, and solidarities in the pursuit of social justice. Prior to and during the Civil Rights Movement, Black churches and Black colleges provided important institutions and networks through

Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin 197

which Blacks regularly interacted and communicated (see Freeman, 1999, p. 9). In the current era of BLM, Mitchell and Williams (2017) argue while Black people are among those most likely to identify with a formal religious affiliation, young Black activists are organising and building networks outside of any religious institution.

Black activists are doing this by taking-up the enduring struggle of Black resistance and liberation by protesting in the streets, and, importantly, through the affordances of visual and digital media technologies that provide everyday spaces for “collective radical imagining” (Lim, 2018, p. 106) of alternative futures from which practices of resistance can emerge, grow, and spread. Crucial in this process is placing a central focus on the Black body, enabling for performances of authentic Black self-representation, and understanding embodied lived experience. This can only be achieved through discursive and creative practices that decentre Western- centrism, structures of racial domination and religious hierarchies. If Black bodies, like Martin’s, are to matter they must be made to matter in ways that represent their Blackness, reflect the realities of their lived corporeal experiences, and make consciously visible the fact that Black bodies remain at risk in a continuum of anti- Black violence. Simultaneously, making Black lives matter is about rejecting oppressive images of the Black body as violent, unfamiliar, and disposable. The practice of digitally mediated martyrdom brings forth these possibilities by enabling participation and intersectionality in the democratic process, and by forging affective commitments through the affordances of visual and social media technologies to rearticulate images of Blackness in its full humanity—in its pain, mourning, despair, rebellion, resistance, strength, creativity, humour, intelligence, desire, hope, joy, beauty, and love.

198 Chapter 5: The Martyrdom of Trayvon Martin

Chapter 6: Conclusion

6.1 CONTRIBUTION TO KNOWLEDGE

This thesis has proposed and explored the concept of ‘digitally mediated martyrdom’ to designate the emergence of a new kind of visually oriented, socially constructed, and ritualised protest dynamic that emerges around instances of unjust death. Specifically, it has examined the discursive practices enacted by activists and ordinary people that contribute to the production, circulation, and transformation of digital images generated in response to the deaths of innocent civilians at the hands of police brutality and to situations of political injustice. Since martyrdom has always been a ritualised and mediated visual communication practice (Sumiala & Korpiola, 2017), the task of the study has been, therefore, to critically examine what the affordances of digital and social media technologies permit for the visual continuum and contemporary deployment of the symbol and narrative of martyrdom as a contemporary political practice.

In establishing the study’s scope and significance, I argued that digitally mediated martyrdom appeared to represent the emergence of a new and transnational protest dynamic that has been made manifest in both non-Western and Western cultures of activism. That is, increasingly, posthumously circulated digitally mediated images of victims are deployed within digital activist cultures to make death globally visible, to make it contestable, to mobilise popular resistance against systems of social and political injustice, and to sustain resistance communities. These practices represent a shift in the ways the trope of martyrdom is being deployed, creatively transformed, made secular, and politically productive as a transnational archetype of protest.

The study arrived at this understanding through a mix of theoretical development and critical empirical investigation. The process began in Chapter 2, first, by introducing and explaining the necessary theoretical vocabulary of digitally mediated martyrdom. This proceeded by integrating theoretical approaches and debates from across disciplinary boundaries, and beyond Western-centric scholarship. I then applied the theoretical and conceptual framework to the exploratory example of Khaled Said and investigated how his posthumous image was deployed as a martyr trope during the 2010-2011 Egyptian uprisings. The empirical reasoning was guided by textual and

Chapter 6: Conclusion 199

critical cultural analysis that was performed on six publicly available images retrieved from Facebook, Twitter, and mainstream media platforms. It established that as activists and ordinary people appropriated the existing digital images of Said invariably those images were transformed visually and materially, spatially, and temporally. This transpired through recurrent and creative processes of mediation, appropriation, remediation and reappropriation, and contributed to the democratisation and secularisation of Said’s martyr image. These practices contributed not only to the transformation of existing images of Said, they contributed to the production of a new kind of memetic martyr image that travels digitally and materially to produce new meanings, is put into use for new sociopolitical purposes, and is deployed in new media contexts.

In Chapter 3 I expanded the theoretical and methodological approach developed in Chapter 2 to the explanatory case study on Trayvon Martin, and I investigated how his posthumous image has been deployed as a martyr figure in the contemporary struggle for Black social justice in America since 2012. First, I provided the background and context for the study. I then described the methods used to retrieve and analyse 1819 publicly available posts (digital images and their textual metadata) from Instagram. I retrieved posts through a combination of the scroll back method (Robards & Lincoln, 2017) and digital ethnography approaches (Pink et al., 2016). This approach enabled for a deep immersion and chronological observation of how posthumous digital images of Martin were emerging and recurrently permutating among digital publics on Instagram. It proved valuable for investigating the multivocal nature of discursive tensions that were enacted through particular digital images (or set of digital images), when and how, and in relation to other external events. A close reading was conducted on 943 posts through a combination of discourse, textual, and critical cultural analysis.

Chapter 4 and 5 presented the analysis of the Martin case study. This was structured around five tropes with the first three detailed in Chapter 4 (‘childhood saint and youthful innocent’, ‘everyday teenager’, and ‘Black thug’), and the remaining two in Chapter 5 (‘martyred body’ and ‘young king’). Chapter 5 concluded by reflecting on the study’s findings. The analysis traced the evolution and transformation of Martin’s posthumous image over seven years (2012-2019) and interrogated the discursive practices and social processes that reclaimed Martin from his victimhood

200 Chapter 6: Conclusion

and reincarnated him as a martyr of the Black Lives Matter movement. The study revealed the complex, contested, and commemorative discourses that were invoked to perform counter-discourse against historic racism and hegemonic narratives that sought to position Martin’s Black body as ungrievable and a threat to the social order. Such practices contributed to a new Black vernacular of radical resistance and aesthetic political representation that decentred Western-centrism by claiming the right for Martin’s life, and therefore all Black lives, to matter. This was made manifest through the memetic and affective dimensions of activist culture attached to posthumous images of Martin that were central to the making of his martyrdom; it emphasised the significance of processes of Black collective identity construction, creative cultural production, and authentic articulation of lived experiences. Importantly, the analysis demonstrated the different visual economies in which pre-death and post-mortem images operated and which aided the construction of witnessing communities and digital publics of solidarity and resistance on Instagram.

Therefore, through the worked example of Said I have demonstrated that the phenomenon of digitally mediated martyrdom first emerged as a recurrent communicative practice of activism against police brutality and oppressive regimes within the 2010-2011 Egyptian uprisings. The study on Martin established that the practice of digitally mediated martyrdom extends beyond the Arab world and has been made manifest in the West as a contemporary activist practice to mobilise resistance against police brutality and to perceived political injustice. From these empirical findings, I have made the arguments that a) activists and ordinary people increasingly appropriate posthumous images of unjust victims to construct injustice symbols; b) that injustice symbols are further transformed through acts of creative insurgency; c) for which mediation, appropriation, remediation and reappropriation are central to the memetic dynamics of contemporary participatory protest culture; d) that cultures of connectivity and collectivity are necessary for understanding both the technical affordances and the affective dynamics that drive mobilisation processes; e) that digital affordances permit for the emergence of multiple spaces of appearance that create visibility and enable a digital co-presence between physical bodies and a visual co- presence with death; f) that connective witnessing presents a new form of testimony and reconfigures the relationship between personalised political expression and

Chapter 6: Conclusion 201

connective and collective action; and that g) ritualised communication practices extend the spatial and temporal dimensions of protest and sustain resistance communities.

Importantly, I have demonstrated through the findings of the study that the emergent affordances of digital and social media technologies impact and shape the possibilities of martyrdom as a digitally mediated performance of ritualised action and mobilising force. These findings are twofold: on the one hand it invites a critical rethinking of the meaning and nature of martyrdom as an emergent social process and of its enactment in political activist discourse during and post 2010-2011 Arab uprisings era. On the other hand, it develops nuanced insight into the growing role and complexity of digitally mediated images that are deployed in emerging configurations of social contestation, political resistance, and transnational activism.

Empirically the study contributes to the fields of visual politics, digital activism, political communications, and social movement studies from a multidisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective. It does this through an investigation of visual cultures of activism and protest communication across the non-Western and Western divide. Moreover, it provides nuanced understanding of the critical functions and increasingly prominent role that digital images that depict brutal violence play in shaping social action and political discourse. I achieved this by exploring the practices and processes that work to make visible unjust death and its aftermath in order to better understand its politics. It challenges researchers in these fields to bridge disciplinary traditions and incorporate new methodological approaches. This is necessary for investigating and comprehending the ways visual forms of communication not only shape how violence, social contentions, and conflict is seen, experienced, and felt. Rather, for critically understanding how sociopolitical discourses are shaped and enacted in and through digitally mediated images, how these dynamics help mobilise popular protests, and how they operate across the political spectrum. It also contributes to the field of internet research by investigating how specific cultures of activism and digital publics come into being on Instagram through various interactions of solidarity, commemoration, contention, and creative mutability, and addresses the paucity of activist research on the platform to-date (Highfield & Leaver, 2016). Beyond academia, this research could offer valuable insight for informing activist practice and for civil society organisations, developmental NGOs and political campaigning organisations. The research also has the potential for broader engagement with media,

202 Chapter 6: Conclusion

technology, and policy bodies that engage in the process of advising and formulating policy and governance decisions that shape the changing environment of social media platforms. Importantly, this study contributes to a growing body of work focused on documenting and archiving visual representations of conflict and revolt in the Middle East and North Africa region and in Black activism in the post-2011 era.

Theoretically, I have shown how digitally mediated martyrdom can contribute to advancing contemporary understandings of how martyr narratives are visually made manifest and secular in popular social justice movements. The framework of digitally mediated martyrdom developed here through the worked example of Said and as applied to the explanatory case of Martin, however, has been developed in mind as transferrable to other contexts and where it could be systematically applied to other empirical cases. Other significant unjust deaths the framework could be applied to include rape victim Jyoti Singh (2012, India, Justice for Joyti), slain Black youth Mike Brown (2014, America, Black Lives Matter), killed Gaza medic Razan al-Najjar (2018, Palestine, Great March of Return), fatally shot protestor Mohamed Mattar (2018-2019, Sudan, Sudanese Revolution), prematurely deceased doctor and silenced whistle-blower Li Wenliang (2020, China, coronavirus COVID-19 disease pandemic), femicide victim Ingrid Escamilla (2020, Mexico, feminist Ni una menoa (not one woman less) movement and Un Dia Sin Nostras (a day without us) movement, and murdered Black victim of police brutality George Floyd (2020, America, Black Lives Matter, among others. Each of these unjust deaths generated mass protests and underscore new and emergent trends in the mediation of martyr narratives. These cases serve to illustrate that the phenomenon of digitally mediated martyrdom is a recurrent practice that can be observed across contexts and cultures, each individually offering nuances and concrete practices of resistance.

The theoretical vocabulary underpinning digitally mediated martyrdom helps problematise existing approaches to the study of mediated death and martyrdom within political activism, and beyond Western-centric and religious approaches. It advances a terminology that builds on existing scholarly works to contribute to the development of new empirical understandings of the phenomenon. Specifically, it advances the Arab Spring martyr model proposed by Buckner and Khatib (2014) by demonstrating that the posthumous images of Said and Martin were recurrently appropriated, transformed, and deployed for commemorative purposes and to mobilise political

Chapter 6: Conclusion 203

dissent in ways that reflected new developments in the deployment of the martyr figure. The study reflects the fact that, posthumous, digitally mediated images of Said and Martin, respectively, were operationalised by people through participatory driven and memetic practices that manifested around the central claims of injustice, human rights abuses, and collective identification.

The contemporary figure of the martyr is, therefore, discursive and material. The mediation and witnessing of the martyr now, primarily, takes place not through traditional instruments or institutions, but through digital and social media technologies that make the figure of the martyr witnessable to global publics and does so in deliberately global forms. These deliberately global forms rely on human-centred practices that mediate martyr narratives as modern, non-violent, and ‘unintentional’. These practices aim to portray the martyr as a common identity of the collective struggle that signals to the witnessing public that the martyr is like “us” and relates to “our” universal values of human rights, freedom, dignity, and self-determination. The portrayal of the martyr, in this way, omits religious discourse in favour of humanist narratives that presents the martyr as a once ‘ordinary’ person and, thus, then is made to appear like many other youth, both non-Western and Western. The discourse of digitally mediated martyrdom, therefore, is brought into being and sustained through human-centred thought and action that is premised on digital participation and creative reappropriation of existing images that craft new meaning into martyr narratives. This reflects that both the meaning and symbolisation of the martyr figure has evolved beyond traditional religious or nationalist causes. Rather, the figure of the martyr is now memetically made, and this martyr-making is a political act that constitutes an embodied response to injustice. I argue, digitally mediated martyrdom is increasingly being deployed to represent the popular struggle for social justice, to radically reimagine alternative futures, and to rearticulate and redress systems of injustice. Digitally mediated martyrdom is politics by new means.

I have drawn from Mortensen’s (2015) work on connective witnessing to advance scholarly thinking when trying to understand what digital affordances permit for the visual continuum and deployment of the martyr figure in the contemporary context. Mortensen’s work encourages us to rethink the idea of witnessing in the current condition in which the practice of connective witnessing reconfigures the relationship between personalised political expression and connective and collective

204 Chapter 6: Conclusion

action. Empirically I have demonstrated how activists and ordinary people participate in the process of capturing, uploading, and circulating images of violent death and injustice on social media which contributes to new cultures of connectivity and information flows beyond state control and mainstream media accounts. These discursive practices and complex social processes play a constitutive role in not only making death visible, but in making death matter i.e. giving otherwise invisible deaths a space where they can appear as grievable lives (Butler, 2009). Digitally mediated images like that of Said and Martin that are connected by hashtags such as #WeAreAllKhaledSaid and #WeAreAllTrayvonMartin and circulate among global publics speak to the veracity of digital culture in producing new ways of seeing unjust death. This marks a definitive change from the way witnessing has traditionally been conceptualised within the discourse of martyrdom. It constitutes the emergence of a new witnessing testimony of martyrdom that digitally sustains the martyred body and enables an interactive and persistent co-presence with death. In turn, it creates a transnational space in which the martyred body can appear and travel spatially and temporally into subsequent performances of creative dissent.

As the worked example of Said and explanatory analysis of Martin shows, post- mortem images that explicitly reveal unjust death and bodily suffering rarely travel alone in digital culture. Rather, they are frequently combined with other pre-death images of victims as a means to symbolise and humanise them as a life that mattered and deserved protection, and to contest the unjust and premature nature of their death. Drawing from Sumiala and Korpiola’s (2017, p. 61) work on the visual aesthetics of mediated Muslim martyrdom, the study explored how Said was constructed, first, as an injustice symbol made manifest through the juxtaposing of a pre-death image that presented him as a once ‘living’ body, and though a post-mortem image that presented him as a ‘tortured’ body. As discussed in the analysis (in Chapter 2) this occurred through the direction action of Said’s brother, Ahmed, who shifted both post-mortem and pre-death images of Said into the public domain and juxtaposed them as a frame that spoke directly to the sense of innocence (Said alive) and injustice (Said’s bodily suffering). Indeed, the analysis found the initial juxtaposition of death and suffering mattered and permitted the engendering of moral shock among global witnesses, which aided the formation of digital solidarities and the performance of “civic mourning rituals” (Sumiala, 2012, p. 105).

Chapter 6: Conclusion 205

However, as was revealed in the study of Martin there were no post-mortem images available for public circulation at the time of his killing in 2012, rather, post- mortem images only emerged publicly in 2013 during the murder trial. In the days following Martin’s killing the Martin family made available to the media a series of pre-death images with two images (Martin wearing a red Hollister T-shirt and one with him wearing a hoodie) emerging as those most prominently appropriated in initial media coverage, as well as in social media posts. The pre-death images of Martin were frequently juxtaposed alongside images of the perpetrator, George Zimmerman, whose image was subsequently appropriated to serve as the injustice frame in pro-Martin discourse and liberal media coverage. Importantly, the Martin family served as intimate injustice interpreters through their persistent presence in the media, in their work as activists, and notably as grieving parents who rendered the killing of their son less abstract for global audiences.

The pre-death images of Said and Martin, respectively, attained a universal visual hierarchy and played a particularly dynamic role in the construction of their status as a martyr and in the sustainment of their political productiveness. The pre- death images of Said and Martin not only provided an aestheticised image of death that was able to globally resonate and be visually transformed as a memetic resource for subsequent political protest; it also offered an interpretive framework for people to project their future desires of hope, freedom, and dignity that translated into transnational discourses of social justice. These communicative practices mutually reinforced and constituted the enduring image through which Said and Martin, respectively, were made a martyr. This reflects how aesthetic political preferences do play a key role in the visual culture of death and martyrdom. For example, the morally shocking post-mortem image provided the narrative framework for constructing Said and Martin, respectively, as victims, while the pre-death image provided an aesthetic and interpretive visual terrain for the construction of Said and Martin as resurrected martyrs who were liberated from the injustice of their bodily suffering.

These dynamics are particularly important for considering what and how particular images become globally resonant (or not) and for understanding how digitally mediated martyrdom operates locally within the context of Egyptian and Arab visual cultures, as well as transnationally in the context of Western visual cultures. Research has underlined significant differences between the visual culture of Arab and

206 Chapter 6: Conclusion

Western media contexts, and of the aesthetic preferences for how dead victims are represented posthumously (see Aulich, 2015; Drainville, 2015). Notably, Western cultures preference aestheticised images of death, or the non-appearance of death (see Campbell, 2004), while Arab cultures exhibit both imagery that can be considered as aesthetic and unaesthetic (or gruesome) representations of death and suffering. Yet, activists and people are increasingly infiltrating this process from a grassroots level though the affordances of digital and social media technologies in ways that challenge and subvert mainstream media control and state-sanctioned cultural production. In turn, this challenges not only what images are made visible and how, it contributes to how visual hierarchies are constituted and contested. These dynamics also hold the potential to transform the ways death is made visible or invisible in social media in both Western and non-Western visual cultures of resistance.

6.2 LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH

This study has incorporated different methodological approaches to examine digitally mediated images; however, it is subject to some limitations. The analytical focus of the study has been situated in the digital environment and the analysis has concentrated on the content of publicly available digital images and social media posts (i.e. digital images and their accompanying textual commentary). My primary focus was to study resonant and recurrent visual conventions that manifest in digitally mediated images, as well as the discursive practices and social processes attached to digitally mediated images. The focus on the site of digital images––and the observational analysis of them within the digital and social media platform of their emergence and circulation––also points to an obvious limitation of the research design: the omission of participant interviews and offline observations. This is in part, because it was not the objective of the research; and, in part because of the conditions of ethical approval imposed on the study and to protect users privacy.

Hence, further research aimed at examining online and offline practices and intentional aesthetic tactics in relation to digitally mediated martyrdom could incorporate mixed methods to interview activists, artists, and social media users who are involved in the co-creation of content. Such methods could also provide avenues for better understanding the mobilising and affective role that digitally mediated

Chapter 6: Conclusion 207

images play within popular social justice movements, and within global visual politics more broadly. Moreover, the inclusion of such methods could provide for more critical empirical analysis of how particular digital images gain popular resonance and reproduce consensus within movements; or, are obscured either through internal contentions of the movement, practices of censorship, or due to discrepancy or discord with dominant political aesthetics that result in struggles over the development of narrative forms and represented political imaginaries. Together, these methods would permit for closer scrutiny of the manifestations of power, politics, and everyday popular culture that operate in and through digitally mediated images. Future research, therefore, should seek to understand the dynamics of digitally mediated images that both produce cohesion and make visible the political aesthetics that are contested, reshaped, and are discarded in different spatial and temporal dimensions of protest.

As outlined in Chapter 2, a limitation of this research has been its focus on agentic communication and practices of self-mediation ahead of examining how social media platforms enact social and political power, and the implications this presents for activist communication and visual culture. Investigating user practices is one part of an important research agenda. Another part is investigating the technical choreographing of visibility and invisibility, and the intermediary role played by platforms as they moderate content and define the boundaries of what visual content is acceptable and prohibited. Content moderation practices and policies have consequences and theses consequences can produce a particular set of ethical, cultural, social, and political implications. The mediation of images of death and violent imagery pervade digital visual culture, be that as a result of terrorism, humanitarian suffering, murder, suicide, and funerary practices, among others. Moderating graphic images of violence and death is one genre of images that generates a particular set of problematics around the matter, central to which are questions of in what contexts, cultures, and instances is it appropriate to allow such images? And, what are the implications for disallowing or removing such content? It also raises ethical and legal questions over the rights of deceased victims and of their posthumous depiction in content e.g. what of the right to be forgotten or remembered online? Who gets to decide on such matters?

This is of particular significance when struggles emerge between a deceased victim’s family or state officials, who may wish for content to be withheld from public

208 Chapter 6: Conclusion

view, and activists, human rights advocates and ordinary people, who feel it necessary to appropriate such content to highlight abuses and to call for justice. This is of specific importance for people living under oppressive regimes who assert the right to use visual social media to expose violent abuses of power—like the family of Khaled Said—and people who use the affordances of visual social media as both a survival tactic and documentary practice. This has been demonstrated in a number of cases raised through the BLM movement (and beyond) including the live streaming of the fatal police shooting of Philando Castile60 in 2016, and the eyewitness testimony recorded on a mobile phone that captured the death of Eric Garner61 by police chokehold in 2014.

However, the reliance on algorithmic content moderation of death and violent imagery is deficient for performing moderation with cultural accuracy and contextual nuance e.g. detecting who is the perpetrator and who is the victim, who is recording to survive and who is recording to enact violence is a demanding task for artificial intelligence to assess. Moreover, the development and enactment of human content moderation policies around the mediation of death and posthumous images on social media platforms is also fraught with inconsistences and errors (see Notopoulos, 2019). While user practices contribute to making visible particular images of death and posthumous content, it is also critical to consider how algorithms play a role in constructing visual hierarchies around particular content. This in turn contributes to making particular content culturally meaningful and shapes social practices around it. Just as this study has argued that digitally mediated images are not neutral devices, rather that they do things, that is, they perform operative functions. Algorithms also do things, that is, they shape culture, they enact politics. This raises difficult questions e.g. in what instances and contexts is death made visible to us, and what of those deaths that are made invisible? What are the social contentions and conflicts that we do not see in the aftermath of invisible death? How does this limit our capacity to understand and remember instances of death and conflict? As such, future research should engage and wrestle with the implications for understanding mediated visibility and the

60 For media coverage of the event and the video footage see: https://theconversation.com/death-on- smartphones-in-a-world-of-live-streamed-tragedy-what-do-we-gain-62769

61 To view the video footage see: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2014/dec/04/i-cant- breathe-eric-garner-chokehold-death-video

Chapter 6: Conclusion 209

sociality of images that meets at the intersection of processes of algorithmic content moderation and agentic practices of mediation.

6.3 OPPORTUNITIES AND IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE

To grasp the operative potential of digitally mediated martyrdom as a template for transnational activist practice, attention to temporality, discursive processes, culture, and sociopolitical contextuality is fundamental. Other research has explored how, posthumously, digitally mediated images of unjust victims of police brutality and situations of political injustice have been mobilised to construct icons in response to racism (see Fleetwood 2015), the refugee crisis (see Mortensen 2017), and transphobia (see Myles & Lewis, 2019). Such practices relate to other transnational movements like the BLM movement, among others. However, while there are a multitude of individuals whose unjust deaths could potentially fit the narrative construction of digitally mediated martyrdom, not all deaths are made to matter equally. This necessitates critical interrogation of how the emergent affordances of digital and social media technologies impact and shape the possibilities of martyrdom as a digitally mediated performance of ritualised action and mobilising force. Importantly, it invites rethinking of the meaning of martyrdom as an emergent social process and of its enactment in political activist discourse in the post 2010-2011 Arab uprisings era.

To develop a better understanding of digitally mediated martyrdom—that is, to explore its implications and intersections between translocal and transnational activist practice—researchers need to explore how unjust deaths are made politically productive. A comparison of the public reactions to martyrs like Khaled Said and Trayvon Martin to those like Oscar Grant (as discussed in Chapter 2), reveals the fact that the narrative portrayal of the unintentional martyr, as non-violent and innocent, as a person who died prematurely, experienced corporeal suffering, and exhibits adherence to certain universal values, are only part of the reasons they are commemorated as martyrs. It signifies the deeply politicised processes that are at play in the making of martyrs, and that martyrs must also receive and influential amount of globalised media attention. This necessitates investigation of who gets to be a martyr (and how), as well as who is merely relegated a victim (and why). This is especially important because who gets to be a martyr and how the martyr is constituted through

210 Chapter 6: Conclusion

social processes is always already political. Thus, examining how victims are either kept alive symbolically and are transformed into martyrs through recurrent performances of visual and digital mediation, remembrance and commemoration, or are instead forgotten and denied, remains a critical site for inquiry in emerging configurations of conflict, contention, and popular resistance.

Chapter 6: Conclusion 211

References

7amleh. (2018, March). Hashtag Palestine 2017: Palestinian Digital Activism Report. 7amleh – Arab Center for Social Media Advancement. Retrieved from: https://7amleh.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Palestine-2017-English- final.pdf

7amleh. (2019a, March). Hashtag Palestine 2018: An Overview of Digital Rights Abuses of Palestinians. 7amleh – Arab Center for Social Media Advancement. Retrieved from: https://7amleh.org/wp- content/uploads/2019/03/Hashtag_Palestine_English_digital_pages.pdf

7amleh. (2019b, March). ‘Index of Racism’ for 2018: Increase in Racist and Inciting Posts Against Palestinians in Israeli Social Media Networks. 7amleh – Arab Center for Social Media Advancement. Retrieved from: https://7amleh.org/2019/03/11/the-index-of-racism-and-incitement-in-israeli- social-media-2018-an-inciting-post-against-palestinians-every-66-seconds/

Abu Hashhash, M. (2006). On the Visual Representation of Martyrdom in Palestine. Third Text, 20(3–4), 391–403. doi:10.1080/09528820600901008

Adami, E. (2016). How Do You Watch a Revolution? Notes from the 21st Century. Journal of Visual Culture, 15(1), 69–84. doi:10.1177/1470412915619456

Adib, M., Azouz, M., Mokhtar, Y., el-Gamal, F. el-Qadi, Y., Gharib, M. Rashwan, H., Sanad, S., and Taalab, E. (2012, January 26). Tahrir tells Tantawi: Checkmate. In News Coverage Prepared for: the European Union Delegation to Egypt. Retrieved from: http://eeas.europa.eu/archives/delegations/egypt/documents/semc/20120126_en. pdf

Ahmed, S. (2014). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

References 213

Ali, A. (2012, June 5). Saeeds of Revolution: De-Mythologizing Khaled Saeed, Jadaliyya. Retrieved from: http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/5845/saeeds- of-revolution_de-mythologizing-khaled-saeed

Alsaafin, L. and Humaid, M. (2018, June 3). In Gaza, Grief and Pain For Slain ‘Angel of Mercy’ Paramedic. Al Jazeera. Retrieved from: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/06/gaza-grief-pain-slain-angel-mercy- paramedic-180602143958100.html

Andén-Papadopoulos, K. (2013). Citizen Camera-witnessing: Embodied Political Dissent in the Age of “Mediated Mass Self-communication.” New Media & Society, 16(5), 753–769. doi:10.1177/1461444813489863

Anderson, M. (2013, June 10). As the Trayvon Martin Case Goes to Trial, Remembering a Major Media Event. Pew Research Center. Retrieved from: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/06/10/as-the-trayvon-martin-case- goes-to-trial-remembering-a-major-media-event/

Allen, L. A. (2006). The Polyvalent Politics of Martyr Commemorations in the Palestinian Intifada. History & Memory, 18(2), 107–138. Project MUSE. doi:10.2979/his.2006.18.2.107

Allen, L. (2009). Martyr Bodies in the Media: Human Rights, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Immediation in the Palestinian Intifada. American Ethnologist, 36(1), 161–180. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1425.2008.01100.x

Alvarado, L. (2013, July 18). Zimmerman, Whiteness and Latinos. ABC News. Retrieved from: https://abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/News/zimmerman- trial-latinos-overvaluation-whiteness/story?id=19701774

Alvarez, L. (2012, March 22). City Criticizes Police Chief After Shooting. New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/22/us/police-chief- draws-fire-in-trayvon-martin- shooting.html?mtrref=www.google.com.au&gwh=F52703C618EA25860062E1 0D41F753F9&gwt=pay

214 References

Alvarez, L. (2013, May 23). Defense in Trayvon Martin Case Raises Questions About the Victim’s Character. New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/24/us/zimmermans-lawyers-release-text- messages-of-trayvon-martin.html

Askanius, T. (2013). Protest Movements and Spectacles of Death: From Urban Places to Video Spaces. In Doerr, N., Mattoni, A. and Teune, S. (Eds.) Advances in the Visual Analysis of Social Movements, 35 (105–133). Emerald Group Publishing Limited. doi.org/10.1108/S0163-786X(2013)0000035009

Aulich, J. (2015). The Life of Images: The Iconography of the Photograph of Aylan Kurdi’s Body and the Turkish Policeman. In F. Vis and O. Goriunova (Eds.), The Iconic Image on Social Media: A Rapid Research Response to the Death of Aylan Kurdi*, Sheffield: Visual Social Media Lab (50–52). Retrieved from: http://visualsocialmedialab.org/projects/the-iconic-image-on-social-media.

Bailey, J. R., (2017). An Examination of the Relationship Between Black Millennial Social Media Use and Political Activism. Thesis, Georgia State University. Retrieved from: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/aas_theses/42

Baldick, C. (2015). Trope. In The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford University Press. Retrieved from: https://www-oxfordreference- com.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/view/10.1093/acref/9780198715443.001.0001/acr ef-9780198715443-e-1172

Baptiste, N. (2017, February 9). Origins of a Movement: A New Book Charts the Rise and Resilience of Black Lives Matter. The Nation. Retrieved from: https://www.thenation.com/article/origins-of-a-movement/

Bellin, J. (2012, March 21). How ‘Duty to Retreat’ Became ‘Stand Your Ground’. CNN. Retrieved from: https://edition.cnn.com/2012/03/21/opinion/bellin-stand- your-ground-law/index.html

Benford, R. D., & Snow, D. A. (2000). Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment. Annual Review of Sociology, 26(1), 611–639. doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.611

References 215

Bennett L.W., and Alexandra Segerberg, A. (2012). The Logic of Connective Action, Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), 739–768. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2012.670661

Bennett, W. L., and Segerberg, A. (2013). The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Berents, H. (2019). Apprehending the “Telegenic Dead”: Considering Images of Dead Children in Global Politics. International Political Sociology, 13(2), 145– 160. doi:10.1093/ips/oly036

Berkowitz, B. (2012, March 23). ALEC, the NRA, and the Killing of Trayvon Martin. Huffington Post. Retrieved from: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/alec- the-nra-and-the-murd_b_1375836

Bernstein, R. (2011). Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York, NY: New York University Press.

Bey, M. (2015). She Had a Name That God Didn’t Give Her: Thinking the Body Through Atheistic Black Radical Feminism. Journal of Feminist Scholarship, 9, 1–17. Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/jfs/vol9/iss9/2

Blaagaard, B., Mortensen, M., & Neumayer, C. (2017). Digital Images and Globalized Conflict. Media, Culture & Society, 39(8), 1111–1121. doi:10.1177/0163443717725573

Black Lives Matter. (2019, June 28). What We Believe. Black Lives Matter. Retrieved from: https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/what-we-believe/

Bleiker, R. (2018a). Mapping Visual Global Politics. In Bleiker, R. Visual Global Politics (1-29). Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge.

Bleiker, R. (2018b). Writing Visual Global Politics: in Defence of a Pluralist Approach—a Response to Gabi Schlag, “Thinking and Writing Visual Global Politics”. International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 32(1), 115– 123. doi:10.1007/s10767-018-9299-5

216 References

Blumer, H. (1969). Collective Behavior. In Lee, A. M. (Eds.), Principles of Sociology, 167–222. New York, NY: Barnes & Noble.

Bolter, J., & Grusin, R. (1999). Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Bouie, J. (2015, 10 February). Christian Soldiers: The Lynching and Torture of Blacks in the Jim Crow South Weren’t Just Acts of Racism. They Were Religious Rituals. Slate. Retrieved from: https://slate.com/news-and- politics/2015/02/jim-crow-souths-lynching-of-blacks-and-christianity-the- terror-inflicted-by-whites-was-considered-a-religious-ritual.html

Borden, J., Horowitz, S., Markon, J. (2015, June 19). Dylann Storm Roof: How A Quiet Life Drifted Off Track for the Alleged Charleston Shooter. The Independent US. Retrieved from: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/dylann-storm-roof-how-a- quiet-life-drifted-off-track-for-the-alleged-charleston-shooter-10330852.html

Boudana, S., Frosh, P., & Cohen, A. A. (2017). Reviving Icons to Death: When Historic Photographs Become Digital Memes. Media, Culture and Society, 39(8), 1210–1230. doi:10.1177/0163443717690818 boyd, d. and Crawford, K. (2012). Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a Cultural, Technological and Scholarly Phenomenon. Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), 662–679. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2012.678878

Brookings Institution. (2004). Growing the Middle Class: Connecting All Miami- Dade Residents to Economic Opportunity. Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy. Retrieved from: https://www.brookings.edu/research/growing-the-middle-class-connecting-all- miami-dade-county-residents-to-economic-opportunity/

Brown, T. (2012, April 8). Racist Past Haunts Florida Town Where Trayvon Died. Reuters. Retrieved from: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-florida-

References 217

sanford/racist-past-haunts-florida-town-where-trayvon-died- idUSBRE83706920120408

Brown, T. & Liston, B. (2013, June 27). Trayvon Martin Was Followed by ‘Creepy’ Man, Witness Tells Murder Trial. Reuters. Retrieved from: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-florida-shooting- idUSBRE95P0R220130627

Bruns, A., Highfield, T., & Burgess, J. (2013). The Arab Spring and Social Media Audiences: English and Arabic Twitter Users and Their Networks. American Behavioral Scientist, 57(7), 871–898. doi:10.1177/0002764213479374

Bucher, T. & Helmond, T. (2016, October 5-8). A Platform-Sensitive Approach to Analyzing the Affordances of Social Media Platforms. In Burgess, J., Baym, N., Bucher, T., Helmond, A., John, N., Nissenbaum, A., Cunningham, S., & Craig, D., Platform Studies: The Rules of Engagement. Panel presented at AoIR 2016: The 17th Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers. Berlin, Germany. Retrieved from: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/107070/1/1236-1286-1- PB.pdf

Bucher, T. & Helmond, A. (2017). The Affordances of Social Media Platforms. In Burgess, J., Marwick, A., & Poell, T. (Eds.) The Sage Handbook of Social Media (233–253). London; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE Publications Ltd.

Buckner, E., and Khatib, L. (2014). The Martyrs’ Revolutions: The Role of Martyrs in the Arab Spring. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 41(4), 368–384. doi: 10.1080/13530194.2014.918802

Burch, A (2012, March 25). After Trayvon Martin, Hoodie Goes From Fashion Statement to Sociopolitical One. McClatchyDC.com. Retrieved from: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/crime/article24726685.html

Burke, K. (1941). Four Master Tropes. The Kenyon Review, 3(4), 421–438. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/4332286

218 References

Butler, J. (2009). Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London; New York: Verso.

Butler, J. (2015). Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Calabrese, E. and Fieldstadt, E. (2015, June 21). Charleston Church Shooter Dylann Roof Was Loner Caught in ‘Internet Evil’: Family. NBC News. Retrieved from: https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/charleston-church-shooting/relatives- charleston-church-shooter-dylann-roof-describe-quiet-sweet-kid-n379071

Cameron, C. (2019). Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.

Cammaerts, B., Mattoni, A., & McCurdy, P. (2013). Mediation and Protest Movements. Bristol: Intellect.

Campbell, D. (2004). Horrific Blindness: Images of Death in Contemporary Media. Journal for Cultural Research, 8(1), 55–74. doi:10.1080/1479758042000196971

Campbell, D. (2007). Geopolitics and Visuality: Sighting the Darfur Darfur Conflict.

Political Geography, 26(4), 357–382. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2006.11.005

Castells, M. (2012). Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Chichester, UK: Wiley.

CBS News (2012, March 23). Trayvon Martin's father: “He saved my life”. CBS News. Retrieved from: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trayvon-martins-father- he-saved-my-life/

Chouliaraki, L. (2015). Mediatized Death in the Post-Arab Spring Conflicts. In Eskjær, M. F., In Hjarvard, S., & In Mortensen, M. (Eds.) The Dynamics of Mediatized Conflicts (185–203). New York, NY: Peter Lang.

References 219

Chouliaraki, L., Stolić, T. (2019). Photojournalism as Political Encounter: Western News Photography in the 2015 Migration “Crisis”. Visual Communication, 18(3), 311–331. doi:10.1177/1470357219846381

Clarke, M. B. (2017, 18-24 November). Black Lives Matter in Australia. The Saturday Paper, edition no. 183. Retrieved from: https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/2017/11/18/black-lives-matter- australia/15109236005503

Coates, T. (2015, 4 July). Letter To My Son. The Atlantic. Retrieved from: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/tanehisi-coates-between- the-world-and-me/397619/

Cook, D. (2007). Martyrdom in Islam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Couldry, N. (2003). Media Rituals: A Critical Approach. London: Routledge.

Couldry, N. (2008). Mediatization or Mediation? Alternative Understandings of the Emergent Space of Digital Storytelling. New Media & Society, 10(3), 373–391. doi:10.1177/1461444808089414

Couldry, N. (2012). Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.

Danchev, A. (2018). Witnessing. In Bleiker, R. (Eds.). Visual Global Politics (332– 338). Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge.

Daniels, L. (2012, March 23). ‘You Cannot Rehabilitate the Hoodie’: Geraldo Rivera Places Blame on Trayvon Martin’s Attire. Time. Retrieved from: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/03/23/you-cannot-rehabilitate-the-hoodie- geraldo-rivera-places-blame-on-trayvon-martins-attire/

Daytona Beach News Journal. (2013, May 23). Defense Releases Photos, Texts of Trayvon Martin. Daytona Beach News Journal. Retrieved from: https://www.news-journalonline.com/news/20130523/defense-releases-photos- texts-of-trayvon-martin

220 References

Deggans, E. (2013, February 26). On Anniversary of Trayvon Martin Death, Lessons and Reflections on Race and Media. Poynter. Retrieved from: https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2013/on-anniversary-of-trayvon- martin-death-lessons-and-reflections-on-race-and-media/

Dehghani, S., & Horsch, S. (2014). Martyrdom in the Modern Middle East. Ergon Verlag, Wuerzburg: Germany. de los Angeles, M. (2017, August 24). Black Resistance in Florida, From the Underground Railroad to the “Quiet Riot”. Miami New Times. Retrieved from: https://www.miaminewtimes.com/arts/black-resistance-in-florida-from-the- underground-railroad-to-quiet-riots-9609754

Detroit Free Press. (2014, October 13). Ferguson October: Civil Rights Divide. Retrieved from: https://www.freep.com/story/news/nation/2014/10/13/ferguson- october-rally-shows-divide-civil-rights/17196139/

Doerr, N., and Milman, N. (2018). Protest. In Bleiker, R. Visual Global Politics (233–236). Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge.

Doerr, N., Mattoni, A., & Teune, S. (2013). Toward a Visual Analysis of Social Movements, Conflict and Political Mobilisation. In Doerr, N., Mattoni, A., & Teune, S. (Eds.) Advances in the Visual Analysis of Social Movements, 35 (11– 26). Emerald Group Publishing Limited. doi:10.1108/s0163- 786x(2013)0000035004

Drainville, R. (2018). Iconography for the Age of Social Media. Humanities, 7(1), 12. doi.org/10.3390/h7010012

Drainville, R. (2015). On the Iconology of Aylan Kurdi, Alone. In F. Vis and O. Goriunova (Eds.), The Iconic Image on Social Media: A Rapid Research Response to the Death of Aylan Kurdi*, Sheffield: Visual Social Media Lab (47–49). Retrieved from: http://visualsocialmedialab.org/projects/the-iconic- image-on-social-media.

References 221

Dunn, M. (2016). The History of Florida: Through Black Eyes. North Charleston, South Carolina: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

Dupuy, P. (2012). Histoire et caricature [History and Caricatures]. Traits Pour Traits, 1029, 8–13. Retrieved from https://translate.google.com.au/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=http://www.caricature setcaricature.com/article-un-numero-de-la-revue-tdc-sur-histoire-et-caricature- 97931148.html&prev=search

Dye, J. F., Schatz, I. M., Rosenberg, B. A., and Coleman, S. T. (2000). Constant Comparison Method: A Kaleidoscope of Data. The Qualitative Report, 4(1), 1– 10. Retrieved from https://nsuworks.nova.edu/tqr/vol4/iss1/8

Dyson, M. E., (2001). Holler If You Hear Me: Searching For Tupac Shakur. New York: Basic Books.

Eaton, T. (2013). Internet Activism and the Egyptian Uprisings: Transforming Online Dissent into the Offline World. Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 9(2), 3–24. doi: http://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.163

Eder, J., & Klonk, C. (2017). Image Operations: Visual Media and Political Conflict. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Ekbia, H., Mattioli, M., Kouper, I., Arave, G., Ghazinejad, A., Bowman, T., Suri, V. R., Tsou, A., Weingart, S. and Sugimoto, C. R. (2015). Big Data, Bigger Dilemmas: A Critical Review. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 66(8), 1523–1545. doi:10.1002/asi.23294

El Gendi, Y., & Pinfari, M. (2020). Icons of Contention: The Iconography of Martyrdom and the Construction of Coptic Identity in Post-revolutionary Egypt. Media, War & Conflict, 13(1), 50–69. doi.org/10.1177/1750635219866137

Ellis, J. (2000). Seeing things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty. London: I.B. Tauris.

222 References

Ensel, R. (2014). Singing About the Death of Muhammad al-Durrah and the Emotional Mobilization for Protest. International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, 10(1), 25–42. doi:10.1386/macp.10.1.25_1

Fabregat, E., & Beck, T. J. (2019). On the Erasure of Race in Control Culture Discourse: A Case Study of Trayvon Martin’s Role in the Black Lives Matter Movement. Social Identities, 25(6), 759–774. doi:10.1080/13504630.2019.1572502

Fanon, F., Markmann, C. L., Sardar, Z., & Bhabha, H. K. (2008). Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press.

Farocki, H. (2004). Phantom Images. Public, 29, 12–22. Retrieved from: https://public.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/public/article/view/30354/27882

Fathi, N. (2009, June 22) Neda Agha-Soltan Becomes a Symbol Of Iran Protests. New York Times. Retrieved From: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/world/middleeast/23neda.html

Fenton, N. (2016). Digital, Political, Radical. Oxford: Polity Press.

Fleetwood, N. (2011). Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fleetwood, N. (2015). On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

Florida Statutes. (2018). Title XLVI. Crimes. Chapter 776: Justifiable Use of Force. Section 013. The Florida Senate. Retrieved from: https://www.flsenate.gov/Laws/Statutes/2018/776.013

Flugennock, M. (2014, September 2). American Handala. Mike Flugennock: Political Cartoons. Retrieved From: http://sinkers.org/stage/?p=1564

Francisco, E. (2018, June 22). Luke Cage’s Hoodie is More Than Just Cosplay in Season 2, It’s a Reckoning. Inverse. Retrieved from:

References 223

https://www.inverse.com/article/46316-how-luke-cage-season-2-netflix- changes-his-hoodie-cosplay

Frazer, R., & Carlson, B. (2017). Indigenous Memes and the Invention of a People. Social Media + Society, 3(4), 1–12. doi:10.1177/2056305117738993

Freelon, D., McIlwain, C., and Clark, M. (2016). Beyond the Hashtags: #Ferguson, #Blacklivesmatter, and the Online Struggle for Offline Justice (Research Report). Center for Media & Social Impact.

Freeman, J. (1999). On the Origins of Social Movements. In J. Freeman & V. Johnson (Eds.), Waves of protest: Social Movements Since the Sixties (7–24). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Frosh, P. (2019). The Poetics of Digital Media. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Frosh, P., and Pinchevski, A. (2008). Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan Limited.

Fuchs, C. (2013). Social Media: A Critical Introduction. London: Sage.

Fulton, S. and Martin, T. (2017). Rest in Power: The Enduring Life of Trayvon Martin. New York: Spiegel & Grau.

Gaffney, D. (2010, April). #IranElection: Quantifying Online Activism. Paper presented at WebSci10, Raleigh, NC. Retrieved from http://journal.webscience.org/295

Gal, N., Shifman, L., and Kampf, Z. (2016). “It Gets Better”: Internet Memes and the Construction of Collective Identity. New Media & Society, 18(8), 1698–1714. doi:10.1177/1461444814568784

Gambino, L. & Laughland, O. (2015, February 28). Three Years After Trayvon Martin, a New Civil Rights Movement Grows in Strength. The Guardian. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/27/trayvon- martin-new-civil-rights-movement-grows-strength

224 References

Gamson, W. A. (1995). Constructing Social Protest. In H. Johnston & B. Klandermans (Eds.), Social Movements and Culture (85–106). London: UCL Press.

Gamson, W. A., Fireman, B., & Rytina, S. (1982). Encounters With Unjust Authority. Chicago, IL: The Dorsey Press.

Gaver, W. W. (1996). Situating Action II: Affordances for Interaction: The Social is Material for Design. Ecological Psychology, 8(2), 111–129. doi:10.1207/s15326969eco0802_2

Gerbaudo, P. (2012). Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism. London: Pluto.

Gerbaudo, P. (2014). The Persistence of Collectivity in Digital Protest, Information, Communication & Society, 17(2), 264–268. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2013.868504

Gerbaudo, P. (2015). Protest Avatars as Memetic Signifiers: Political Profile Pictures and the Construction of Collective Identity on Social Media in the 2011 Protest Wave. Information, Communication & Society, 18(8), 916–929. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2015.1043316

Gerbaudo, P. (2017). The Mask and the Flag: Populism, Citizenism and Global Protest. London: Hurst & Company.

Gerbaudo, P. and Treré, E. (2015). In Search of the ‘We’ of Social Media Activism: Introduction to the Special Issue on Social Media and Protest Identities. Information, Communication & Society, 18(8), 865–871. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2015.1043319

Ghannam, F. (2015). Technologies of Immortality, ‘Good Endings’, and Martyrdom in Urban Egypt. Ethnos, 80(5), 630–648. doi:10.1080/00141844.2014.938091

Ghonim, W. (2012). Revolution 2.0: The Power of the People Is Greater Than the People in Power: A Memoir. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

References 225

Gibson, J. J. (2015). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Classic Editions. New York: Psychology Press.

Gillespie, T. (2010). The Politics of “Platforms”. New Media & Society, 12(3), 347– 364. doi: 10.1177/1461444809342738

Gillespie, T. (2017). Regulation of and by Platforms. In Burgess, J., Marwick, A., & Poell, T. The Sage Handbook of Social Media (254–278). London: SAGE Publications Ltd

Glaser, B. G. & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. New York: Aldine De Gruyter.

Goff, P., Jackson, M., Di Leone, B., Culotta, C., & Ditomasso, N. (2014). The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(4), 526–545. doi:10.1037/a0035663

Gölz, O. (2019). Martyrdom and the Struggle for Power. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Martyrdom in the Modern Middle East. Behemoth – A Journal on Civilisation, 12(1), 2–13. doi:10.6094/behemoth.2019.12.1.1013

Gonzales, R. (2009, January 30). Video Hints at Unprovoked Attack in BART Shooting. NPR. Retrieved from: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99905334

Graeff, E., Stempeck, M., Zuckerman, E. (2014). The Battle for “Trayvon Martin”: Mapping a Media Controversy On- and Offline. First Monday, 19(2), 1–11. doi:10.5210/fm.v19i2.4947

Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections From the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Grinberg, E. (2012, March 27). Hoodie's Evolution from Fashion Mainstay to Symbol of Injustice. CNN. Retrieved from: https://edition.cnn.com/2012/03/27/living/history-hoodie-trayvon- martin/index.html

226 References

Gross, N. (2017). #IfTheyGunnedMeDown: The Double Consciousness of Black Youth in Response to Oppressive Media. Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, 19(4), 416–437. doi:10.1080/10999949.2018.1441587

Grossberg, L. (1986). On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 10(2), 45–60. doi:10.1177/019685998601000204

Gruber, C. and Haugbolle, S. (2013). Visual Culture in the Modern Middle East: Rhetoric of the Image. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Gürsel, Z. (2016). Worldmaking Frame by Frame. In Eder, J., & Klonk, C. (Eds.), Image Operations: Visual Media and Political Conflict (37–48). Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Gutman, M. and Tienabeso, S. (2012, March 13). Orlando Watch Shooting Probe Reveals Questionable Police Conduct. ABC News. Retrieved from: https://abcnews.go.com/US/neighborhood-watch-shooting-trayvon-martin- probe-reveals-questionable/story?id=15907136

Hall, S. (1992). What is This “Black” in Black Popular Culture? In Dent, G., Wallace, M., & Dia Center for the Arts (New York, N.Y.) (Eds.) Black Popular Culture (21–33). Seattle: Bay Press.

Hamarneh, M. (2011, March 10). Egypt 2011: From Movement to Revolution (Case Analysis). Doha: Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies. Retrieved from: https://www.dohainstitute.org/en/PoliticalStudies/Pages/Egypt_2011_From_Mo vement_To_Revolution.aspx

Hamburger, T. (2012). Trayvon Martin Shooting Spurs Protests Against Companies with Ties to Legislative Group. The Washington Post. Retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trayvon-martin-shooting-spurs- protests-against-companies-with-ties-to-legislative- group/2012/04/12/gIQAs8HuDT_story.html

References 227

Hariman, R. & Lucaites, J. L. (2018). Icons. In Bleiker, R. (Eds.). Visual Global Politics (176–181). Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge.

Hariman, R. & Lucaites, J. L. (2008). Visual Tropes and Late-Modern Emotion in U.S. Public Culture. Poroi, 5(2), 47–93. doi:10.13008/2151-2957.1015

Harold, C., & Deluca, K. M. (2005). Behold the Corpse: Violent Images and the Case of Emmett Till. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 8(2), 263–286. doi:10.1353/rap.2005.0075

Haslam, N., Rothschild, L., & Ernst, D. (2000). Essentialist Beliefs About Social Categories. British Journal of Social Psychology, 39(1), 113–127. doi:10.1348/014466600164363

Hatina, M. (2014). Martyrdom in Modern Islam: Piety, Power, and Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Haugbolle, S. (2013). Naji al-Ali and the Iconography of Arab Secularism. In Gruber, C., & Haugbolle, S. (Eds.), Visual Culture in the Modern Middle East: Rhetoric of the Image (231–258). Indiana University Press.

Herrera, L. (2014). Revolution in the Age of Social Media: The Egyptian Popular Insurrection and the Internet. London: Verso.

Highfield, T. (2016). Social Media and Everyday Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Highfield, T. & Leaver, T. (2016). Instagrammatics and Digital Methods: Studying Visual Social Media, From Selfies and GIFs to Memes and Emoji. Communication Research and Practice, 2(1), 47–62. doi:10.1080/22041451.2016.1155332 hooks, b. (1995). Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. New York: The New Press. hooks, b. (2006). Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations. New York: Routledge. hooks, b. (2014). Black Looks Race and Representation. New York: Routledge.

228 References

Horsch, S. (2014). Global Martyr Practices and Discourses. Entanglements Between East and West. In: Dehghani, S., & Horsch, S. (Eds.), Martyrdom in the Modern Middle East (203–222). Ergon Verlag, Wuerzburg: Germany.

Howard, P., and Hussain, M. (2013). Democracy’s Fourth Wave?: Digital Media and the Arab Spring. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Huffington Post (2013, July 14). Trayvon Martin Protests: Reactions On The Streets After The George Zimmerman Verdict. Huffington Post. Retrieved from: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/15/trayvon-martin- protests_n_3593469.html

Hughey, M. (2014). The Savior Trope and the Modern Meanings of Whiteness. In The White Savior Film: Content, Critics, and Consumption (1–17). Temple University Press. Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/stable/j.ctt14bsx29.4Copy

Hutchby, I. (2001). Technologies, Texts and Affordances. Sociology, 35(2), 441–56. doi:10.1177/S0038038501000219.

Hutchinson, J., Martin, F. & Sinpeng, A. (2017). Chasing ISIS Network Power, Distributed Ethics and Responsible Social Media Research. In Zimmer, M., and Kinder-Kurlanda, K. Internet Research Ethics for the Social Age: New Challenges, Cases, and Contexts (57–71). Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang US.

Ibrahim, Y. (2015). Neda, Martyrdom and the Media Event: Death Imagery as an Iconic Memory. The Poster, 3(1–2), 31–48. doi:10.1386/post.3.1-2.31_1

Ince, J., Rojas, F., & Davis, C. (2017). The Social Media Response to Black Lives Matter: How Twitter Users Interact with Black Lives Matter Through Hashtag Use. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40(11), 1814–1830, doi: 10.1080/01419870.2017.1334931

Jackson, R. (2006). Scripting the Black Masculine Body Identity, Discourse, and Racial Politics in Popular Media. Ithaca: State University of New York Press.

Jasper, J. M. (1997). The Art of Moral Protest. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

References 229

Jasper, J. M. (2018). The Emotions of Protest. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU

Press.

Karpf, D. (2016). Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and The New Political Strategy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Kemp, S. (2019, July, n.d.). Digital 2019: Q3 Global Digital Snapshot. Kepios, We Are Social and Hootsuite. Retrieved from: https://datareportal.com/?utm_source=Reports&utm_medium=PDF&utm_camp aign=Digital_2019&utm_content=Disclaimer

Kettell, S. (2019, January 25). Secularism and Religion. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Retrieved from: https://oxfordre.com/politics/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.001.0001/a crefore-9780190228637-e-898.

Khalili, L. (2007). Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Khatib, L. (2013). Image Politics in the Middle East: The Role of the Visual in Political Struggle. London: I.B. Tauris.

Kiss, J. (2009, January 10). Fatal Police Shooting Posted on YouTube. The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/jan/09/subway-killing-video- footage

Kraidy, M. M. (2007). Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and The Changing Arab Information Order. International Journal of Communication, 1(1), 139–156. Retrieved from: https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/18/22

Kraidy, M. M. (2016). The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

230 References

Kraidy, M. M. (2017). The Projectilic Image: Islamic State’s Digital Visual Warfare and Global Networked Affect. Media, Culture & Society, 39(8), 1194-1209. doi:10.1177/0163443717725575

Krugman, P. (2012, March 25). Lobbyists, Guns and Money. New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/26/opinion/krugman- lobbyists-guns-and- money.html?mtrref=www.google.com&gwh=61DD66166E4CA0A70852AB7B C286CD00&gwt=pay

Kurzman, C. (2010). Cultural jiu-jitsu and the Iranian Greens. In Hashemi, N. & Postel, D. (Eds.), The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future (7–17). Brooklyn, NY: Melville House.

Laclau, E. (2005). On Populist Reason. London: Verso.

Latzko-Toth, G., Bonneau, C. C., & Millette, M. (2017). Small Data, Thick Data: Thickening Strategies for Trace-based Social Media Research. In The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods (199–214). doi:10.4135/9781473983847.n13

Lawson, T. (2012). A Fresh Cut in an Old Wound – A Critical Analysis of the Trayvon Martin Killing: The Public Outcry, the Prosecutors’ Discretion, and the Stand Your Ground Law (August 1, 2012). 23 U. Fla. J.L. & Pub. Pol'y 271 (2012); St. Thomas University School of Law (Florida) Research Paper No. 2015-04. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2176438

Leaver, T., Highfield, T. & Abidin, C. (2019). Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Lee, T. (2017, February 26). Analysis: Trayvon Martin’s Death Still Fuels a Movement Five Years Later. NBC News. Retrieved from: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/analysis-trayvon-martin-s-death-still- fuels-movement-five-years-n725646

References 231

Lievrouw, L. (2011). Alternative and Activist New Media. Cambridge, England: Polity.

Lim, M. (2012). Clicks, Cabs, and Coffee Houses: Social Media and Oppositional Movements in Egypt, 2004–2011. Journal of Communication, 62(2), 231–248. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2012.01628.x

Lim, M. (2018). Roots, Routes, and Routers: Communications and Media of Contemporary Social Movements. Journalism & Communication Monographs, 20(2), 92–136. doi:10.1177/1522637918770419

Liston, B. (2012, March 8). Family of Florida Boy Killed by Neighborhood Watch Seeks Arrest. Reuters. Retrieved from: https://www.reuters.com/article/us- crime-florida-neighborhoodwatch/family-of-florida-boy-killed-by- neighborhood-watch-seeks-arrest-idUSBRE82709M20120308

Liston, B. (2013, July 3). Zimmerman's Injuries ‘Insignificant’, Medical Examiner Testifies. Reuters. Retrieved from: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa- florida-shooting-idUSBRE9610TY20130702

Lotan, G., Graeff, E., Ananny, M., Gaffney, D., Pearce, I., & boyd, d. (2011). The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flows During the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions. International Journal of Communication, 5, 1375–1405. Retrieved from http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/1246

Mackey, R. (2018, June 9). Israel Attempts to Smear Razan a-Najjar, Palestinian Medic It Killed, Calling Her “No Angel”. The Intercept. Retrieved from: https://theintercept.com/2018/06/08/israel-attempts-smear-razan-al-najjar- palestinian-medic-killed-calling-no-angel/

Madison, E. (2015). Media Portrayals of the Trayvon Martin Tragedy. Cultural Studies–Critical Methodologies, 15(4), 278–282. doi:10.1177/1532708615578418

Mahr, K. (2009, December 8). Neda Agha-Soltan. Time Magazine. Time. Retrieved from:

232 References

http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1945379_19447 01_1944705,00.html

Manchel, F. (1990). Film Study: An Analytical Bibliography. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Masci, D., Mohamed, B. & Smith, G. A. (2018, April 23). Black Americans Are More Likely Than Overall Public to be Christian, Protestant. Pew research Center. Retrieved from: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact- tank/2018/04/23/black-americans-are-more-likely-than-overall-public-to-be- christian-protestant/

Matthews, D. G. (2000). The Southern Rite of Human Sacrifice: Lynching and Religion in the South, 1875–1940. Journal of Southern Religion, 3 (n.pg). Retrieved from: http://jsr.fsu.edu/mathews3.htm

Mattoni, A. (2017). A Situated Understanding of Digital Technologies in Social Movements. Media Ecology and Media Practice Approaches. Social Movement Studies, 16(4), 494–505. doi:10.1080/14742837.2017.1311250

Mattoni, A., & Treré, E. (2014). Media Practices, Mediation Processes, and Mediatization in the Study of Social Movements. Communication Theory, 24(3), 252–271. doi:10.1111/comt.12038

Markham, A. N., Tiidenberg, K., & Herman, A. (2018). Ethics as Methods: Doing Ethics in the Era of Big Data Research—Introduction. Social Media and Society, 4(3), 1–9. doi:10.1177/2056305118784502

McCrummen, S., & Horwitz, S. (2012, May 20). In Martin Case, 45 seconds of Debate. The Washington Post. Retrieved from: https://gateway.library.qut.edu.au/login?url=https://search-proquest- com.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/docview/1014278154?accountid=13380

McCune, J. Q. (2014). Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

References 233

McVeigh-Schultz, J., & Baym, N. (2015). Thinking of You: Vernacular Affordance in the Context of the Microsocial Relationship App, Couple. Social Media + Society, 1(2). doi:10.1177/2056305115604649

Melucci, A. (1996). Challenging Codes: Collective Action in an Information Age. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Miami Herald. (2017, February 28). A Teen Was Shot by a Watchman 5 years ago. And the Trayvon Martin Case Became a Cause. Miami Herald. Retrieved from: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article135413214.html

Milner, R. M. (2013). Pop Polyvocality: Internet Memes, Public Participation, and the Occupy Wall Street Movement. International Journal of Communication, 7, 2357–2390. Retrieved from: http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/1949

Milner, R. M. (2016). The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Mina, A. X. (2019). Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media is Changing Social Protest and Power. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Mirzoeff, N. (2011). The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Mirzoeff, N. (2015). How To See The World. London: Pelican Books.

Mirzoeff, N. (2017). The Appearance of Black Lives Matter. Society. Miami, FL: Name Publications.

Mirzoeff, N. (2018). Appearance Unbound: Articulations of Co-presence in #BlackLivesMatter. In The Evolution of the Image: Political Action and the Digital Self (76–88). London: Taylor and Francis.

Mitchell, C. M., & Williams, D. R. (2017). Black Lives Matter: A Theological Response to Racism’s Impact on the Black Body in the United States. Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae, 43(1), 28–45. doi:10.25159/2412-4265/1702

234 References

Mittermaier, A. (2015). Death and Martyrdom in the Arab Uprisings: An Introduction. Ethnos, 80(5), 583–604. doi:10.1080/00141844.2014.938090

Moorti, S. (2018). States of Exception: Gender-based Violence in the Global South. In Harp, D., Loke J., Bachmann I. (Eds.), Feminist Approaches to Media Theory and Research. Comparative Feminist Studies 147–157. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

Morozov, E. (2011). The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. New York: PublicAffairs.

Mortensen, M. (2015). Connective Witnessing: Reconfiguring the Relationship Between the Individual and the Collective. Information Communication and Society, 18(11), 1393–1406. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2015.1061574

Mortensen, M. (2017). Constructing, Confirming, and Contesting Icons: The Alan Kurdi Imagery Appropriated by #humanitywashedashore, Ai Weiwei, and Charlie Hebdo. Media, Culture & Society, 39(8), 1142–1161. doi:10.1177/0163443717725572

Mother Jones. (2012, March 22). “We Are All Trayvon Martin”: Photos and Video from the Million Hoodie March. Mother Jones. Retrieved from: https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2012/03/photos-million-hoodie- march-trayvon-martin/

Müller, M. (2011). Iconography and Iconology as a Visual Method and Approach. In Margolis, E., & Pauwels, L (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods (283–287). London: SAGE Publications Ltd.

Müller, M., & Özcan, E. (2007). The Political Iconography of Muhammad Cartoons: Understanding Cultural Conflict and Political Action. PS: Political Science and Politics, 40(2), 287–291. doi.org/10.1017/S104909650707045X

Mundt, M., Ross, K., & Burnett, C. (2018). Scaling Social Movements Through Social Media: The Case of Black Lives Matter. Social Media + Society, 4(4), 1– 14. doi:10.1177/2056305118807911

References 235

Musoni, M. A. (2018, May 11). Why I Call My Male Friends ‘King’. Washington Post. Retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/soloish/wp/.../why-i-call-my-male- friends-king/

Myles, D. & Lewis, K. (2019). Constructing Injustice Symbols in Contemporary Trans Rights Activism. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning [Women, Gender and Research], 28(3-4), 24–42. doi:10.7146/kkf.v28i2-3.116306

Nagy, P., & Neff, G. (2015). Imagined Affordance: Reconstructing a Keyword for Communication Theory. Social Media + Society, 1(2). doi:10.1177/2056305115603385

Naveh, E. (1990). Crown of Thorns: Political Martyrdom in America from Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King, Jr.. New York: New York University Press.

Neal, M. A., (2013). NIGGA: The 21st‐Century Theoretical Superhero. Cultural Anthropology, 28(3), 556–563. doi:10.1111/cuan.12025

New York Times. (2016, August 28) Emmett Till, Whose Martyrdom Launched the Civil Rights Movement. New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/obituaries/archives/emmett-till

New York Times. (2012, May 18). Documents in Trayvon Martin Case (See Criminal Investigation Report, by Chris Serino, March 13th, 2012). New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/05/17/us/trayvon-martin- documents.html

Newport, F. (2012, April 5) Blacks, NonBlacks Hold Sharply Different Views of Martin Case. Gallup. Retrieved from: https://news.gallup.com/poll/153776/Blacks-Nonblacks-Hold-Sharply- Different-Views-Martin-Case.aspx

236 References

Nichols, J. (2012, March 22). How ALEC Took Florida’s ‘License to Kill’ Law National. The Nation. Retrieved from: https://www.thenation.com/article/how- alec-took-floridas-license-kill-law-national/

Nikunen, K. (2019a). Once a Refugee: Selfie Activism, Visualized Citizenship and the Space of Appearance. Popular Communication, 17(2), 154–170. doi:10.1080/15405702.2018.1527336

Nikunen, K. (2019b). Media Solidarities: Emotions, Power and Justice in the Digital Age. London: SAGE.

Norman, D. A. (1988). The Psychology of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books.

Norton, B. (2015, June 24). Charleston Massacre Media Coverage: Recognizing the Crime, Downplaying the Causes. Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. Retrieved from: https://fair.org/home/charleston-massacre-media-coverage- recognizing-the-crime-downplaying-the-causes/

Notopoulos, K. (2019, September 23). Burt's Bush And XXXTentacion's Death: Why Facebook Moderators Fail. BuzzFeed News. Retrieved from: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/facebook-moderators- are-set-up-to-fail

Obbie, M. (2015, September 29). American Bar Association Calls for Repeal of Stand Your Ground Laws. The Trace. Retrieved from: https://www.thetrace.org/2015/09/bar-association-stand-your-ground/

Olesen, T. (2013). ‘We are all Khaled Said’: Visual Injustice Symbols in the Egyptian Revolution, 2010-2011. In Doerr, N., Mattoni, A., & Teune, S. (Eds.) Advances in the Visual Analysis of Social Movements, 35 (3–25). Emerald Group Publishing Limited. doi:10.1108/s0163-786x(2013)0000035005

Olesen, T. (2015). Global Injustice Symbols and Social Movements. New York: Palgrave.

References 237

Olesen, T. (2018). Memetic Protest and the Dramatic Diffusion of Alan Kurdi. Media, Culture and Society, 40(5), 656–672. doi:10.1177/0163443717729212

Orlando Sentinel. (2013, May 23). George Zimmerman Evidence Photos. Orlando Sentinel. Retrieved from: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/trayvon- martin-george-zimmerman/os-george-zimmerman-evidence-photos-20130522- photogallery.html

Ovalle, D. (2014, December 6). Miami’s Last Cop Shooting Conviction, 25 Years Ago, Left Legal Legacy. Miami Herald. Retrieved from: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami- dade/article4317878.html

Papacharissi, Z. (2014). Affective Publics. New York: Oxford University Press.

Papacharissi, Z. (2016). Affective Publics and Structures of Storytelling: Sentiment, Events and Mediality. Information, Communication & Society, 19(3), 307–324, doi:10.1080/1369118X.2015.1109697

Papacharissi, Z., & de Fatima Oliveira, M. (2012). Affective News and Networked Publics: The Rhythms of News Storytelling on #Egypt. Journal of Communication, 62, 266–282. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2012.01630.x

Parry, K. (2015). Visibility and Visualities: “Ways of Seeing” Politics in the Digital Media Environment. In Coleman, S., & Freelon, D. (Eds.) Handbook of Digital Politics (417–432). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Parry K. (2019). #MoreInCommon: Collective Mourning Practices on Twitter and the Iconization of Jo Cox. In: Veneti A., Jackson D., & Lilleker D. (Eds.) Visual Political Communication (227–245). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Peralta, E. (2012, May 17). New Evidence Released: Trayvon Martin Had Traces of Pot In System. NPR. Retried from: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2012/05/17/152948727/new-evidence-released-trayvon-martin-had-traces- of-pot-in-system

238 References

Peters, J. D. (2001). Witnessing. Media, Culture & Society, 23(6), 707–723. doi:10.1177/016344301023006002

Pew Research Center. (2012a, March 27). Trayvon Martin Killing Is Public’s Top News Story. Pew Research Centre. Retrieved from: https://www.people- press.org/2012/03/27/trayvon-martin-killing-publics-top-news-story/

Pew Research Centre. (2012b, March 30). How Blogs, Twitter and Mainstream Media Have Handled the Trayvon Martin Case. Pew Research Centre. Retrieved from: https://www.journalism.org/2012/03/30/special-report-how- blogs-twitter-and-mainstream-media-have-handled-trayvon-m/

Pew Research Center. (2012c, April 3). Wide Racial, Partisan Gaps in Reactions to Trayvon Martin Coverage. Pew Research Centre. Retrieved from: https://www.people-press.org/2012/04/03/wide-racial-partisan-gaps-in- reactions-to-trayvon-martin-coverage/

Pew Research Center. (2015, May 12). U.S. Religious Landscape Study. Pew Research Centre. Retrieved from: http://www.pewforum.org/religious- landscape-study/metro-area/miami-metro-area/

Pew Research Center. (2018, March 1). Social Media Use in 2018. Pew Research Centre. Retrieved from: http://www.pewinternet.org/2018/03/01/social-media- use-in-2018/

Philyaw, D. (2017, March 14). One-on-One with ‘The Hate U Give’ Novelist Angie Thomas. Ebony. Retried from: https://www.ebony.com/entertainment/the-hate- u-give-angie-thomas/

Pilkington, E. & Luscombe, R. (2013, July 14). Trayvon Martin: How a Teenager's Death Sparked a National Debate. The Guardian. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/14/trayvon-martin-george- zimmerman-trial

Pink, S., Horst, H., Postill, J., Hjorth, L., Lewis, T., & Tacchi, J. (2016). Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.

References 239

Pinn, A. B. (2010). Embodiment and the New Shape of Black Theological Thought. New York: New York University Press.

Poole, D. (1997). Vision, Race and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Polletta, F. & Jasper, J. M., (2001). Collective Identity and Social Movements. Annual Review of Sociology, 27(1), 283–305. doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.27.1.283

Postill, J., & Pink, S. (2012). Social Media Ethnography: The Digital Researcher in a Messy Web. Media International Australia, 145(1), 123–134. doi:10.1177/1329878x1214500114

Raiford, L. (2011). Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Rambukkana, N. (2015). Hashtag Publics: The Power and Politics of Discursive Networks. New York: Peter Lang.

Rauh, E. L. (2013). Thirty Years Later: Iranian Visual Culture from the 1979 Revolution to the 2009 Presidential Protests. International Journal of Communication, 7, 1316–1343. Retrieved from: https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/1558/929

Raymond, W. (1983). The Long Revolution. New York, Columbia University Press.

Ravitz, J. (2009, June 24). Neda: Latest Iconic Image to Inspire. CNN. Retrieved from: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/06/24/neda.iconic.images/

Reeve, E. (2012, March 30). What Did Trayvon Look Like? That Depends on Your Politics. The Atlantic. Retrieved from: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/03/what-did-trayvon-look- depends-your-politics/329893/

Robards, B., & Lincoln, S. (2017). Uncovering Longitudinal Life Narratives: Scrolling Back on Facebook. Qualitative Research, 17(6), 715–730. doi:10.1177/1468794117700707

240 References

Robinson, C. J. (2000). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. (Original work published in 1983).

Robles, F. (2012a, March 28). Sanford Cops Sought Warrant to Arrest George Zimmerman In Trayvon Martin Shooting. Tampa Bay Times. Retrieved from: http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/crime/sanford-cops-sought- warrant-to-arrest-george-zimmerman-in-trayvon-martin/1222259

Robles, F. (2012b, March 26). Multiple Suspensions Paint Complicated Portrait of Trayvon Martin. The Palm Beach Post. Retrieved from: https://www.palmbeachpost.com/article/20120326/NEWS/812035988

Rose, G., & Tolia-Kelly, D. (2016). Visuality/Materiality: Introducing a Manifesto for Practice. In Rose, G., & Tolia-Kelly, D. (Eds.) Visuality/Materiality Images, Objects and Practices (1–12). Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.

Ruby, J. (1995). Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America. Boston: MIT Press.

Sandler, N. (2013, September 6). Map of South Florida Shows How Racially Segregated We Are. WLRN. Retrieved from: https://www.wlrn.org/post/map- south-florida-shows-how-racially-segregated-we-are

Schwartz, M. (2015). Dead Matter: The Meaning of Iconic Corpses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Scola, N. (2012, April 14). Exposing ALEC: How Conservative-Backed State Laws Are All Connected. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/04/exposing-alec-how- conservative-backed-state-laws-are-all-connected/255869/

Shepard, A. (2012, March 30). The Iconic Photos of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman and Why You May Not See the Others. Poynter. Retrieved from: https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2012/the-iconic-photos-of-trayvon- martin-george-zimmerman-why-you-may-not-see-the-others/

References 241

Shifman, L. (2013). Memes in a Digital World: Reconciling With a Conceptual Troublemaker. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 18(3), 362–377. doi:10.1111/jcc4.12013

Shifman, L. (2014). Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Shifman, L. (2018). Testimonial Rallies and the Construction of Memetic Authenticity. European Journal of Communication, 33(2), 172–184. doi:10.1177/0267323118760320

Shirky, C. (2011, January/February, n.d.). The Political Power of Social Media. Foreign Affairs. Retrieved from: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2010- 12-20/political-power-social-media

Simon, B. & Klandermans, B. (2001). Politicised Collective Identity: A Social Psychological Analysis. American Psychologist, 56(4), 319–331. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.56.4.319

Smith, C. (2003). The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Snow, D. (2001). Collective Identity and Expressive Forms. UC Irvine: Center for the Study of Democracy. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2zn1t7bj

Sorett, J. (2016). Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Spencer, T. (2019, March 8). Fired Florida Officer Guilty of Slaying Black Motorist. Associated Press. Retrieved from: https://www.apnews.com/c3074a4933bf47e490dea0d5c03bf4a9

Steele, C. and Lu, J. (2019). Defying Death. In Papacharissi, Z. (Eds.) A Networked Self and Birth, Life, Death (143–159). New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

242 References

Stocchetti, M. (2011). Who Gets What, When and How?. In Stocchetti, M., & Kukkonen, K. (Eds.) Images In Use: Towards The Critical Analysis of Visual Communication (11–37). (DAPSAC Series; Vol. 44). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co.

Stout, D. W. (2019, July n.d.). Social Media Statistics 2019: Top Networks By the Numbers. Retrieved From: https://dustinstout.com/social-media- statistics/#infographic

Sumiala, J. (2012). Media and Ritual Death, Community and Everyday Life. London and New York: Routledge.

Sumiala, J. & Hakola, O. (2013). Introduction: Media and Death. Thanatos, 2(2), 3– 7. Retrieved from: https://thanatosjournal.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/sumialahakola_introduction _than2220131.pdf

Sumiala, J., & Korpiola, L. (2017). Mediated Muslim Martyrdom: Rethinking Digital Solidarity in the “Arab Spring.” New Media & Society, 19(1), 52–66. doi:10.1177/1461444816649918

Thomas, A. (2017). The Hate U Give. London, UK: Walker Books.

Thorson, K., Driscoll, K., Ekdale, B., Edgerly, S., Thompson, L. G., Schrock, A., Swartz, L., Vraga, E. K., Wells, C. (2013). Youtube, Twitter and the Occupy Movement. Information, Communication & Society, 16(3), 421–451. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2012.756051

Thrasher, S. W. (2015, July 2). Pop Culture's Black Lives Matter Moment Couldn't Come at a Better Time. The Guardian. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/01/black-art-comedy-trevor-noah- chiwetel-ejiofor-kehinde-wiley

Tilly, C. (1978). From Modernization to Revolution. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

References 243

Trodd, Z. (2015). John Brown's Spirit: The Abolitionist Aesthetic of Emancipatory Martyrdom in Early Antilynching Protest Literature. Journal of American Studies, 49(2), 305–321. doi:10.1017/S0021875815000055

Troyer, J. (2007). Embalmed Vision. Mortality, 12(1), 22–47. doi:10.1080/13576270601088525

Tufekci, Z. (2014). Big Questions for Social Media Big Data: Representativeness, Validity, and Other Methodological Pitfalls. In ICWSM ’14: Proceedings of the 8th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. Palo Alto, CA: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Retrieved from: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1403.7400.pdf

Warnke, M. (1994). Politische Ikonographie. Hinweise Auf Eine Sichtbare Politik [Political Iconography. Hints at Visible Politics]. In Leggewie, C. (Eds.), Wozu Politikwissenschaft? Über das Neue in der Politik. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

Weinstein, A. (2013, July 12). This, Courtesy of MSNBC, Is Trayvon Martin's Dead Body. Get Angry. Gawker. Retrieved from: https://gawker.com/this-courtesy- of-msnbc-is-trayvon-martins-dead-body-753370712

Wells, I., B. (1983). Lynch Law. History is a Weapon. Retrieved from: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/wellslynchlaw.html

Wetzstein, I. (2017). The Visual Discourse of Protest Movements on Twitter: The Case of Hong Kong 2014. Media and Communication, 5(4), 26–36. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v5i4.1020

Whitfield, S. (2001). A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Willems, W. (2019). “The Politics of Things”: Digital Media, Urban Space and the Materiality of Publics. Media, Culture & Society, 41(8), 1192–1209. doi:10.1177/0163443719831594

244 References

Williams, A. I. (2003). On The Subject Of Kings And Queens: “Traditional” African Leadership and the Diasporal Imagination. African Studies Quarterly (7)1, 59– 67. Retrieved from: https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1- 107488966/on-the-subject-of-kings-and-queens-traditional

Wilson, J. (2013, July 16). Trayvon Martin Tribute Memes Flood Social Media. Huffington Post. Retrieved from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/trayvon-martin-tribute-memes- photos_n_3601094

Wood, A. (2009). Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Yancy, G. (2017). Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America. Lanham, USA: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc.

Zarzycka, M., & Kleppe, M. (2013). Awards, Archives, and Affects: Tropes in the World Press Photo Contest 2009–11. Media, Culture & Society, 35(8), 977–995. doi:10.1177/0163443713501933

Zimmer, M., & Kinder-Kurlanda, K. (2017). Internet Research Ethics for the Social Age: New Challenges, Cases, and Contexts. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.

Ziter, E. (2013). The Image of the Martyr in Syrian Performance and Web Activism. TDR/The Drama Review, 57(1), 116–136. doi:10.1162/dram_a_00238

References 245

Appendices

Appendix A

Chronology of Key Events

The timeline highlights key events and periods that served as catalysts in the evolution of the Trayvon Martin story, and represents occurrences through which the posthumous character of Trayvon Martin becomes politicised.

Phase 1 2012 February 26 • George Zimmerman shoots and kills Trayvon Martin in Stanford, Florida. March 1 • Martin family sign papers for the Parks & Crump Law Firm to take the case pro bono March 2 • Local media coverage of the story begins with the Miami Herald March 3 • The funeral is held for Trayvon Martin in Miami, Florida. March 5 (images released to media) • Martin family provides private images of Trayvon to PR publicist Ryan Julison and family attorney Natalie Jackson, who release them to the media March 7 • National print media coverage begins with a story on the Reuters newswire March 8 • National broadcast media coverage begins via CBS’s This Morning • Howard University alumnus Kevin Cunningham launches a Change.org petition calling for public mobilisation • Crump introduces racial framing into the case during media interview with Reuters

246 Appendices

• ‘Trayvon Martin’ appears on Google Trends for the first time • African American bloggers help mobilise attention to the story March 16 • Audio of the 911 calls from the night of the shooting are publicly released March 17 (Historical injustice framing begins) • Orland Sentinel runs a story juxtaposing the historical injustice of Emmett Till’s death with Martin, narrative spreads to blogs and broader media uptake, notably from 20 March onward March 19 • Civil rights organisation ColorOfChange launches “Justice for Trayvon Martin” campaign March 20 • U.S. Department of Justice announces investigation March 21 (Hoodie, skittles and iced-tea becomes popular symbols) • Civil rights leaders and activists began holding rallies and marches in Sanford, New York City, London, and elsewhere. The most notable of these marches was the Million Hoodie March in New York City • Sybrina Fulton files to trademark “I Am Trayvon” and “Justice for Trayvon” name and image March 22 (Thug framing begins) • Complex character framing emerges in media coverage as Miami Herald reveals Martin was suspended from school at the time of his killing (smearing and framing soon emerges in other media) • Bill Lee temporarily steps aside as Chief of Police • Florida Gov. Rick Scott appoints Angela B. Corey, the state attorney for the Jacksonville area, to take over the case • New York Times introduces controversial racial framing of Zimmerman as “white Hispanic” March 23 • Fox contributor Geraldo Rivera says “I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman.” • President Obama says "If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.” March 25

Appendices 247

• Martin-Zimmerman story surpasses presidential elections news coverage between 22-25 March 2012 • Howard University students released their video campaign entitled “Am I Suspicious?” • Michelle Malkin of Twitchy.com publishes a photo of the wrong Trayvon Martin (the same image was featured on white supremacy message board Stormfront and was picked up by other media including Business Insider. Fakes images are called out on Snopes.com and in July on PolitiFact March 26 • Daily Caller scours Martin's social networks and publishes photo of Martin from his Twitter account under the handle of “NO_LIMIT_NIGGA” showing a grill that mimics gold teeth gold teeth, and 152 pages of Twitter activity from Martin’s feed to imply Martin was a scary thug (the image is picked up by Drudge Report) March 26 • The Change.org petition signatures delivered to the Florida Attorney General, Sanford Police Chief, U.S. Attorney General, and Florida’s 4th District State’s Attorney • Time interview with Martin’s parents where they say they believe he's in heaven and has on “a heavenly hoodie” (Sybrina Fulton) March 29 • Daily Caller publishes another photo image (allegedly taken on June 17, 2010) from a second Twitter account used by Martin in December 2011 under the handle “T33ZY_TAUGHT_M3”. The image depicts Martin wearing a black Polo cap, looking into the camera and extending his middle finger • News emerges a white supremacist hacked Martin’s email and social networking accounts, and leaked his private Facebook messages • Bloggers accused of cherry picking undesirable images from social media to cast Trayvon Martin as a Menace and ignore “normal” images from Myspace (debate over the doctoring of some images emerges) April 11 • Attorney Corey announces Zimmerman is charged with second degree murder April 23 • Zimmerman’s attorney Mark O'Mara enters a not guilty plea on his behalf

248 Appendices

May 17 • Prosecutors publicly release evidence in the case, including police and autopsy reports, witness statements, and surveillance videos. This includes evidence that HTC was found in Trayvon’s system June 20 • Sanford Police Chief Bill Lee is fired over his handling of the Trayvon Martin case and its impact on the city of Sanford July 13 • Trayvon’s legal team released 284 pages of documents (including black and white images of Trayvon's blood-stained hoodie) that were collected by the FBI and local authorities as part of a civil rights investigation November 23 (Martin’s juxtaposition with subsequent Black killings emerges on Instagram) • 17-year-old high school student, Jordan Davis, is shot and killed by white man Michael David Dunn, a 45-year-old software developer, at a gas station in Jacksonville, Florida, following an argument over loud music played by Davis and his three friends.

2013 February 6 • Posthumous birthday commemoration of Trayvon emerges on Instagram May 23 (Thug framing becomes a dominant trope during the pre-trial phase) • Zimmerman’s defence attorney, Mark O’Mara, releases a series of images from the case evidence files including images retrieved from Trayvon’s social media accounts and mobile phone. Also released is a series of Martin’s text messages retrieved from November 2011 to February 2012 showing Martin’s personal discussions with a friend noting his mother said he was to go and live with his father due to his recent issues at school, his partaking in organised fighting, smoking marijuana, his interest in guns and an exchange of messages that discussed the possibility of buying a gun May 27 • Judge Debra Nelson announces only some of the material submitted as part of the evidence files by Mark O’Mara will be permitted (in a limited capacity) for use in

Appendices 249

court. Nelson ruled that the defence was not permitted to reference Trayvon's drug use, fights, and suspensions during opening statements. Nelson specifies that some of personal material of Trayvon can be introduced later in the trial, contingent on the progression on the trial.

Phase 2

June 10 • State of Florida v. George Zimmerman murder trial begins with the selection of six all-female jury members, five white and one of mixed Black and Mestizo ancestry June 25 • Graphic post-mortem images of Trayvon’s body at the crime scene were nationally broadcast by media – these images were snapshot and recirculated by other media and on social media June 26 • “What if” meme emerges on Instagram as a counter public to explicitly frame Martin’s killing in racial terms and as an act of injustice July 9 • Spike in racist discourse emerges on Instagram with racist memes “Trayvonning” imitating Martin’s death begin to frequently circulate, and is met with counter discourse by pro-Martin supporters • Backlash on Instagram also emerges through pro-Martin supporters in response to “Angry Trayvon” game. In this same period multiple hate groups establish anti- Martin Facebook pages July 12 • On the eve of the trial outcome a social media blackout campaign emerges across multiple platforms with profile avatars changed to black and multiple images representative of Trayvon appropriated along with slogans including “Justice for Trayvon”

Phase 3

July 13 • Zimmerman is found not guilty and acquitted of all charges

250 Appendices

• Black Lives Matter movement begins in response to Zimmerman’s acquittal after activist Alicia Garza posts on Facebook, “I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter…”. Garza and fellow activists, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors, helped popularise the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter across social media • This period also sees the popular rise of empowered discourse as a way to claim the justice that Martin was denied, marking the beginning of communicative practices that contribute to the ascension of his martyrdom October 27 • Racist Halloween memes “Black face” begin to circulate on Instagram

2014 July 17 • Eric Garner, 43, is shot and killed by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo, who is white. “I can’t breathe” becomes a key slogan in the Black Lives Matter movement

Phase 4

August 9 • Michael Brown is shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri, by white police officer Darren Wilson – widespread public unrest erupts November 22 • 12-year-old Tamir Rice, shot and killed by white police officer Timothy Loehmann in Cleveland, Ohio November 24 (to 2 December) • Second wave of Ferguson unrest incited by the grand jury deciding not to indict Wilson in the shooting death of Brown – protests erupted nationally and internationally (rise in transnational solidarity on Instagram emerges)

2015 February • Backlash (over what many see as attention diversion) emerges in response to the trending #whiteandgold and #blackandblue #thedress (counter images are produced and discourses seek to re-orientate public attention to Martin’s cause)

Appendices 251

April 19 • Freddie Gray dies in police custody after sustaining injuries during his arrest in Baltimore on 12 April July 13 • Sandra Bland found hanged in a jail cell in Waller County, Texas July 19 • Samuel DuBose shot and killed in Cincinnati, Ohio, by white University of Cincinnati police officer, Ray Tensing, during a traffic stop Late July • Backlash (over attention diversion) emerges in response to the trending death of Cecil the lion – counter publics work to reorient public attention to Martin’s cause by challenging the lack of value placed on Black life versus an animal September 27 • Outrage on social media erupts after George Zimmerman retweets a photograph of Martin’s lifeless body

2016 March 14-30 • Backlash emerges during the People v. Brock Allen Turner trial with multiple posts juxtaposing Martin alongside Brock to highlight issues of white privilege and institutionalised racism May 12 • Zimmerman lists the gun he used to kill Martin for auction on the GunBroker.com web site May 18 • Zimmerman auctioned off the gun he used to kill Trayvon on UnitedGunGroup.com for a reported $US250,000 – public outrage ensues July 5 • Alton Sterling is shot and killed, at close range, by two white Baton Rouge Police Department officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana

2017 January 31

252 Appendices

• The autobiographical book “Rest in Power: The Enduring Life of Trayvon Martin”, written by Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin is published May 13 • Martin is posthumously awarded a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical science from Florida Memorial University September and October • Images of Martin begin to be appropriated in association with NFL player Colin Kaepernick’s silent ‘take a knee’ protests (that began in 2016 against police brutality and racism and grew in controversy in September 2017 as protests gained traction across NFL players, with many kneeling against Trump) November • Images emerge as evidence that Martin’s father, Tracy, had an image of Martin’s face, depicted as the young Tutankhamun, tattooed on his shoulder blade

2018 March 8 • Stephon Clark was shot and killed in Meadowview, Sacramento, California by police officers Terrance Mercadal and Jared Robinet March 24 • Martin becomes appropriated as an intersectional symbol in the March for Our Lives movement July 30 (aired through to September 10) • National broadcasting of the six-part series “Rest In Power: The Trayvon Martin Story” begins – marking a controversial and emotional period in which multiple images (mainly hoodie trope) and discourses were mobilised September 29 • Martin is appropriated as a counter “not a boy” meme in response to allegations of white privilege and presumed innocence when, during the confirmation process for the position of Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Brett Kavanaugh, was accused of sexually assaulting Christine Blasey Ford in high school in 1982 when he was deemed “just a boy” November 1

Appendices 253

• Martin’s image is further politicised by pro-Democrat supporters as a voting meme ahead of the US midterms (6 December) to mobilise voters. Both images of Martin wearing a hoodie and red Hollister T-shirt were appropriated on billboards and in internet memes, respectively

2019 January 18 • Images of Trayvon’s were politically operationalised by multiple ordinary people, activists and public figures to speak out against media bias in the framing of #CovingtonBoys as “just kids” wearing MAGA hats while referring to Martin’s framing as a “thug” whose hoodie made him “suspicious”. February 6 • Extant commemoration is performed across social media channels to mark what would have been Martin’s 24th birthday.

February 26 • Widespread attention is generated across social media platforms, and on mainstream media, and to mark the seven-year-anniversary of Martin’s killing.

254 Appendices