from inside the circle
“This story is told from inside the circle.”
Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (xvi)
In response to the increased circulation and consumption of surveillance videos depicting state-sanctioned violence against Black people in the United States and Canada following the murder of George Floyd, de Jesús used digital Black annotation and Black redaction (Sharpe 2016) as artistic practices. This work explores tensions between how these traumatic images sparked calls for social justice and how they also excluded survivors and victims from social definitions of normative childhood (Brown 2009, Webster 2021) and naturalized stereotypes about Black criminality (Noble 2018).
Her developing video art series “from inside the circle” takes its name from Saidiya Hartman’s (2019) critical fabulation re-reading of archival materials featuring “wayward” young Black women and their unconventional kinships.
This project unmakes and remakes surveillance videos of police brutality against Black girls to attend to an understudied demographic and to emphasize their agency in circumstances where their bodies are subject to criminalization, forced restraint, and racial profiling.
These artistic works use experimental animation, negotiated imagining, and interactivity to engage the “long history and present of imaging and imagining blackness and Black selves otherwise” (Sharpe 2016, 115). Three of these developing and completed works—“ask me what my name is,” “Dajerria,” and “spotted”—have been featured in conference and keynote presentations and in art exhibitions.
This video cites a 16-year-old Black girl’s challenge to anti-Black carding practices in Canada. The film uses cross-dissolves to interrogate racial misidentifications in policing methods and sonic cues to amplify the "ordinariness” of racism, as described by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (2023: 8).
References:
Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. Critical race theory: An introduction. NYU press, 2023.
ask me what my name is (2023) | 6:00
References:
Campt, Tina M. A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See. MIT Press, 2021.
_____. “Black visuality and the practice of refusal.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 29, no. 1 (2019): 79-87.
Epstein, Rebecca, Jamilia Blake, and Thalia González. 2017. “Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood.”
Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2021.
_______. “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 1-14.
James, Carl E. “Who Gets to Be ‘Canadian’? How Race Has Operated in Keeping Canada
White.” Journal of Canadian Studies/ Revue d’études canadiennes 57, no. 3 (November 2023): 317-338.
Noble, Safiya Umoja. "Critical surveillance literacy in social media: Interrogating black death and dying online." Black Camera 9.2 (2018): 147-160.
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016.
Webster, Crystal. Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North, University of North Carolina Press, 2021.