Abstract
On March 26, 2018, Jennifer Hart drove her SUV off a cliff along the northern coast of California with her partner and at least five of their transracially adopted Black children inside. Their remains were recovered at the crash site. As of this writing, a sixth child, Devonte, remains missing and is presumed dead. Four years before the crash, Devonte was famously photographed at the age of twelve, tearfully hugging a white police officer at a Ferguson rally in Portland, Oregon. By simultaneously occupying the feel-good spectacle of interracial intimacy and the everyday tragedy of interracial violence, Devonte embodies and embodied the conditions of contemporary Black life and death in the United States. His disappearance is intimately linked to other forms and histories of American state violence. Through cultural analysis, autoethnography, and poetic intervention, this essay performs wake work as a method for living with the unmournable.
Subject
Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous),Communication,Social Psychology
Reference29 articles.
1. AAPF . 2018. “Say Her Name.” African American Policy Forum. www.aapf.org/sayhername/.
2. Asgarian Roxanna . 2018. “Devonte Hart’s Biological Mom: They Gave My Kids ‘to Monsters’.” Oregonian, April13(updated April 14). www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2018/04/devonte_harts_biological_mom_t.html.
3. Trans
Cited by
9 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献