Not only do I think Citizen is simply a beautiful collection of work, but it is also a fantastic pedagogical tool for teaching students the imperatives of race and racial projects. This semester, I’ve been teaching the English department’s 100 level course on Race and Literary Texts. For many of my students, my class is the first time they’ve explicitly discussed race in an academic space. We’ve spent much of the semester discussing the ways that anti-blackness is an ongoing project in the United States. We’ve looked at films such as Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro (2016) and even The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project. I think Citizen has been impactful for connecting the institutional and structural dimensions of racial discrimination to the isolated moments, conversations, and interactions that students see in their own lives.

One of the reasons why I think Citizen is so effective as a teaching tool is because it is a multimedia experience. Claudia Rankine collaborated with her husband John Lucas on a number of  “Situation Videos,” to accompany the text. In the classroom, the situation videos are equally instructive, if not more so. For example, Situation 6 “Stop-and-Frisk” visually and sonically demonstrates how anti-black racism shapes the everyday lives of Black people. In the video, we view two Black young men shopping for clothing. The footage of them trying on clothing is overlaid with red and blue police lights. As viewers watch the Black men move through the store viewing and purchasing items, they also hear police sirens, as well as Rankine reading her poem “Stop-and-Frisk.” Upon showing the video to my students, they told me that they expected to see something much worse in the video, such as a display of police violence, and were surprised that the video simply depicted the young Black men shopping. My students were surprised by the melancholy, monotone tone Rankine employs to recite the words. This wasn’t the affect they expected from a poem detailing a violent encounter with the police. In the short film, they took note of Rankine’s repetition of the lines “And you are not the guy and still you fit the description / because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description” (Rankine 106). All these elements together solidified for my students the ways in which criminalization, policing, and surveillance are integrated into the everyday lives of Black people. As they articulated to me, Situation Video 6 demonstrates that Black people can become subjects of violence at any moment. Our conversation about these elements was incredibly generative.

However, as a Black woman, reading and teaching Citizen is difficult. It’s hard, and it’s wearing. When I read, I feel the narrator’s exhaustion, or, perhaps, become increasingly aware of my own. I find myself attempting to breathe along with the narrator’s every “sigh.” (Rankine 59). I’ve read the book four or five times, and the more I read it, the more I struggle to get through it. The microaggressions described in the book are numerous, yet nearly every situation mirrors moments in my own life. The poems are reminders of the racist actions and comments I’ve received for simply existing in primarily white spaces. Every time I read the book, I’m confronted with just how invisible I can be in many spaces I inhabit. How much anti-blackness I’ve been made to brush off and how much I’ve internalized despite my best efforts.

In reading Citizen, confronting my own deep sadness for the innumerable lives lost due to anti-black violence is unavoidable. Each time I’ve sat down to read the book in full, Rankine’s poem, “July 29-August 18, 2014 / Making Room,” increases in length. This is a poem which ends by repeating “In Memory of,” listing numerous, recognizable names of Black men and women who have been murdered by police. And while this list only consisted of Jordan Russell Davis, Eric Garner, John Crawford, and Michael Brown’s names when I read it in fall 2014, the book has continually been reprinted to include more and more names. When we discussed the poem in class, my students were in awe of the fact that this list now includes over 30 household names. The list of those we must mourn only keeps getting longer.

This time around, the difficulty with reading Citizen is compounded by another anxiety: While the book has been generative and eye opening for some students, I worry that reading the book may be an added burden for my most vulnerable students. I worry that that they too struggle to get through the book. I worry that rather than affirming my Black students and other students of color, reading Citizen instead requires them to confront the racism they experience every day. I worry that while discussing Citizen offers white students an opportunity to exercise and explore their capacity for empathy, it only demonstrates to my Black students insights they already knew.

In my last Broadly Textual post, I began to question how we handle Black trauma inside cinema’s depictions of enslavement. This week, I question the best way to manage and negotiate the circulation of Black trauma in our classrooms. I think that our conversations around Citizen must always keep in mind the intersecting racial and gender dynamics of the classroom. Engaging Citizen requires holding space for our most vulnerable students, without putting them on the spot, or positioning them as objects of study. Teaching Citizen might require us to reach out to students and offer words of encouragement. It might even require sharing our own reservations and struggles with the subject of the text. While I’ve outlined here how Citizen can be an effective means to engage students on the topic of anti-black racism, teaching it involves a certain amount of precarity. While I’m still working out answers to my question, what I do know is that educators should always listen carefully to responses from their students of color, never taking for granted how closely Citizen might mirror their everyday lives.

^[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpREs2WTbWA

^[2] Still from Claudia Rankine and John Lucas’s Situation Video 6, “Stop-and-Frisk” https://vimeo.com/157537847

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Upon the release of Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz’s Antebellum (2020), the film was met with mixed reception. Antebellum follows a young Black woman author, Veronica Henley (Janelle Monaé), who, after leaving her home and family to complete her book tour, “wakes up” to find herself enslaved on what appears to be a cotton plantation in the antebellum south. In the film, viewers watch as Veronica is forced to assume the role of a slave named Eve, navigate the dynamics of the plantation, and find a way to escape her mysterious circumstances. The film’s pre-release trailer framed the film’s narrative as containing all the conventions of an action-packed horror film. In response to the initial announcement trailer for Antebellum, some people expressed excitement for a film that possessed promising similarities to Jordan Peele’s very popular, Academy Award-winning film Get Out (2017). The trailer even highlights Peele as one of the film’s producers. However, there was also a contingent of critics hesitant to show excitement for yet another film depicting Black enslavement. For these critics, films about slavery are an excuse for filmmakers to display and circulate more images of Black trauma. In her article for The Atlantic aptly titled, “Who Wants to Watch Black Pain,” Hannah Giorgis notes the gratuitous onslaught of violence to which Black characters are subject in Antebellum. This include scenes of physical and psychological abuse, beatings, whippings, and sexual assault. Ultimately, the article asks: “Who is this for?”^[1]

The mixed response to Antebellum raises a number of questions about the role of contemporary films depicting enslavement. Given the strong resistance to “Black trauma films,” why, then, do we continue to make films about slavery?

Film scholars suggest that the answer to this question is due to more than a simple fascination with slavery. In their book Afterimages of Slavery (2012), Marlene Allen and Seretha Williams write that the “peculiar institution” has always been the subject of American narrative and is itself foundational to our literary tradition. Moreover, they argue that film and the history of enslavement share a unique relationship: “Film has become a powerful medium for representing slavery visually, allowing a viewing audience to connect with the experiences of slave characters onscreen and requiring an emotional investment in these experiences that is harder to present in the pages of a book.”^[2] According to film scholar Rudyard Alcocer, part of the appeal of films depicting enslavement is the way in which they respond to a visual absence in the historical record. He writes that “slavery films take us back to the scene of the crime, as it were: a crime that involved to a significant degree of physical, visible transgressions against the enslaved. In other words…slavery films allow viewers to see the crime (or to have the sensation of doing so) in a way that is closer to a real-life experience than reading about the same events in a book.”^[3] Slavery films show us what slavery was like in a way that fills a gap in our historical record, and as Alcocer suggests, the films provide viewers visual “evidence” of its utter brutality.

 I don’t think it is an exaggeration to claim that the way present day Americans — living nearly 160 years post-emancipation — “imagine” slavery largely through its filmic representations. Think about how one of Hollywood’s first blockbusters, Gone with the Wind (1939), provided its viewers along with future films distinctive imagery of American plantation life. Similarly, we might draw upon films such as Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1997) to imagine the ships that crossed the middle passage. Biopics like Harriet (2019) invite us to peer into the lives of Black historical figures who experienced the institution themselves. Many of these films, and others like 12 Years A Slave (2013) & Lincoln (2012), have won awards for their depictions of slavery. Given the sheer amount of films that have been made about enslavement and the filmmakers, actors, and actresses who have been recognized for their roles in these films, we could even claim that slavery is foundational not only to American history, but also to American film history.

Film is one of the primary avenues through which viewers attempt to understand what slavery was like, yet, if the relatively recent responses to Antebellum are any indication, the sheer volume of these films have produced a certain level of fatigue – one that is particularly experienced by Black viewers. In a time where viewing audiences are constantly inundated with images of Black death on the news and videos depicting police brutality on social media, I often see the question asked: Do we need even more films depicting slavery?

While I’m not advocating for more films about slavery over anything else, I do think that films about slavery still need to be made. In many ways, American film doesn’t exist without depictions of slavery onscreen. I do agree that films about Black trauma can not only be difficult to stomach but can also run the risk of replicating the very structures of violence they represent. However, I think that the films we do make about enslavement should seek to challenge the assumptions that slavery is long over. Films about slavery have the potential to operate as pedagogical tools, instructing viewers on the ways that slavery’s affects are still felt in the present.

I’m intrigued by the way Christina Sharpe compares Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) and Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave. She claims that the trace of slavery — in “whip-scarred backs, brands, or other familiar marks” — is perhaps too visible in 12 Years a Slave. The film is notable for its long takes and the camera’s unwillingness to cut away from the brutality it depicts. However, Sharpe recognizes the ways in which those gratuitous, aesthetic representations of enslavement run the risk of offering no relief. In 12 Years a Slave “The long time/the long shot, the residence time of Black life always on the verge of death and in death, goes on.”^[4] Instead, Sharpe is interested in films that aesthetically engage with slavery’s “long-time.” Julie Dash’s independent film, Daughters of the Dust, is a film set in 1902 and follows three generations of the Peazant family, direct descendants of enslaved Gullah peoples. The film depicts the family’s final day on St. Helena Island before migrating north to the continent. According to Sharpe, slavery is felt in the film through indigo blue — Dash’s decision to “show the traces of slavery as the indigo blue that remains on the hands of the formerly enslaved people who labored and died over the poisonous indigo pits on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina.”^[5] Indigo has a presence in the film not only on Nana Peasant’s hands, but in other aspects of the film’s mise-en-scene and cinematography. Indigo extends to accents in the film’s costuming, in the film’s lighting, post-production tinting, and in the color of the Island’s ever present sea and sky. In Daughters of the Dust, slavery is still very much felt and has an undeniable presence throughout the film, but avoids the violent imagery with which our present day representations are overrun. 

Perhaps, then, films depicting enslavement could avoid being “trauma films” by finding aesthetic strategies that align with the central thesis of the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project.^[6] That placing slavery at the center of our examinations of American history in some ways allows us to understand the ongoing nature of anti-blackness. While more slavery films could still be hard to stomach, I strongly believe that visual depictions of enslavement have the potential to reorient our understanding of an essential part of our history. They could also provide us strategies for actively resisting the ongoing racial violences of today. Moving forward, we should be wary of how slavery films contribute to the “Black trauma genre,” but continue to look out for and advocate for films that instruct us on the ways slavery has been an integral part of our history and our present, lest we forget.

^[1] Giorgis, Hannah. “Who Wants to Watch Black Pain?” The Atlantic, April 17, 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/04/black-horror-racism-them/618632/.

^[2] Allen, Marlene and Seretha Williams. Afterimages of Slavery: Essays on Appearances in Recent American Films, Literature, Television and Other Media. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland, 2012. p.2.

^[3] Alcocer, Rudyard J, Kristen Block, and Dawn Duke. Celluloid Chains: Slavery in the Americas Through Film. p. xxxix.

^[4] Sharpe, Christina Elizabeth. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Book, Whole. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. p.126.

^[5] Ibid.

^[6] Hannah-Jones, Nikole. Hannah-Jones, Nikole. “America Wasn’t a Democracy, Until Black Americans Made It One (Published 2019).” The New York Times, August 14, 2019, sec. Magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html

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Perhaps it’s silly to expect a multi-billion dollar platform such as Fortnite to be capable of doing truly progressive work around Black social movement. Even so, I’m drawn to the centrality of the archive in this attempt to educate players on civil rights. March Through Time recognizes that archival images play a significant role in informing our relationship to the past, even if the way in which Fortnite integrates those images into its project falls short. This is not to say that there are only “appropriate” or “inappropriate” ways to engage the civil rights archive. I’m not attempting to delineate what counts as “misuse.” I simply want to ask: if we wish to educate by way of archival images, how should our experience of those images be curated? What visual and sonic arrangements invite viewers to ask new questions about the civil rights movement rather than restricting or delimiting our understanding of that history? What uses of the civil rights archive can aid viewers in comprehending the struggle of civil rights as ongoing rather than distant?

I believe that Rauol Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro (2016) and Arthur Jafa’s Dreams are Colder than Death (2014)are two documentary film texts that imbue the civil rights archive with an urgency that is lost in Fortnite’s March Through Time. Both films accomplish this urgent and active relationship to history through careful aesthetic and sonic curation.

Raoul Peck’s 2016 film, I Am Not Your Negro, is a documentary film based on James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript, Remember this House. The film’s essay style narration, performed by Samuel L. Jackson, recounts Baldwin’s relationship to assassinated Black movement leaders and friends, Medgar Evars, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King^[2]. One of the film’s biggest accomplishments is its vast collection of repurposed archival imagery. The footage and photographs included in the documentary not only originate from and depict events from the civil rights era, but this archive is also inclusive of Hollywood film footage, photographs of Black lives lost to police violence, Black Lives Matter protest footage, and dreamlike tracking shots through contemporary environments. In imagining what James Baldwin would write about his friends in this unfinished manuscript, the film very deliberately moves between past and present, drawing critical comparisons between the concerns of nearly 60 years ago and those of today.

In her own essay on the film, scholar and historian Ellen Scott writes that Peck “achieves a curatorial feat in his selection and pairing of images and Baldwin’s words.”^[3]I think one of the best demonstrations of Peck’s curatorial capacities happens in a sequence that tackles the effects of white violence and white supremacy. In this section of the film, we view stunning technicolor footage from the late 1950s. We view white people, armed with picket signs and baseball bats, passionately protesting integration. The white protestors angrily chant “We want King!” and this footage is intercut with rare, up-close technicolor footage of Martin Luther King Jr. ducking through an unruly crowd. Given that so much of the visual archive of civil rights imagery is rendered in black-and-white, this vibrant color footage of King instantly troubles our assumed relationship to the past with shocking immediacy. Peck reinforces this unsettling temporal experience by juxtaposing these vibrant, full color images with black-and-white footage from the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, Missouri. In this footage, state violence is on full display. Police officers move through the city streets in armored tanks, they carry military grade weapons, and assault unarmed protestors. The meaning of this curatorial choice is made known in the clip that follows from James Baldwin’s 1963 interview with Kenneth Clark. When Baldwin voices his terror of the “moral apathy” of the “vast, heedless, unthinking, cruel white majority,” viewers must reconcile the similarities between the technicolor footage of white protestors and the black-and-white footage of the Ferguson police. Not only does “white cruelty” remain consistent in the present, but it is also thoroughly integrated into the systems that proclaim to protect all of its citizens.

Jafa’s Dreams are Colder than Death is an experimental essay film that has been described as a visual “tapestry.” The film is interwoven with interviews featuring prominent Black studies scholars, images from the archive of slavery, photographs from the civil rights and Black power movements, renderings of deep space, and contemporary slow-motion footage of Black people simply living, walking, talking, and moving through their everyday lives. The film moves “across scale, from the minute to the cosmological, from the familial to the collective” with what Alessandra Raengo dubs a “aesthetic liquidity.”^[4] As such, the film is afforded a temporal liquidity: it traffics from past to present in a manner similar to Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, but does so at an even larger scale in the spirit of contemplating Blackness and its meanings in the afterlife of slavery.

Despite this larger conceptual scale, Jafa’s film begins as a “lyrical meditation” on the legacy of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech^[5]. This film takes on the legacy of King, not by memorializing him through images, but instead by prefacing the film with a central question: Has King’s dream been achieved in the present? The question remains throughout the film as an audible motif. Passages from the “I Have a Dream Speech” are interwoven into the film’s sonic layers. As interviewees such as Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, and Fred Moten philosophize on the meanings of Blackness, King’s intentionally slowed voice echoes and resonates underneath the scholars’ voices, enhancing the “dreamlike” quality of the slow-moving tapestry of images that appear on the surface.

In her examination of Arthur Jafa’s visual aesthetics, Tina Campt suggests that Jafa’s use of slow-motion, or more precisely “still-moving-images,” are a Black visual aesthetic of refusal. According to Campt, Still-moving-images are “images that hover between still and moving images; animated still images, slowed or still images in motion or visual renderings that blur the distinctions between the multiple genres; images that require the labor of feeling with or through them.”^[6] In Dreams are Colder Than Death, Jafa’s still-moving-images of Black life “refuse” both stillness and movement in a way that insist on the presence and humanity of their subjects. The sonic incorporation of Martin Luther King’s speech similarly insists on its own presence as present,  refusing to be rendered “past.” In this film, the “I Have A Dream” speech acts not as a passive soundtrack for the film, but instead becomes an active catalyst for exploring questions about what Blackness means and does in the present.

Dreams are Colder than Death and I Am Not Your Negro are exemplars of active engagement with the civil rights archive, and in this post I’ve provided brief illustrations of how these films carefully curate archival footage, photographs, and audio in a manner that challenges the passive curation inside Fortnite’s March Through Time. It is not lost on me that Peck and Jafa’s films, two experimental documentaries, are the exact kind of media that we would expect to tackle history in ways that ask new questions rather than presume answers. However, in placing these texts in conversation with one another, what occurs to me is that Fortnite is the most accessible of the three. I Am Not Your Negro is available to view on streaming platforms such as Netflix and Kanopy by those who are able to pay the necessary fee, but Dreams are Colder than Death has not been distributed to any streaming services. Jafa’s film has been screened in very limited viewing contexts such as in film festivals or university talks. In contrast, Fortnite is free and available on several platforms. Despite the game’s seeming incompatibility with the subject matter, I don’t think that TIME Studios was entirely off the mark in their desire to collaborate with Epic Games given the company’s reach. If reworked and rethought, could Fortnite’s March Through Time provide an engagement with civil rights history that not only closes the distance, but could also reach a very large audience of active players ? Or, are mainstream texts inherently incapable of challenging our relationship to the history of social movement? While I’m not sure how to answer these questions, I do think that our evolving media landscape will continue to force filmmakers and archivists to weigh questions of access moving forward.

^[1]https://broadlytextual.com/2021/11/20/march-through-time-fortnites-passive-engagement-with-the-photographic-archive-of-civil-rights/

^[2] http://www.iamnotyournegrofilm.com/synopsis

^[3] Ellen Scott, “‘Some One of Us Should Have Been There with Her’: Gender, Race, and Sexuality in I Am Not Your Negro and Contemporary Black Experimental Documentary,” Jaimie Bron and Kristen Fuhs. I Am Not Your Negro: A Docalogue. (New York, NY;: Routledge, 2021), p.39

^[4] Alessandra Raengo, “Close-Up: #BlackLivesMatter and Media: Dreams are Colder than Death and the Gathering of Black Sociality” Black Camera: An International Film Journal 8, no.2 (Spring 2017) p.120.

^[5] https://liquidblackness.com/arthur-jafa-dreams-are-colder-than-death

^[6] Tina Campt, “Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal”, Women and Performance a Journal of Feminist Theory, p.80

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However, Fortnite’s March Through Time quickly became infamous not for its purported educational value, but instead for its “cringiness.”^[2] If you spent as much time as I did on the internet this summer, you may have encountered viral Tik Toks or Tweets capturing the event. You might have seen avatars resembling the likes of Rick Sanchez, Clark Kent, and Ariana Grande running around with picket signs. Perhaps you saw clips of these characters kneeling in reverence to Martin Luther King or Abraham Lincoln. You might have even laughed at screenshots of players discovering 3D models of segregated “white” and “colored” water fountains. Instead of players participating in March Through Time as a way to learn about the civil rights movement or to honor King, it became a way to participate in the absurdity created by what Twitter user Blessing Adeoye Jr. calls the project’s complete and total “tonal dissonance.”^[3]  

Having taken up playing Fortnite semi-regularly during COVID as a free and easy way to have fun with long-distance friends, I wanted to experience what I was seeing online first-hand. I was able to convince my close friend, Andrea, to explore March Through Time together and we found ourselves utterly baffled by the whole experience. Unsettled by our nervous laughter, we immediately took note of the project’s competing tones. We found that Fortnite’s cartoon style clashed with the setting of the National Mall as Adeoye Jr. describes. Moreover, we were somewhat perturbed by the knowledge that we, just over a year ago, had actively participated in the real-life Black Lives Matter protests that erupted following the murder of George Floyd. This was a time in our lives that was fresh on our mind during our second COVID summer. Even if the purpose of the March Through Time was the furthest thing from a protest, something about having the option to virtually emote with protest signs which said nothing more than “DREAM” felt wrong. We felt as if the history of Black struggles for liberation were entirely reduced to a multiculturalist, post-racial rhetoric of “teamwork.”

For this reason, we mulled over the project’s educational value. Looking beyond the tonal dissonance that dominated the surface, what was the March Through Time intending to teach its players about the civil rights movement? In what ways was the project aiming to honor Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy? Or, as Leigh Raiford acknowledges of the present uses of civil rights images in her book Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: “We are invited, expected, even demanded to recount and memorialize. To remember. But what exactly are we being asked to remember? How are we being asked to remember? And to what end?”^[4]

For me, the failure of March Through Time arises not just from the project’s tonal dissonance, but more importantly from the way in which it firmly relegates the events of the civil rights movement to the past, refusing to acknowledge how the struggles which birthed the movement persist in the present. This becomes most evident to me in how the archive of civil rights photography is used within the project’s virtual landscape. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to claim that it fails to put the archive of civil rights photography to active use.

At the heart of March Through Time—located at the very center of the game’s re-creation of the National Mall—is a virtual museum space through which players can move freely, stopping to view what the exhibit claims are “pivotal images in the civil rights movement.” The exhibit consists entirely of black and white photographs, static and unmoving, displayed cleanly, grouped together on the museum’s walls in thin black frames. These images are large and illuminated, standing out as points of interest in the low-lit museum space. However, players are unable to truly interact with or even zoom into the photos. Players are simply invited to stand before them at a distance and, perhaps, with a kind of reverence as the audio of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” acts as a soundtrack for the viewing. It must be noted that the images players are prompted to revere are given very little context. The only clues to their significance are provided by vague captions, such as “SEPARATE BUT UNEQUAL,” “BIRMINGHAM CAMPAIGN,” and “LUNCH COUNTER SIT-INS.” Consequently, the photographs are presumed to speak for themselves; they are emblematic of an already established, concluded history upon which players can only look “back.”

While a few figures in the photographs are recognizable, such as Rosa Parks’s mug shot in the collection of photos captioned “THE MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT,” or a young Ruby Bridges in the photos captioned “THE DESEGREGATION OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS,” there are no names attributed to the faces in the photos. In fact, barely any faces can be made out at all because players are only able to stand at a distance from them. As a result, these images are relegated to a distant past in a manner that is incompatible with the player’s present. It is this distance from the images that troubles me more than the project’s competing tones. If the images are distant, then so too are the struggles of civil rights, which is proved untrue again and again by the persistence of voter suppression, state violence, mass incarceration, and all other systems which continue to uphold our country’s climate of anti-blackness. It is this ongoing history of struggles for Black liberation which Fortnite’s exhibit fails to acknowledge in their passive arrangement of civil rights photography.

Photography was of vital importance during the civil rights era and continues to be a key element of Black social movement in the U.S. In his 1964 book Why We Can’t Wait, Martin Luther King himself claims that the way the media captured the state’s brutal response to the Birmingham Campaign exposed the “truth” of Black people’s subordination. King writes that:

The brutality with which officials would have quelled the Black individual became impotent when it could not be pursued with stealth and remain unobserved. It was caught—as a fugitive from a penitentiary is often caught—in gigantic circling spotlights. It was imprisoned in a luminous glare revealing the naked truth to the whole world.^[5]

Yet, scholar Martin Burger’s central contention is that the images of the movement that circulated in the media in the 1960s— such as those showing Black people getting beaten by police batons, hosed down, and attacked by police K9s— did not necessarily reveal “truth” to the public. Instead, these selected images portrayed Black people not as active fighters for their rights and liberties, but as passive victims to individual white violence. Examining the dominant newspapers and magazine publications in the 1960s such as The New York Times, Life Magazine, and even TIME, Berger finds that the way these images were cropped, arranged, and narrativized with captions participated in stripping Black photographic subjects of their agency. As a result, white people and the state could then be positioned as “benevolent bestowers” of civil rights, diminishing the severity of the state’s ongoing violence against Black people, and extremely limiting the demands Black activists could make in favor of their liberation.^[6]

Similarly, the passive affect of Fortnite’s March Through Time is a product of the exhibit’s curation. The exhibit’s arrangements – its choice to hold the photos at a distance, to use minimal captions, and to not give faces to names – reduces the photographs to “digital shadows of their former being, both materially and intellectually.” The exhibit fails to recognize the archive of civil rights photography as one that is “actively resourceful” as scholar Elizabeth Edwards might observe.^[7] These arrangements raise no new and interesting questions about our engagement with civil rights. Unfortunately, the way Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is employed as a soundtrack to this viewing simply reinforces its passivity; it assumes the dream has already been achieved. This is why Fortnite can so easily, without contention or contestation, distill the lessons of the civil rights movement into seven words: “We move forward when we work together.”^[8]

Does this then imply that digital games are themselves incapable of an active engagement with the civil rights archive? Is recognizing the “active potential” of civil rights imagery something impossible to do in the mainstream? I have to wonder if there are ways to engage the archive of civil rights in a digital game format in a manner that refuses to delimit the archive’s possibilities. There’s an irony in Fortnite’s passive engagement with these photographs given the active ontology of digital games— what Alexander Galloway claims to be an action-based medium.^[9] This is why I think there is still tremendous potential for games to reorient our understanding of this history. While I am unsure about what an active engagement with the Black archive of photography might look like inside digital games at the moment, at least I can be sure that it’s not going to happen inside Fortnite any time soon.

In my next blog post, I’d like to examine what I understand to be two active engagements with the archive of civil rights photography. These are visual and sonic engagements that ask questions, don’t assume knowledge, and seek to uncover the ways in which our understanding of the civil rights movement is already mediated. Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro (2016)and Arthur Jafa’s Dreams are Colder than Death (2013) are both films that are invested in the “active potential” of civil rights imagery. The way they position the civil rights archive with and against contemporary images imbues them with an urgency that is entirely lost inside Fortnite’s tribute to the March on Washington. These films don’t simply memorialize civil rights images, but make them usefulfor exploring pressing questions that concern us in the present day.

^[1] https://time.com/6092587/i-have-dream-speech-fortnite/

^[2] https://www.denofgeek.com/games/fortnite-martin-luther-king-jr-event-reactions-controversy-debate/

^[3] https://twitter.com/BlessingJr/status/1431004344988565506?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1431004344988565506%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.denofgeek.com%2Fgames%2Ffortnite-martin-luther-king-jr-event-reactions-controversy-debate%2F

^[4] Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), pp. 3-4.

^[5] Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can’t Wait, (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p.30.

^[6] Martin A. Berger, Seeing through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), pp.6-7.

^[7] Elizabeth Edwards. “Photographs: Material Form and the Dynamic Archive.” p.53.

^[8] https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/news/celebrate-mlk-time-studios-presents-march-through-time-in-fortnite

^[9] Alexander Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), p.3.

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