Critical Memory and Anti-Racist Media: An Analysis of the Transnational Political Subjectivity of BLM-DK

When a young Danish-Tanzanian man was brutally murdered in Denmark, the Danish division of Black Lives Matter (BLM-DK) followed closely the journalistic coverage of the police investigation. BLM-DK posted 37 memes and commented links in the six months following the murder. Drawing on theories of critical memory, black publicity, and African American resistance that produces a genealogical counter-public (Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, Verso Books, 1993; Baker, Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere, Public Culture, 7(1), 3–33, 1994), this article explores the question of how BLM-DK’s textual and visual social media content concerning the murder addressed and helped mobilise a counter-public. In particular, the article investigates the convergent nature of the posts and the insistence on transnational political subjectivity. The article employs discursive analyses and produces detailed visual discursive readings of selected posts by BLM-DK.