Audiovisual Materiality and the Technopoetical Gesture in Recent Black Poetry and Performance

Abstract

April 2021: A long anticipated murder trial begins, as former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin stands trial for the May 2020 murder of George Floyd. Like the capture on video by bystanders and viral circulation of Floyd’s death in police custody, the trial is inescapable, streamed live, in part as a coronavirus pandemic accommodation. As the trial airs, new details emerge in the already thoroughly mediatized event. Witnesses for the prosecution weep under examination, and the identities and likenesses of those who were legal minors at the time of George Floyd’s murder are kept confidential during these livestreams. We learn through presentation of new video footage that Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds—forty-three seconds longer than the “8:46” that became a public rallying cry after Floyd’s murder. Trigger warnings are ubiquitous such that on Saturday, 3 April 2021, after three weeks of state-ments, evidence, and testimony, CNN.com releases a panel of expert advice on how to handle and process the information: “Traumatizing Details of George Floyd’s Death Were Shown in Court. Experts Weigh in on Who Should—and Shouldn’t—See Them” (LaMotte). After another full week of testimony, on Saturday, 10 April 2021, CNN.com releases another feature: “Inside Cup Foods, Where It Seems George Floyd Never Left” (Sidner). The piece details the ways in which Cup Foods and the site of Floyd’s murder in front of the store have been turned into an impromptu memorial to his life and death: a large metal fist rises in protest and solidarity in the center of the intersection; a garden, tended by regular visitors, surrounds the fist; votive candles and other mementos left by passersby accumulate; and most notably, images of George Floyd himself adorn every visible surface—photo-graphs, wall-sized murals, and even the forensic chalk outline where on the street memorialized and metamorphosed into the outline of an These specifically material practices of are accompanied,