Future Anterior Witness: Women’s Voices Narrating Black Death

Abstract:This essay describes acts of recording by Rakeiya Scott and Diamond Reynolds, who captured on cellphone video and vocally narrated the police deaths of their loved ones. There is a long Western tradition of testifying to the death of a loved one while it is unfolding. In the United States, this history is racialized by unjust Black death and the forms of extra-juridical testimony, from Frederick Douglass to Ida B. Wells, that accompany it. But cellphone technology breaks with these traditions by making it possible to broadcast in the present and to a future audience; the women narrate in the future anterior tense. These videos do not provide visual evidence and also break with Susan Sontag’s and Saidiya Hartman’s sanction of violent images. The ethical and juridical demand of these videos is to listen and thus recognize the singularity of the loved one, who is also a citizen.