More Than Our Pain

More Than Our Pain Introduction More Than Our Pain: Affect and Emotion in the Era of Black Lives Matter BETH HINDERLITER AND STEVE PERAZA In 2013, following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin, the Black Lives Matter Global Network coalesced as a call to action demanding justice for Black Americans killed by police and vigilantes. [...] The affective power of grief, for example, galvanized the Civil Rights Movement following the open-casket funeral of Emmett Till, in which the mutilated body of a black teenage boy showed the horrors of Jim Crow terrorism to the world (see figure I.2).6 Louis Till, the young child’s father, communi- cates dismay and tragedy as he stares at the viewer. [...] As historian Jeanne Theoharis explains, much of the early work on the Black Lives Matter movement analyzed the campaigned comparatively, noting similarities and differences with the modern Civil Rights Movement: Key similarities exist between the civil rights movement and BLM—from the forces they are up against to the criticisms they encounter to the expansive vision of justice they seek. [...] Shaping Collective Protest and Speech through Affect and Emotion in this Book and Beyond Defining affect as the capacity to affect and to be affected, authors in this volume analyze three main emotions that BLM activists have used to mobilize the movement: grief for the injured and lost, rage at many forms of violence visited upon black and brown life, and the joy of celebrating the vitality of bl. [...] Their collective rebirth at the end of the performance is a statement of the strength of collective action in the face of its erasure.