“’See you tomorrow, kid’: BLM, apt anger, and the redemption of history” - Natalia Botonaki (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid)

The BLM movement emerged in 2014 and gained unprecedented popularity in 2020 after the circulation of a video recording of George Floyd’s murder by the police. In both protest waves, much sensation was caused by the protesters’ attacks on statues and monuments, with FOX news and former president Donald Trump being vociferous about their outrage at this unpatriotic behaviour. Whereas the Civil Rights era of black mobilization was particularly focused on the future of the black community and the future of the USA broadly speaking, BLM seems to be a movement which grounds its motivations and its actions in the historical, a grounding signalled by the role of anger and the situating of this anger in a continuum of oppression (e.g.Kimberly Jones’s speech How Can We Win). The role of anger politics and – specifically – in politics of liberation has been hotly contested for decades, often on account of anger’s attachment to the past, something which critics like Martha Nussbaum (2016) argue acts against the forward-looking project of political reformation. The new generation of activists however, inspired by the writings of activist writers such as James Baldwin, Audre Lorde and bell hooks, speaks of a sense of connection and community in anger (Lloyd), one that traverses historical bounds. Walter Benjamin’s stipulations in Theses on History posits the relationship between past injustice and the present as crucial to any project of revolution – itself conceptualized as a redemption of history itself. This presentation will describe the ways in which the experience and expression of anger in contexts of political mobilization serve as an affective register of moral violations (Callard, 2020) while also forging bonds of solidarity across time, space, and identities (Lugones, 2005). It will also propose that the imperative to let go of one’s anger is a form of affective injustice (Srinivasan, 2018). To complement this conceptual exploration, the presentation will look at two works of black American fiction which use the form of the time loop: the short film Two Distant Strangers written by Travon Free and directed by him and Martin Desmond Roe and the short story “The Flash” found in the collection Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. The presentation will suggest that form of the time loop in works of black fiction contributes to the signalling of historical continuities of oppression and violence, while also communicating with recent theorizations of a cultural and political stagnation (i.e. Mark Fisher, Franco Berardi). Following Benjamin’s proposal, the paper will argue that contemporary black activism has pivoted towards confronting history and engaging in a project of radical reassessment of historical injustice and its residue, as a means to identify unredeemed potentialities which can point the way to a radically different political and cultural future.