The acoustics of civil resistance: Summoning the spirit of the law with a smartphone

Abstract

Inspired by Diamond Reynolds’s radical gesture to open a live broadcast in the moments after Philando Castile was shot by police in 2016, this paper explores the ways smartphones have become a critical tool of civil resistance. The paper situates this tool in a historical context, tracking the role of visual testimony in the long struggle for Black liberation, drawing special attention to the acoustic dimension and posing questions about how attending to the sonic environment modifies our understanding of bearing witness as embodied practice and our understanding of civil resistance.

Keywords

civil resistance visual testimony smartphone Black Lives Matter sonic resistance dissonance Martin Luther King Jr Diamond Reynolds Emmett Till Mamie Till-Mobley

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