This article situates the loss of Michael Brown and Eric Garner within the affective resonance of the Transatlantic Slave Trade’s afterlife. Building upon critical theories of performance and memory that position nonexistence as the generative force of Black life, I interrogate the activism sparked by the untimely death of Brown and Garner as a performative, death-derived absence dramatized through the bodies of protestors. Engaging the body as the confluence of agential presence and deathly absence, I develop a hauntology that questions how to make Black life matter through a reworking of the relationship between the Transatlantic Slave Trade’s affective ecologies of nonexistence and blackness.
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