Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife. Tonia Sutherland. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2023. 232 pp. 9780520383876

In Resurrecting the Black Body, Tonia Sutherland investigates information systems designed within the frameworks of colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy. Sutherland is an associate professor of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. In this book, she draws from critical race studies, Black feminist thought, and her lived experience as a Black American woman. This book is an important contribution to a growing body of literature that critically examines how oppression is perpetuated by information technologies, which includes Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Noble and Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin. Resurrecting the Black Body pays particular attention to the ways that Black people’s bodies are digitally resurrected and used as records. The foundational questions that ground the text are: “What happens to the digital documentation and (re)presentation of Black people after they die, . . . who gets a say in how Black bodies are treated, and . . . who benefits from enduring practices around the ‘Black Body’ as digital archival record” (p. 5). Notions of the Black Body are a central theme in this book. Drawing from performance studies scholar Harvey Young, the “Black Body” is defined as the imagined ideas about Black people that mythologize Blackness. This myth is separate from the actual lived experiences of Black human beings. Sutherland’s book traces the Black Body from enslavement to the present day. Sutherland divides the book into a three-part exploration, with parts titled “Records,” “Resurrection,” and “Rights.” In the first part, “Records,” she addresses the legacy of Atlantic slavery and racial commodification. Sutherland critiques the presence of the archives of Atlantic slavery and records of Black death and suffering in online environments, arguing that violence, ownership, and othering are reproduced through archival practices. Descriptive practices reproduce structures of power by organizing information in ways that prioritize the enslavers who created the records. Images of the enslaved, much like their bodies, are claimed and owned by powerful white institutions (p. 31). The afterlives of the enslaved are shaped by digitization, where records are removed from their historical contexts and face their own forms of remembrance. Images of Black death in our contemporary digital culture are made profitable and permanent as digital records. In our capitalist society, the body is the data – we are the product. Images of police shootings and racial attacks appear as spectacle on the Internet. Every post, share, comment, and view enhances the social media platforms’ profits. The violence against Black bodies, then, becomes further ingrained in public consciousness. Sutherland argues that when Black death and suffering is recorded and reproduced digitally, we are not remembered for who we are but, instead, for what was done to us. In the second part, “Resurrection,” Sutherland raises issues with using technologies for “resurrection practices” (p. 88). Here, Sutherland offers two case studies: the use of Henrietta Lacks’s body to produce HeLa cells for cancer research, and the use of a hologram to digitally resurrect Tupac at Coachella. In 1951, Lacks went to Johns Hopkins Hospital for treatment. She was diagnosed with malignant cervical carcinoma. Samples were taken from Lacks’ body, without her knowledge or consent, to be used in research. Sutherland connects this to the control of Black women’s bodies in slavery and the resulting generations of Black women who were “reduced to cogwheels in systems of reproduction” (p. 67). Lacks’ body became data, and the information stored in her cells was used for the scientific purpose of cellular resurrection. The theme of resurrection is continued with an examination of the …