Critical memory and anti-racist media: An analysis of the transnational political subjectivity of BLM-DK

In the summer of 2020, a young Danish-Tanzanian man was brutally murdered on the Danish island Bornholm. The killing took place shortly after the murder of the African American man George Floyd in the United States, which had already driven the Danish chapter of Black Lives Matter (BLM-DK) to mobilise significant public focus on the issue of racism in Denmark. Along with a couple of other anti-racist organisations, BLM-DK now continued their activism by posting 37 memes and links between 25 June and 12 December 2020 in which they covered the Danish and international journalistic reporting of the police investigation of the Danish murder, commented directly on the case and on racism in Denmark, and organised a demonstration. Despite similarities to Floyd’s murder and several signs linking the defendants – later to be convicted – to far-right politics and ideology, the Danish murder was met with journalistic professional principles, which followed the official line of the authorities and reported that the murder was not racially motivated (Dindler & Blaagaard, 2021). BLM-DK opposed the journalistically sanctioned account in their posts, effectively creating a counter-position and -public through their social media posts. Rather than drawing on official sources, the counter-public posts drew on critical memory and a sense of black publicity connecting BLM-DK to a narrative larger in terms of space as well as time.

This article therefore explores the question of how BLM-DK’s textual and visual social media content helped mobilise a counter-public. Drawing on theories of critical memory and black publicity that support African American resistance in producing a genealogical counter-public (Baker, 1994; Gilroy, 1993), I argue, that the social media content is an act of black witnessing (Richardson, 2020), which calls on political activism through the convergent nature of the posts and the insistence on temporal and geographical minority connections. Conducting a discursive analysis of the posts, including detailed visual discourse analysis of selected posts by BLM-DK, this study shows that it is exactly because of the predominance of convergent visuality mirroring and expressing critical memory and black publicity that BLM-DK can insist on a transnational political subjectivity.

Following a short introduction to the case study, I begin by discussing theories of critical memory, black publicity and black witnessing in order to frame the following analysis and the concomitant conclusions (Counter-publics and critical memory). The theory will be followed by a methodological section (Notes on method) before I return to the case study and embark on the analysis (Analysis: Transnational and temporal discursivity). The analysis is divided into two sections: (1) A discursive analysis of all the posts’ textual elements and (2) An in-depth visual discursive analysis of a smaller selection of visual social media posts. The article concludes by connecting the analysis to examples of similar practices.

28-year-old Philip Mbuji Johansen was found lifeless on the morning at a campsite in the woods on the small Danish island of Bornholm. He had been brutally beaten, tortured, and had had a knee pressed against his neck resulting in haemorrhages in his eyes. Combined, the injuries had led to his death. The police had already arrested the first suspect by the time the story was published as a short notification in the tabloid newspaper Ekstra Bladet. Following the initial notification, the murder was covered by mainstream media following two interdependent storylines: firstly, the murder was covered as just another murder following the line of the authorities thus favouring the interests of the people in political, juridical and economical power and arguing that the murder was a result of a personal relationship gone awry (Dindler & Blaagaard, 2021, pp. 103–104). However, the similarities to the murder of George Floyd, who had died in police custody in the United States the month prior, prompted BLM-DK to suggest a different and more assertive, anti-racist perspective on the events. The critique posed by BLM-DK and other left-wing organisations led journalists to follow a second storyline that defended their own coverage of the case, effectively cementing the binary construction between the public addressed by journalists and the counter-public forged by BLM-DK.

Fraser (1990) argues that ‘members of subordinated social groups – women, workers, peoples of color, and gays and lesbians – have repeatedly found it advantageous to constitute alternative publics’ (p. 67). Arguably, as such a subaltern counter-public, BLM-DK brought their concerns to the table and expressed themselves in such a way that ‘simultaneously construct[ed] and express[ed] [their] cultural identity through idiom and style’ (p. 69). Counter-publics produce spaces of appearance (Mirzoeff, 2017) and may be understood to be supported by political acts that rupture socio-historical structures (Isin & Nielsen, 2008, p. 10) as political acts counter-publics are a form of speech acts that produce citizens as acting subjects beyond the legal and dominant liberal framework of citizenship and the public sphere (p. 11). The counter-public or spaces of appearance are produced by the people and for the people – be they legal citizens or not. Counter-publics are self-organising through discourse, continuously constructing and being constructed through interactions and other meaning-making processes (Warner, 2002, p. 50). A public is a relation among strangers, who nevertheless ‘can be treated as already belonging in our world. More: they must be’ (p. 55–56, italics in original). The link between strangers in a public is imagined, because it is the idea of a commonality between the strangers that links them to each other (Anderson, 1991). The link, however, is no less real. What makes counter-publics different from other publics, including notions of the dominant public produced and upheld by mainstream media, is that ‘[a] counterpublic maintains at some level, conscious or not, an awareness of its subordinate status’ (Warner, 2002, p. 86). Power is discursively embedded in the idea and understanding of counter-publics’ existence and extends to the style and genre of expression, i.e. the modes of discursively expressing the position of those belonging to a counter-public. They are ‘counter’ by virtue of their attempts at reimaging power structures of social life and the political despite their underdog position. Similarly, in the case of the murder on Bornholm, BLM-DK produced a ‘parallel discursive arena[] where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses’ as ‘subaltern counterpublics’ (Fraser, 1990, p. 67). In effect, the resistance of BLM-DK from below broke down formats of expressions as well as content.

Broken down formats and content in counter-public discourse take different expressions, such as mnemonic audio devices, poetry, and visual expressions. The analysis will show that BLM-DK produce their own mnemonic genealogy in their posts. However, in the following the expressions are discussed linking them to counter-public discourse and in turn to social media activism, such as BLM-DK’s.

Gilroy (1993), for instance, uses the example of music as a counter-public and counter-cultural mnemonic device, redefining tradition as ‘the living memory of the changing same’ (p. 198). The changing same is a term that Gilroy uses to question the idea of the original and of origin in particularly African American discourse. Memory and lived culture are always already producing and reproducing themselves, thereby redefining what is authentic, Gilroy argues. The changing same is practiced in music and in the culture that surrounds the African American music scene (Gilroy, 1993, p. 198). Both in terms of rhythm and of lyrics, music calls on a counter-culture, or counter-public, of active listeners, who are engulfed in the memory-making of the present. The music is drawing in (and on) historicity and social memory that simultaneously calls into being a counter-culture. Memory, then, is not nostalgia for a time gone by or a yearning for a pure past. Rather it is a vehicle for further change through capture and expression of the change that has already happened, and which makes up the counter-culture. Similarly, Braidotti (2006, p. 167) ‘stresses the deep generative powers of memory as a political project,’ as active remembrance – that which returns and is remembered or repeated (p. 168). ‘The concept is deeply connected to subject formation and political resistance as it is theorized by Braidotti, because it emphasizes the personal as the political and the importance of sharing collectively and publicly the accounts of lived experience’ (Blaagaard, 2018b, p. 130).

Writing produces another opportunity for counter-public discourse. Poetic writings such as those of Audre Lorde and James Baldwin are famous examples of activist poetry changing perceptions of their readers and influencing theory and theoretical thought. They may be described as counter-public or postcolonial intellectuals (Ponzanesi & Habed, 2018). Citizen journalistic writing likewise introduces a possibility for counter-publics. African American – as well as Hispanic, Japanese and Indigenous – journals, editors and writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created counter-publics covering journalistic angles and public debates that were overlooked by the mainstream, white press (Blaagaard, 2018a; González & Torres, 2011). Indeed, thinking – poetically or journalistically expressed – is potentially an activist strategy when it disidentifies with philosophical and western traditions (Braidotti, 2011, p. 24).

Focusing on images, Martin A. Berger also finds counter-publicity in mnemonic devices. To Berger images of counter-publics are ‘lost’ or ‘missing’ (Berger, 2011, pp. 112–156) from the dominant public. Examples of such missing images are of the 14-year-old boy, Emmett Till, who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955. While the image of Till’s open casket was published and distributed in Black newspapers, it didn’t appear to the same extent in white news – thus creating a parallel discursive arena. Other lost or missing images are of African American agency, such as images of black women fighting back against police violence, the black power salute performed by members of the Black Panther Party (BPP) at the Olympic Games in 1968, and the seated position of BPP leader Huey P. Newton, ‘showing [him] armed with Zulu shields, rifle, and spear’ (p. 143). These images are forms of speech acts that insist on appearing from and to the people, although they may be deemed lost or missing within the dominant framework.

The image of the lynched Till may be considered the first in a seemingly running list of calls to witness the struggles of African Americans in the United States. Following the global spread of mobile media devices, images of the deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Philando Castille, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and so many more have been added to the list. Like music, the images become mnemonic devices, living memories of a changing same. They provide a critical memory created through ‘a continuity in the development of black publicity rather than [in] recurrent novelt[ies]’ that focuses on the critical and creative ‘efforts, strategies and resources for leadership and liberation’ (Baker, 1994, p. 15, 31).

Critical memory as produced by BLM-DK is connected to the embodied experience of subaltern subjects not only through the visceral act of witnessing physical struggle and death, but also through re-enactments, music, and collective memory produced through expressive political culture actively preserving memory as an intellectual resource (Gilroy, 1993, p. 39; see also Blaagaard, 2018b). Gilroy takes care not to essentialise nor pluralise the cultural and political expressions of African Americans. Rather he emphasises the multiple connections and co-constructions of cultural and political meaning-making processes that extend the bounds of politics. In this way, critical, collective memory sustains political expressions of images, texts, music, re-enactments and more that produce the counter-public and counter-culture underscored by political discourse and protests.

Music, writing and imagery as political acts and critical memory devices take new forms and significance in the platformed public. In Bearing Witness While Black, Richardson (2020) argues that black community building today takes place on Twitter by means of witnessing the implications of societal politics and policing. African American communities online are popularly called Black Twitter, although Black communities are neither restricted to Twitter nor a bounded community on the platform, but rather intersecting with other counter-publics and -cultures (Freelon et al., 2018). However, the counter-public should not be understood merely as a group of people using hashtags concerned with African American lives and experiences. Rather, it is ‘instrumental in producing networked subjects which have the capacity to multiply the possibilities of being raced online’ (Sharma, 2013, p. 46). It is a digital space in which African Americans define and frame the relevance of news, a space in which they may insist on the plurality of their community (Freelon et al., 2018, p. 38), and a space in which they may give voice to the community by sharing and documenting evidence of excessive police force (Richardson, 2020, p. 17). However, their interactions and expression are also directed at external audiences, writes Richardson (2020, p. 17): ‘They want to set the record straight in many cases’.

In this way, Black Twitter is a term for a counter-public realised through the micro-blogging platform Twitter. Twitter as well as other social media platforms allow for the emergence of different kinds of publics (Squires, 2002). The enclaved public is a hidden form of community, which is driven by lack of support and resources but thrives on coded vernacular and strong counter-memory, while Catherine R. Squires reserves the term counter-public to ‘increased public communication between the marginal and dominant public spheres, both in face-to-face and mediated forms [in which counterpublics] argue against dominant conceptions of the group and … describe group interests’ (Squires, 2002, p. 460).

While this study is focused on BLM-DK expressions on Facebook rather than Twitter, similar vernaculars, public formations and structures of witnessing and giving voice to public discourse are identifiable on BLM-DK’s Facebook site. In particular, the visual content, which Richardson calls a ‘visual vernacular’ (2020, pp. 139–151), is akin to what has been found on Twitter. Richardson identifies three ‘semiotic approaches’ that stand out to her: firstly, historic juxtapositions, which encompass a remixing of old images of resistance, giving them new meanings, and mashing up old images with new ones emphasising the historical continuities and contingencies in the movement and in society. Arguably, historical juxtapositions produce an expression of the changing same – pointing to the relationship between the lived experience of then and now and how the two temporalities inform each other and produce political subjectivities. Secondly, symbolic deaths, which are for instance die-ins in which flash-mobs simulate their collective deaths in public places, bringing focus on the body and claiming space. Such ‘embodied visual gestures’ (Blaagaard, 2019) or simultaneously digital and embodied ‘double hashtags’ (Blaagaard, 2022) if a digital campaign is involved re-enact the collective, critical memory and ‘serve as reminders of the ruptures [produced by the political act of the gesture] and encourage new perspectives on police violence and racial bias’ (Blaagaard, 2019, p. 260). Thirdly, satirical memes joke about serious matters, such as racism and white privilege, bringing relief, but also working to ‘sustain dialogue between crises and major demonstrations [and] mark[] time to create a collective memory’ (Richardson, 2020, p. 152). The visual vernacular produces and sustains what Richardson calls ‘the Black visual public sphere’. It is a visual vernacular expression that breaks down formats by insisting on specific visual idioms and styles as well as producing content for and by the people, with whom the images engage. While some of the vernaculars are coded and enclaved, recently Black Twitter has developed a counter-public awareness due to the political resources and activist resistance to the status quo of United States’ politics. This is why, Richardson asserts (2020, p. 17), digital interactions want to set the record straight and in doing so reach out and enter dialogues through visual content.

Critical memory is a strategy to evoke a counter-public through creative modes of expression. Common to music, historical images, and digital posts is the way in which these expressions are mnemonic devices that remind the listener or viewer of a common struggle and resistance as well as the resistance’s genealogy and importance. Critical memory establishes a linkage between strangers, reminding them that they are all in the struggle together despite transnational and temporal distances. Critical memory as a strategy, then, is likely to play a role in understanding how BLM-DK’s visual social media content helps mobilise a counter-public.

The case study is made up of posts gathered manually on BLM-DK’s Facebook page. The time frame was 25 June to 12 December, i.e. from the first post announcing the murder of the Danish-Tanzanian man by link to a newspaper article and six months onwards. All posts selected related to the murder as the main topic and not only as a side note or example in relation to other issues. The posts presented as clustered around events, such as the organisation of a demonstration and the beginning of the court case, rather than evenly spread out over the six months. Of the 37 posts found, the biggest share encompassing 11 posts contained links to Danish news media coverage of the murder. The remaining posts fell evenly into five themes containing 4–6 posts each. The themes were (1) Encouragements to join an upcoming demonstration against the police investigation’s focus, including presentations of speakers and possibilities for signing up (five posts); (2) Links to international media coverage, including a link to a YouTube-clip of BLM-DK laying a wreath at the murder site (six posts); (3) Original comments or links to personal Facebook pages of BLM-DK members and other public figures (four posts); (4) Written memes without images (five posts); and (5) Visual posts or memes accompanied by written comments (six posts).

The posts will be analysed using a discursive reading inspired by Hall (1997/2002) and Rose (2016). This approach entails identifying firstly the discursive strategies that express transnational and temporal discursivity. This first part of the analysis will refer to all 37 posts, but with emphasis on the posts that link to the Danish press articles and the first three themes. Secondly, the latter two themes as presented above, encompassing eleven posts in all, will serve as the main empirical data for the second part of the discursive analysis, which applies the semiotic approaches to the visual social media content.

The initial post about the murder (25.6) is a reference to a national newspaper introducing the linked article with an indignant comment ending with ‘GET YOUR KNEES OFF OUR NECKS’. The comment presents the murder victim as a successful man, who had recently graduated from engineering school. ‘For Black people or people of African descent it may provoke psychological or physical violence to succeed’,¹ writes BLM-DK. The murder is to BLM-DK a part of a structural racism that oppresses people of colour and punishes them for being ‘TOO professional. That is not allowed either’. While the two initial posts about the murder focus on the unfairness and jealousy involved in the murder, pointing to the successful completion of the victim’s engineering degree and to the civic uproar that followed the murder, soon after the posts shift their focus to the media’s role in reporting on the murder. BLM-DK among other activist groups and publications arranged for readers and viewers to campaign against the media coverage by sending emails to editors of major news organisations demanding room for different angles on the topic. The campaign is cheered on (26.6) as are news coverage that presents the desired angle (1.7;12.12). The positive reception is captioned ‘spot on!’ and ‘finally a step out-of-the-echo chamber’. In this way, the posts that share newspaper articles and other media products about the murder become part of a public dialogue² initiated, curated, and managed by BLM-DK, which positions mainstream media in an echo chamber of like-minded views and BLM-DK as a counter-public. It is also the encouragement to stage an email protest that make mainstream media pursue the storyline of defending their journalistic practices as presented earlier.

Some of the posts about news coverage are accompanied by BLM-DK’s comments either deriding (3.7b; 29.11) or praising (26.6; 1.7; 3.7a; 12.12) the article or media content. The comments underscore the bifurcation of reality perceptions between BLM-DK and Danish mainstream media by highlighting what BLM-DK sees as particularly disheartening sections or quotes (29.9) or by mockingly revealing their incompatibility with the discourse laid out by BLM-DK. An article published in the national newspaper Information, for instance, is captioned: ‘Information, after the criticism laid out by the New York Times, lazily dragged itself to Bornholm only to give an extended version of the usual headlines and angles, that we see again and again’ (3.7b). In other words, Information is portrayed as a newspaper, whose reporters are lazy and unimaginative.³ Some news items are represented in snapshots of texts or updates (29.7) that are left un-remarked upon, speaking their own unfathomable language, such as the quote from the coroner, who has never seen violence or ‘injuries as bad as these on a [murder] victim’ before (30.11).

Only two of the eleven posts that present Danish news media coverage of the case link to journalistic products featuring the organiser of BLM-DK Bwalya Sørensen (25.8; 20.8), even though the organisation was very vocal and the main driver behind the critique of the coverage. One article is an opinion piece authored by Sørensen and a colleague, which the Facebook post introduces with a long excerpt from the article. The other post is a link to a radio broadcast, in which Sørensen appeared. The link to the radio broadcast is headed only with factual statements about the programme’s time and channel. These are also the first two sustained appearances in the press, which BLM-DK made outside cursory remarks taken from their Facebook page and at demonstrations (Dindler & Blaagaard, 2021, p. 100). In sum, the content was not the only dissonance between mainstream press and BLM-DK. The format through which BLM-DK chose and was forced to express themselves also differed starkly from the journalistic news items (p. 107) adding a layer of hierarchical power relation to the relationship. While BLM-DK enthusiastically engaged in a dialogue with mainstream media on their own Facebook page, and in turn were featured in mainstream newspapers only through Facebook posts and statements, very little direct interaction between the two mediated publics was initiated, keeping BLM-DK somewhat enclaved.

While BLM-DK’s posts highlight the bifurcation between Danish press coverage and the organisation’s own reading of the events, their comments to the coverage by the foreign press are less contentious. By and large, the foreign press exhibits curiosity and critical thinking towards the Danish authorities’ handling of the case and the legal practice administered in Denmark when it comes to hate crimes (20.7; 30.7; 10.12). These are questionings in line with the interpretation of events by BLM-DK. The affiliation with foreign perspectives is underscored in BLM-DK’s posts that encourage followers to attend a demonstration against the focus of the police investigations and the media’s coverage. Especially three posts that announce the demonstration in the week leading up to the event (17.11; 19.11; 23.11) stand out. Similar to the initial post announcing the brutal murder with the words: ‘GET YOUR KNEES OFF OUR NECKS,’ these three posts feature text in English. One post references the last words of another African American man killed by the police in the United States, Eric Garner, before he lost consciousness and later died in a police chokehold in 2014: ‘I can’t breathe’. Both ‘GET YOUR KNEES OFF OUR NECKS’ and ‘I can’t breathe’ are phrases that have since become associated with BLM demonstrations and resistance internationally. Another post inviting people to join the demonstration catch the followers’ eyes with capital letters in yellow spelling out ‘A man was lynched in Bornholm’. Lynching of course was the practice of white people terrorising, torturing, and killing African Americans without impunity, particularly associated with the United States’ white supremacy organisation the Ku Klux Klan. As mentioned above, the lynching of Emmett Till marks a visual starting point for the mediated struggle against white impunity. Finally, a third post invites attendees to the demonstration across a black and white photo of people on a bus holding placards with slogans such as: ‘Freedom’s wheels are rolling’ and ‘The law of the land is our demand’. The photo is from a demonstration organised by the so-called Freedom Riders, who were part of the United States’ Civil Rights Movement in the 60s.

While the links to foreign press articles suggest an interdiscursivity between the United States context and BLM-DK, the demonstration announcements make this connection intertextually using both words and images. The attachment to the United States’ culture and history and African American memory, in particular, is a discursive thread running through all the posts to various degrees. Discursively, BLM-DK may produce a counter-public local to the Danish context when they frame the coverage as structural racism – a concept, which in turn is denied in Danish journalistic discourse by insisting on racism as personal intent (Dindler & Blaagaard, 2021, p. 98; Titley, 2020). But the structure asserted by BLM-DK goes beyond Danish journalism and connects to the United States’ context, when BLM-DK references the international BLM’s call to stop oppression and getting white people’s knees – metaphorically as well as literally – off the necks of African Americans and people of colour. In this, BLM-DK connect to a broader counter-culture – in time (the Civil Rights Era) and space (the United States) – through the political speech acts of the original posts. Intertextually, they position BLM-DK in line with a transnational community and an African American political and juridical history. BLM-DK evokes a critical memory as an activist strategy of thinking and writing in a mode which disidentifies with dominant discourse as it is produced in Danish mainstream media. The draw on African American critical memory is enhanced and furthered in the written and visual memes, which I turn to next.

The semiotic approaches identifying a visual vernacular on Black Twitter (Richardson, 2020) is detectable in the Facebook communication by BLM-DK regarding the murder on Bornholm.

As an example may serve the meme featuring the text ‘Bornholm authorities be like … ’ followed by a still photo from the film American History X, which portrays the hate of white supremacists in the United States (27.6). The black and white photo shows the actor Edward Norton in character as the protagonist of the film with his arms spread out as he surrenders to the police immediately after killing an African American man in the streets. Norton’s head is shaved, his chest is bare, and he sports a large swastika – tattoo across his heart. He has a goatee and a smirky grin on his face. To the left of him the text ‘Nothing suggests a racial motive. [signed the] Media & the authorities’ is super-imposed onto the photo. To the right, a placard with the words ‘white lives matter’ is photoshopped into the photo. While the ‘ … be like’ – meme template is well-known across social media, the force of this particular rendition comes from its juxtaposition with a following post (28.6) featuring a photo of one of the defendant’s legs, which shows a tattoo depicting the words ‘white power’ framed by two swastikas. This post also references the media and the authorities’ claim that nothing suggests that the murder was racially motivated. The intertextuality on the level of visuality (the tattoos) and text (nothing suggests …) connects the Hollywood context of white supremacy’s impunity in the United States with the alleged impunity of the Danish defendants. The arrogance reflected in Norton’s character’s grin is in turn mirrored in the overbearing quote from the media and the authorities. Because the viewer knows that Norton’s character is guilty but does not feel accountable in the film due to the skewed and racist structures of American society, a similar reading is permissible regarding the photo of a real murderer’s tattoo.

The placard to the right of Norton’s character injects a further level of analysis. The words ‘white lives matter’ originate in the United States context and in opposition to the Black Lives Matter – movement. Its placement in the movie still suggests a relation between fiction and reality, underscoring the interpretation made above. Both posts draw their argument from the obvious discord between image and text, which aims to expose the absurdity of the claim made by the media and the authorities. Elements like the meme template used in one of the posts could be considered satirical, nevertheless, these posts are not what Richardson calls satiric memes (2020, pp. 147–151). Richardson’s examples of satiric memes are #BBQBecky or using the name Dolezal as a verb: i.e. Dolezaling meaning brazen cultural appropriation.⁴ BLM-DK’s memes are closer in kind to Richardson’s historic juxtapositions (pp. 139–143), but with the important difference that these are not merely historical photos, but partly fictional photos drawing on a broader cultural frame of reference. The ‘nothing suggests … ’ – posts point to exactly what does suggest a racist motive for the murder on Bornholm. The meme calls on connections and structural racism within powerful cultural institutions and historical facts, while making a point not about the satirical or laughable but the absurdity and unreal components of the case in question.

Another post (30.6) is clearly a historic juxtaposition in Richardson’s definition, which like the use of the image from the Freedom Riders mentioned above features an historic image in the context of present-day Denmark. It is the gruesome image of the dead boy Emmett Till, who was lynched in 1955 in Mississippi. The post shows Till before the lynching next to a photo from his open casket at his funeral. The accompanying text in the post states that it is not a coincident that the post features the image of Till, but the text does not offer an explanation for the choice or why it is uncoincidental. The critical memory of injustice towards and sufferings of African Americans is brought to bear in the contemporary Danish context. However, if the Till-image was a lost or missing image to Berger (2011) in the United States context, it is all but non-existent in the Danish context. The communication here is therefore clearly meant for the people already in the know about African American history and the details of the Bornholm murder. The post draws on an inside knowledge or coded vernacular making it belong partly in an enclaved textuality.

The post of Till moreover needs to be read alongside the posts mentioning lynching (23.11; 19.8). The posted invitation to participate in a demonstration mentioned above and a post arguing against the defendants’ claim that they attacked the victim because he had relations with their mother – the argument which drew the police investigation and the court case in a direction away from taking a possible racist motive into account. The latter post argues that it is ‘textbook’ (19.8) case to cry rape as a reason to lynch a man of African descent. The Till-case had a similar timeline: Till, who was only 14 years old, was accused of flirting with a white woman. This accusation led to his lynching and subsequent violent death. Several elements in the case, then, are pieced together in the post with the Till – images that intertextually, – discursively and visually place the Danish murder on the running list of victims of racist killings associated with the Civil Rights Struggle and Black Lives Matter. The lynching-posts taken together may partly speak to a counter-public already in the know, and partly educate the mainstream or dominant public that may be listening in.

On the day of the guilty verdict of the two defendants in the murder case, BLM-DK posted a text-image with a warm orange background framing black letters spelling out in English: ‘Mads and Magnus Møller Guilty of murder in the first degree’ (1.12). Nine days later, the organisation posted a Danish written text in black on a yellow background in which they lamented that the mother of the victim was not given compensation to the same degree as the parents of another recent murder victim.⁵ They also argued that the media had taken no notice of the fact that the claim that the victim had raped the mother of the perpetrators was admitted to being a falsehood. Other written statements in strong colours were posted around the time of the conviction calling for justice and recognition and continuing to follow the case, but without the news media’s presence.

The visual social media content ranges from complex cultural and political speech acts drawing on several temporalities, geographies, and visual modalities simultaneously to simple writings in bright colours. While all posts speak to the same counter-position against the mainstream media and official line of the inquiry into the murder, some posts speak directly to a broader public – setting the record straight – while others require inside knowledge and access to a collective, critical memory. Through BLM-DK’s Facebook posts a visual expression and textual content is created as a mnemonic device embedding the narrative of the Bornholm killing in a larger context of Black publicity.

The way in which BLM-DK engaged in and covered the case of the murder on the island of Bornholm is marked by their discursive production of a counter-public, which is heavily embedded in a United States context and history and deeply suspicious of the Danish authorities and media. BLM-DK’s counter-public is established in an under-dog position to powerful institutions as well as common Danish prejudice. However, the organisation is transnationally connected to a spatial and temporal narrative on which it draws its strength and arguments. The posted speech acts tie the Danish murder to the list of historical and present day lynchings in the United States and to the global Hollywood representation of white supremacy through images, while they engage in dialogue with the foreign press in text. As a result, BLM-DK uses intertextual and interdiscursive references to African American history in their attempts to mobilise the counter-public, thus insisting on a transnational connection and political subjectivity rooted in a community beyond the Danish mainstream public.

Arguably, the Danish political, legal, economic, and historical public is far removed from the racial tensions and the police violence of the United States. However, the transnational bridges sustaining counter-publics are not new. In the Danish colonies in the Caribbean, a descendant of enslaved African Caribbeans, David Hamilton Jackson, produced and edited a newspaper titled The Herald from 1915 to 1925. Re-publishing United States articles from African American newspapers and commenting on world affairs with an emphasis on the impact on the African Caribbean population on the islands, he created a far-reaching community connected to the black press in North America while seeking social reforms akin to the reforms that developed in contemporary Denmark (Blaagaard, 2018a). Another example would be the Spanish language newspapers and journals in the United States at the turn of the century. They announced the Spanish-speaking public as an integral part of the United States as they simultaneously forged their own political and cultural subjectivity (González & Torres, 2011, p. 168). Similarly, BLM-DK can be said to connect disparate spaces in order to argue for a transnational political subjectivity, which is not merely Danish, but which is constructed and continuously constructing ties to a broader and diversified counter-culture by evoking a common critical memory.

BLM-DK produces this discursive counter-public by refusing to adhere to preconceived communicative formats, such as news articles. Nevertheless, by sharing newspaper articles and other media products about the murder BLM-DK does more than comment on media representations and debates: they become a part of a public dialogue initiated and managed by them. The visual expressions of this dialogue in particular hold the potential to draw on multiple discourses simultaneously, thus pushing forward and challenging the visual vernacular. The critical memory of African American resistance to white supremacy and police impunity is reproduced in a Danish expression producing a changing same – a new chapter in an on-going narrative of civil rights.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).