Introduction

Kevin Wilson Jr.’s 2017 short film, My Nephew Emmett, which revisits the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, provides the point of departure for the following forum. Nominated for Best Live Action Short Film at the Ninetieth Academy Awards in 2018, the film grapples with the injustice of Till’s kidnapping and murder from the perspective of his uncle, Mose Wright. In their responses to the film, LaShonda S. Carter, Bridget R. Cooks, Erin Gray, and Linette Park offer a complex range of readings that highlight the intersections of aesthetic and technical mediation, racial terror, and the paradoxes and possibilities of representing anti-Black violence. While the forum was not initially guided by the question of fascism, we find it important to include in this issue as a way of beginning to confront the entanglements of anti-Black lynching and vigilante racial terror with fascist domination. Police impunity and the relentless killing and brutalization of Black, Native, and other people of color in the name of so-called law enforcement today further manifest the centrality of lynching to white supremacy in the United States. Such entanglements allow us to see the grotesque entrenchment of mob violence as a disciplinary tool for white capitalist dominance. The forum discussion also presents compelling and divergent insights on the aesthetic politics of Black mourning under anti-Black regimes of visuality and spectatorship.