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Paper short abstract

Experimenting with collage and animation in Anthropology and Black Studies, and attending to practices of mourning and remembrance in New Orleans, the paper explores what remains in the aftermath of loss, accounting for and anticipating new permutations of identity, culture, and form.

Paper long abstract

This paper showcases artistic and intellectual experiments with collage and animation at the intersection of Anthropology and Black Studies. Inspired by the beauty and utility of collage within the Black experience, the paper represents a theoretical and methodological shift, beyond the persistence of anti-Black violence and death and towards an orientation of black aliveness (Quashie 2021). Sorting through the remnants of fieldwork in post-Katrina New Orleans (including interview excerpts, photographs, and archival images), the paper attends to local practices of mourning and remembrance to illustrate Black ways of transformative enduring in these times. It explores collage as an essential tool for sorting through what remains in the complex aftermath of loss, accounting for and anticipating new permutations of identity, culture, and form through processes such as cutting, rearranging, and adhering (Delmez 2023). The multiplicity and impact of this work, a visual form of Black story (re)telling, is enhanced in the digital realm where compositing programs set things in motion at various speeds and scales. The paper discusses the ability of an animated collage to exist in a state of suspension between representation and simulation, making it difficult to anchor what one observes or experiences as knowable and thus possible to push past conventional frames into new territory (Cholodenko 1991). After presenting clips of work in progress, the paper concludes by theorizing scraps as bits as bytes, considering collages as data hubs and their circulation as a form of Black coding (Johnson and Neal 2017) in an age of (mis/dis)information.