Dismantling the Archive of Anti-Black Violence: Performing Futurity in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s “Zimmer Land”

The circulation of images of police brutality and Black suffering has reached a dramatic intensification in our hyper-mediatized times. While their effectiveness in eliciting outrage and fostering grassroots mobilization is undeniable, their unbridled dissemination also raises fundamental ethical and political concerns: Can the political gain these images might afford make up for the psychic devastation they inflict? How can the possibility of change and futurity itself be imagined from within the constraints of a deadly archive? This essay reads Nana Kwame Adjei- Brenyah’s “Zimmer Land” (2018) as a narrative intervention in the contemporary economy of images of racialized suffering. By foregrounding their mediatized character – and by privileging performance over representation, the speculative over the spectacular – the short story reintroduces these scenes of violence within the frame of the techno-racial capitalism that sustains (and is sustained by) the precarity of Black bodies. Furthermore, while addressing the status of the Black body as fungible commodity, “Zimmer Land” circumvents the Afropessimist claim of the impossibility of Black narrative and of a Black future by exploiting the very features that would make Black emplotment inconceivable: a flattening of historical time, the lack of causality in gratuitous violence, and the foreclosure of the transformative promise of narrative.