Goin' Viral
Uncontrollable Black Performance

Gabriel A. Peoples (Author)

9780252088742

Paperback / softback, published 22 July 2025

296 pages, 33 black & white photographs
23.5 x 15.6 x 1.6 cm, 0.454 kg

“Brilliantly walks readers through a history and legacy of Black virality. Beginning with a deep reading of performance studies theory and literature, the author situates our present moment contextually, unpacking the importance of the viral sound and image on our understanding of and relationships to Blackness.”--Catherine Knight Steele, author of Digital Black Feminism

Black virality refers to the spread of Black performance that becomes uncontrollable because of its rapid and ubiquitous circulation through popular media. Gabriel A. Peoples examines Black people and representations of Black people that have gone viral from the eighteenth century to today.

Peoples’s analysis ranges from abolitionist and proslavery visual culture to Do the Right Thing to “Bed Intruder Song” and the cellphone video of Derrion Albert’s murder. After identifying these moments, he considers how performances go viral in Black ways. He also thinks through the ways Black virality circulates ideas that materially affect Black life. As he shows, an interacting person’s vulnerability to racialized gender and racialized sexuality knowledge inspires how they spread a performance. Non-iconic elements of viral moments reveal hard-to-find nuances of Black life while the artists and others represented in viral moments promote both collective and individual liberation by harnessing their visibility and audibility.

Introduction