The request to write this piece arrived at a welcome time. I had exhausted all defensible forms of procrastinating on a chapter I planned to write on the Emmett Till case and the afterlives of two sets of photographs—those of Till’s body as it was recovered from the river and used as trial evidence, and the famous open-casket images in Jet. Beyond that, I was stuck. So it was a welcome reprieve to read someone else’s book. The Documentary Audit is not explicitly about visual evidence. Yet it is concerned with many of the questions that had me stuck.

Rangan considers how the humanitarian logics of socially engaged documentaries over the past four decades have come to reproduce the habits and values that justified the rise of mass incarceration. Documentary audiences, in other words, have been taught how to see like cops and like juries. Rather than offering a compensatory, even liberating alternative to the justice system, the jurification of documentary audiences replicates carceral relationships and conflates justice with criminal justice in a manner antithetical to abolition (19–20). Listening—as a metaphor for witnessing—is both noun and verb, providing documentary audiences with an ethical mandate while serving as a key activity through which documentarians might “expose wrongdoing, create awareness, and instigate action” (10). But listening, Rangan suggests, often means juridical listening. Its adversarial structure, evidentiary logic of forensics, and the punitive version of justice it assumes support a discourse of carceral enclosure. 

In the context of the Emmett Till case, nonfiction media that encourage “listening like a cop” have repeatedly promised justice through legal rectification. Most recently, Timothy Tyson’s book The Blood of Emmett Till presented what appeared to be a crucial piece of new testimony. Tyson claimed that, in an interview, Till’s accuser Carolyn Bryant had recanted her claims that Till had propositioned her.{1} The revelation was sensational and prompted exactly what juridical listening promises: a reopening of the investigation, the possibility of indictments, the arousal of hopes in the Till family that justice might finally be served through prosecution. Yet the recantation turned out to be unverifiable.{2} It was nowhere in Tyson’s recordings of the interview. When the investigation was reclosed without new charges, the family’s hopes for deferred justice were once again dashed. This is the cruel machinery of juridical listening: It can only ask who is guilty and what evidence proves it, while remaining unfit to address the conditions that enabled the violence in the first place. The courtroom demands individual defendants, disaggregated incidents, linear timelines—precisely what the Till case, like all cases of racial violence, exceeds.

When yet another best-selling book about the Till case appeared in 2024, Wright Thompson’s The Barn, I felt reluctantly obligated to engage with it. Thompson takes a long view of the crime, going back to the Indian Wars and the cotton market, tracing the family histories of those involved in the killing through generations.{3} It is filled, almost to exhaustion, with facts and connections. The book takes on a near-conspiratorial fascination with geographical and biographical confluence, recording the distances between different historical events to the tenth of a mile. More than sixty times in the book, Thompson incants some variation on the exact location of Till’s murder, “Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, measured from the Choctaw Meridian,” like a sort of hymn. Yet his insistence on the particulars is conveyed in what Rangan describes as a “tone less of a tribunal than of a vigil or wake” (169). The ungainliness of location connects to the artificiality of jurisdiction and the clumsy efforts of people to impose order on the unbounded landscape. It depicts a history of legal struggle transposed onto a square of an old map. 

The Barn’s insistence on place reframes the narrative away from the adjudicating of contested details—how many murderers there were, what exactly transpired between Till and Bryant—and onto the many other factors that allowed for Till’s murder to happen, beyond the stage of the rural grocery store. The systemic is hard to show visually; as Brecht observed, a photograph of the Krupp factory tells us almost nothing about its crimes. Documentary film tends to prefer individuals—the charismatic megafauna of human rights advocacy—over spaces, making it perhaps unsurprising that the spatial dimensions of listening might be rendered more clearly in book form. For Thompson, the question of blame extends well outside what can be determined in a courtroom. Instead, culpability extends across past failures of justice: abandoned treaties with Native peoples of the Delta, dishonored land sales, nationalization of the cotton crop, resettlement of black farmers, refusal to integrate schools after Brown v. Board of Education. Where Tyson’s juridical listening sought new testimony to reopen legal proceedings, Thompson’s spatial approach makes such proceedings beside the point—not because justice doesn’t matter, but because the courtroom is structurally incapable of addressing justice at this scale.

So what would it mean to listen, instead, like an abolitionist? For one thing, it would mean listening with instead of to subjects. The root of forensic is the Latin term forensis, a space for listening. Rangan notes that, by paying attention to the “forum function” of documentary, filmmakers can work to interrogate and sever their investments in the carceral (158). In doing so, they might unsettle the structure of bearing witness in favor of a solidarity politics that recognizes “that the activity of listening is subtended by an oblivion only revealed in the company of others” (26). Listening like an abolitionist, then, means interrogating the position of the listener, lengthening the timeline of the incident in question, and attending to spatial relationships (how do we produce places where these things can happen?) over narrative relationships (who did what, when?). This is spatial listening as abolitionist practice: It builds what Rangan calls “informal, necessary forums” outside the courtroom, where accountability is organized not around punishment but around collective reckoning with place and history (172).

* Outlaw Communities of Care, LaCharles Ward