Introduction: Data and the matter of Black life. Undisciplining data ; The social life of racial data ; Racial data, visual revolutions ; The aesthetics of data ; Undisciplining as method ; Overview
The social survey : the survey spirit. "The survey spirit" : origins, evolution, and the radical operations of the social survey ; "Ugly facts" and (anti)social data : Kelly Miller, the American Negro Academy, and the call for the social survey ; A book to do some good : Kelly Miller, Sutton Griggs, and the emergence of social document fiction ; Faulty surfaces, unruly eyes ; Everywhere and nowhere : the social survey's nongeography
Photography : looking out. Seeing survival ; Deep black mourning : lynching's (anti)photographic logic ; "Let them see" : photography, performance, and reform ; Looking out : toward a new visual epistemology of survival ; Photographically hesitant : the visual politics of W. E. B. Du Bois's "Jesus Christ in Georgia"
Film: overexposure. Beyond the frame : overexposure and Zora Hurston's Filmic Practice ; "Drenched in light" ; Recording racial feeling ; Contraband flesh ; Cinematics of Negro expression
Coda: Racial data's afterlives.