Dark Matters: On The Surveillance Of Blackness
by Simone Browne /
2015 / English / EPUB
1.9 MB Download
In
InDark Matters
Dark Matters Simone Browne locates the conditions of
blackness as a key site through which surveillance is practiced,
narrated, and resisted. She shows how contemporary surveillance
technologies and practices are informed by the long history of
racial formation and by the methods of policing black life under
slavery, such as branding, runaway slave notices, and lantern
laws. Placing surveillance studies into conversation with the
archive of transatlantic slavery and its afterlife, Browne draws
from black feminist theory, sociology, and cultural studies to
analyze texts as diverse as the methods of surveilling blackness
she discusses: from the design of the eighteenth-century slave
ship
Simone Browne locates the conditions of
blackness as a key site through which surveillance is practiced,
narrated, and resisted. She shows how contemporary surveillance
technologies and practices are informed by the long history of
racial formation and by the methods of policing black life under
slavery, such as branding, runaway slave notices, and lantern
laws. Placing surveillance studies into conversation with the
archive of transatlantic slavery and its afterlife, Browne draws
from black feminist theory, sociology, and cultural studies to
analyze texts as diverse as the methods of surveilling blackness
she discusses: from the design of the eighteenth-century slave
shipBrooks
Brooks, Jeremy Bentham's
, Jeremy Bentham'sPanopticon
Panopticon, and
, andThe Book of Negroes
The Book of Negroes, to contemporary art, literature,
biometrics, and post-9/11 airport security practices.
Surveillance, Browne asserts, is both a discursive and material
practice that reifies boundaries, borders, and bodies around
racial lines, so much so that the surveillance of blackness has
long been, and continues to be, a social and political
norm.
, to contemporary art, literature,
biometrics, and post-9/11 airport security practices.
Surveillance, Browne asserts, is both a discursive and material
practice that reifies boundaries, borders, and bodies around
racial lines, so much so that the surveillance of blackness has
long been, and continues to be, a social and political
norm.