Dark matters : on the surveillance of blackness / Simone Browne.
Publisher: Durham : Duke University Press, 2015Description: ix, 213 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 23 cmContent type: text | still image Media type: unmediated Carrier type: volume001: 43860ISBN: 9780822359388 (pbk.) :Subject(s): African Americans -- Social conditions | Blacks -- Canada -- Social conditions | Electronic surveillance -- United States | Government information -- United States | Society | United States -- Race relations | Canada -- Race relationsDDC classification: 305.896073 BRO LOC classification: E185.86 | .B76 2015Summary: Simone Browne shows how racial ideologies and the long history of policing black bodies under transatlantic slavery structure contemporary surveillance technologies and practices. Analysing a wide array of archival and contemporary texts, she demonstrates how surveillance reifies boundaries, borders, and bodies around racial lines.| Item type | Current library | Collection | Call number | Copy number | Status | Date due | Barcode | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Book | MAIN LIBRARY Book | 305.896073 BRO (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 113505 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
In 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 Brooks , Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon , and 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.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Simone Browne shows how racial ideologies and the long history of policing black bodies under transatlantic slavery structure contemporary surveillance technologies and practices. Analysing a wide array of archival and contemporary texts, she demonstrates how surveillance reifies boundaries, borders, and bodies around racial lines.
Table of contents provided by Syndetics
- Acknowledgments (p. vii)
- Introduction, and Other Dark Matters (p. 1)
- 1 Notes on Surveillance Studies Through the Door of No Return (p. 31)
- 2 "Everybody's Got a Little Light under the Sun" The Making of the Book of Negroes (p. 63)
- 3 B®anding Blackness Biometric Technology and the Surveillance of Blackness (p. 89)
- 4 "What Did TSA Find in Solange's Fro"? Security Theater at the Airport (p. 131)
- Epilogue: When Blackness Enters the Frame (p. 161)
- Notes (p. 165)
- Bibliography (p. 191)
- Index (p. 203)
Reviews provided by Syndetics
Library Journal Review
Browne (African & African Diaspora studies, Univ. of Texas, Austin) connects contemporary systems of surveillance to those set up under slavery. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.There are no comments on this title.