Dark Matters
Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
SIMONE BROWNE
Copyright Date: 2015
Published by: Duke University Press
https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw89p
Pages: 224
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv11cw89p
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Book Info
Dark Matters
Book Description:

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.

eISBN: 978-0-8223-7530-2
Subjects: African American Studies, American Studies, International Relations, Sociology
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-iv)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw89p.1
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. v-vi)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw89p.2
  3. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (pp. vii-x)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw89p.3
  4. INTRODUCTION, AND OTHER DARK MATTERS
    INTRODUCTION, AND OTHER DARK MATTERS (pp. 1-30)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw89p.4

    The CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records responsive to your request.” Sometime in the spring of 2011, I wrote to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to request the release of any documents pertaining to Frantz Fanon under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). At the time, I was interested in Fanon’s travels to the United States of America in 1961, possibly under the nom de guerre Ibrahim Fanon, to receive treatment for myeloid leukemia. He arrived in the United States on October 3, staying at a...

  5. 1 NOTES ON SURVEILLANCE STUDIES THROUGH THE DOOR OF NO RETURN
    1 NOTES ON SURVEILLANCE STUDIES THROUGH THE DOOR OF NO RETURN (pp. 31-62)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw89p.5

    In early August 1785, English social reformer Jeremy Bentham set out from Brighton, England, destined for Krichëv, Russia. It was in Russia where Bentham would first conceive of the Panopticon in a series of letters “from Crecheff in White Russia, to a friend in England.” At one point during his journey, in an attempt to reach Constantinople, he embarked from Smyrna on a cramped Turkish caïque with “24 passengers on the deck, all Turks; besides 18 young Negresses (slaves) under the hatches.”¹ Much of Bentham’s writings that addressed slavery were written before this voyage. In those texts he touches on...

  6. 2 “EVERY BODY’S GOT A LITTLE LIGHT UNDER THE SUN” THE MAKING OF THE BOOK OF NEGROES
    2 “EVERY BODY’S GOT A LITTLE LIGHT UNDER THE SUN” THE MAKING OF THE BOOK OF NEGROES (pp. 63-88)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw89p.6

    Billed as “the ultimate cat and mouse chase through the Canadian wilderness,” the reality television series Mantracker made its debut on the Outdoor Life Network in 2006. With only a compass, a map, and a two-kilometer head start, each episode sees the aptly named “prey” given thirty-six hours to reach the finish line, by foot, often some forty kilometers away. Riding on horseback with a lasso and spurs, the Mantracker carries neither map nor compass and supposedly has no idea where the finish line is located. He is equipped with binoculars and an assistant, however. The Mantracker is Terry Grant,...

  7. 3 BRANDING BLACKNESS BIOMETRIC TECHNOLOGY AND THE SURVEILLANCE OF BLACKNESS
    3 BRANDING BLACKNESS BIOMETRIC TECHNOLOGY AND THE SURVEILLANCE OF BLACKNESS (pp. 89-130)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw89p.7

    You can find Wilson Chinn on eBay.com or other online auction sites for sale among antebellum ephemera. Wilson Chinn’s portrait was taken around 1863 by Myron H. Kimball, a photographer with an interest in daguerreotype and a correspondent with the Philadelphia Enquirer during New York’s 1853 World’s Fair. Kimball also served as an official photographer for the Freedman’s Bureau. In this particular portrait, a chain is tied around Chinn’s ankle and various tools of torture lie at his feet: a paddle, a leg iron, a metal prodding device. The caption below the image reads, “exhibiting Instruments of Torture used to...

  8. 4 “WHAT DID TSA FIND IN SOLANGE’S FRO”? SECURITY THEATER AT THE AIRPORT
    4 “WHAT DID TSA FIND IN SOLANGE’S FRO”? SECURITY THEATER AT THE AIRPORT (pp. 131-160)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw89p.8

    We often think of baggage as something in one’s past that forms a burdensome attribute that one brings into a new relationship: debt, children, trauma, or drama, as in, “She’s got a lot of baggage.” Or that something that gets carried around or lugged from place to place, from space to space, or that one leaves behind, such as unclaimed baggage. Or even something that gets searched and rifled through, as when travelers are notified by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) by way of a Notice of Baggage Inspection, the little note left in their luggage that informs them that...

  9. EPILOGUE: WHEN BLACKNESS ENTERS THE FRAME
    EPILOGUE: WHEN BLACKNESS ENTERS THE FRAME (pp. 161-164)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw89p.9

    In December 2009, Desi Cryer and Wanda Zamen, coworkers at Toppers Camping Center in Waller, Texas, uploaded a video to YouTube titled “hp Computers Are Racist.” Cryer and Zamen tested out the new Hewlett Packard MediaSmart computer, and they recorded what happened when “Black Desi” and “White Wanda” used the computer’s webcam. Cryer narrates the pair’s video, at one point saying, “I think my blackness is interfering with the computer’s ability to follow me,” referring to the webcam’s apparent inability to pan, tilt, zoom, follow, or detect any of Cryer’s gestures.¹ However, “as soon as white Wanda appears,” the webcam’s...

  10. NOTES
    NOTES (pp. 165-190)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw89p.10
  11. BIBLIOGRAPHY
    BIBLIOGRAPHY (pp. 191-202)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw89p.11
  12. INDEX
    INDEX (pp. 203-213)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw89p.12
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