Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
by Simone Browne
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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 show more 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"--Publisher description. show lessTags
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Author Information
2 Works 187 Members
Simone Browne is Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Awards and Honors
Notable Lists
Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 2015
Classifications
- Genres
- Nonfiction, Anthropology, General Nonfiction, Politics and Government, History
- DDC/MDS
- 305.896 — Society, government, & culture Social sciences, sociology & anthropology Social group - Age, Gender, Ethnicity Ethnic and national groups Other ethnic and national groups Africans and people of African descent; Blacks of African origin
- LCC
- E185.86 .B76 — History of the United States United States Elements in the population Afro-Americans Status and development since emancipation
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 184
- Popularity
- 176,187
- Rating
- (4.43)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 3
- ASINs
- 2
