Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness

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.  

• In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
• Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
• Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Race and American Culture)
• Demonic Grounds: Black Women And The Cartographies Of Struggle
• Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human
• Black and Blur (consent not to be a single being)
• Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
• Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
• The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study
• Listening to Images