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Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
Duke University Press
Copyright:
This content is made freely available by the publisher. It may not be redistributed or altered. All rights reserved.
ISBN electronic:
978-0-8223-7530-2
Publication date:
2015
Book Chapter
Notes on Surveillance Studies: Through the Door of No Return
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Published:September 2015
Chapter 1 considers the Panopticon (1786) and the plan of the slave ship Brooks (1789) for what these two pieces of architecture disclose about surveillance, race, and the production of knowledge. This chapter explores black feminist theorizing of surveillance and the operation of disciplinary and sovereign forms of power over black life under slavery by looking at advertisements for runaway slaves and the census, as well as a set of rules from the 1800s for the management of slaves on an East Texas plantation. Drawing on novelist Caryl Phillips’s short story “The Cargo Rap,” visual artist Robin Rhode’s Pan’s Opticon...
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