Acknowledgments vii
Introduction, and Other Dark Matters 1
1. Notes on Surveillance Studies: Through the Door of No
Return 31
2. "Everybody's Got a Little Light under the Sun": The Making of
the Book of Negroes 63
3. B®anding Blackness: Biometric Technology and the Surveillance of
Blackness 89
4. "What Did TSA Find in Solange's Fro?": Security Theater at the
Airport 131
Epilogue. When Blackness Enters the Frame 161
Notes 165
Bibliography 191
Index 203
Simone Browne is Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
"Dark Matters reframes surveillance studies in a way that will
spark interrogations regarding the historical, racialized origins
of surveillance theory and practice, while presenting a robust
entryway to the field’s current debates for new readers. Dark
Matters offers a model of interdisciplinary feminist scholarship
for media scholars invested in critical race inquiry, visual
analysis, and archival study. At a moment when surveillance
practices permeate livelihood, Browne’s contribution here is an
invaluable resource for examining the contemporary moment of
#BlackLivesMatter, police brutality, and strategies for future
resistance."
*Feminist Media Studies*
"Dark Matters provides an invaluable perspective on surveillance
and reminds us that the history of the surveillance of blackness
has a unique and important roll to play in our understanding and
analysis of contemporary surveillance."
*Epic.org*
"With Dark Matters, Simone Browne delivers a theoretical tour
de force to the field of Surveillance Studies by bringing
blackness, black life, and the black subject—dark matter—into
focus. . . . Browne's work is a must-read for those interested in
examining the complexities of surveillance and attendant ongoing,
embodied, political struggles."
*Surveillance & Society*
"Through her analyses of maps, newspaper articles, fugitive slave
advertisements, slave narratives, personal correspondence,
government documents, memoirs, and treaties, Brown exposes how
blackness was shaped and produced through surveillance practices
during slavery."
*Public Books*
"Dark Matters is a powerful book, which stems partly from the
subject matter and partly from Browne’s simultaneously lucid and
forceful writing. It is also a book that feels increasingly
necessary, helping us to ask not only about the policies, processes
and technologies that govern civil liberties, but also about whose
bodies and freedoms are most controlled and curtailed."
*Catalyst*
"Each chapter of Dark Matters presents a different archive of
racializing surveillance paired with reflections on black cultural
production Browne reads as dark sousveillance. At each turn, Browne
encourages us to see in slavery and its afterlife new modes of
control, old ways of studying them, and potential paths of
resistance."
*boundary 2*
"Dark Matters is an invaluable study that showcases how
surveillance, historically and contemporarily, is rooted in
anti-Blackness. Through utilizing a Black feminist methodology and
centering the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the genealogy of
surveillance, Browne demonstrates how the workings and technologies
of domination, surveillance and governance utilized during slavery
pre-figure and haunt the historical present. While the specific
technologies have become far more advanced, the brutal fact of
anti-Blackness remains the bedrock of surveillance practices to
date."
*Souls*
"Dark Matters is of great importance not just because it
illuminates historical and contemporary surveillance technologies
of (anti)blackness, but equally because it opens up a series of
questions around geography, race, power, and surveillance."
*Theory & Event*
"Browne’s Dark Matters is a groundbreaking and field-changing study
important for cultural criticism broadly and surveillance studies
in particular. Moreover, it is especially timely given the ways the
issues she raises intersect with debates about police violence and
mass surveillance, among others."
*American Journal of Sociology*
"What does Blackness have to do within the modern surveillance
state? Beautiful and theoretical, Simone Browne details how Black
life from slavery to the present has been subjugated by the
constancy of being watched and how Black people have resisted."
*Zora, 100 greatest books ever written by African American women*
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