Review of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, by Simone Browne

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Notes

See, for instance: Alondra Nelson, The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations and Reconciliation after the Genome (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016).; Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century (New York: The New Press, 2011).

A prime example of this is the case of Ramsey Orta, who filmed the now notorious video of Eric Garner’s murder at the hands of the NYPD in 2014. Since filming the video, Orta and his family have been subject to intensified police surveillance, harassment, and imprisonment. Meanwhile, the video’s continued widespread circulation has not led to any indictments of the involved officers.

Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terrory, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).; See especially: Chapter 1, “Innocent Amusements: The Stage of Sufferance.”

For more sustained engagements with the fraught nature of blackness’ relationship to the archive, see: Saidiya Hartman “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008):1–14; Katherine McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life,” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 16–28; Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Omise’eke Natasha Tisnsley, “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14, no. 2–3 (2008): 191–215.

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Tyrone S. Palmer

Tyrone S. Palmer is a writer and PhD student in African American Studies at Northwestern University. His research lies at the intersection of Black critical theory, affect theory, and the history of philosophy, interrogating the centrality of affect to modern conceptions of the Human.