Routing

Abstract

As Simone Browne has observed, performances of racializing surveillance “reify boundaries, borders, and bodies along racial lines.” Taking cues from thinkers such as Browne and Donna Haraway, this special issue draws on feminist understandings of sight as a partial, situated, and embodied type of sense-making laden with ableist assumptions to explore how racial politics have structured practices of oversight. How have technologies of race and vision worked together to monitor modes of being-in-the-world? In what ways have bodies performed for and against such governance? With these initial questions, we set out to stage a methodologically feminist forum at the intersection of critical race theory and surveillance studies. The contributions that animate this special issue propose and problematize numerous responses to racializing surveillance and the myriad vectors of violence tied to it. Through this collective inquiry, the articles, creative essays, multi-media works, and reviews here pursue an array of possibilities for redirecting powers of scrutiny—particularly those mobilized for oppressive purposes—to strengthen social infrastructures of care.

Keywords:

• surveillance
• critical race theory
• feminist theory
• Black feminism
• performance studies
• visual culture
• embodiment
• Simone Browne

The eyes have been used to signify a perverse capacity—honed to perfection in the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male supremacy … Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all seems not just mythically about the god trick of seeing everything from nowhere, but to have put the myth into ordinary practice. And like the god trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters.

–Donna Haraway (1988, 581)

In the post-9/11-Covid-19 digital age, the techno-monsters of governmental and corporate monitoring can feel inescapable. From Google Earth to consumer drones, defining innovations of our times seem to position us as players in a compulsory drama for a master spectator with the capacity to see everything from nowhere. Despite their present-day high-tech veneer, these performance scores are not new. They undergird the very history of surveillance—a history inextricably bound with those of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery.

Yet from the prison cell to the theater of security quarantine to the closet, surveillance also gives rise to techniques of resistance. How might feminist interpretations of vision and/or its enactment interrupt racialized segregation and confinement—in the classroom, lecture hall, senate floor, court room, bedroom, public bathroom, behind the big house, in the club, on the floor, out at night, backed into a corner, running for your life, under pressure, on stage?

As Simone Browne has observed, performances of racializing surveillance “reify boundaries, borders, and bodies along racial lines” (2015, 16). Taking cues from thinkers such as Browne and Donna Haraway, this special issue draws on feminist understandings of sight as a partial, situated, and embodied type of sense-making laden with ableist assumptions to explore how racial politics have structured practices of oversight.¹ How have technologies of race and vision worked together to monitor modes of being-in-the world? In what ways have bodies performed for and against such governance? With these initial questions, we set out to stage a methodologically feminist forum propose at the intersection of critical race theory and surveillance studies. The contributions that animate this special issue propose and problematize numerous responses to racializing surveillance and the myriad vectors of violence tied to it. Through this collective inquiry, the articles, creative essays, multi-media works, and reviews here pursue an array of possibilities for redirecting powers of scrutiny—particularly those mobilized for oppressive purposes—to strengthen social infrastructures of care.

In the late winter of 2020, our collaboration with contributors commenced. A global pandemic erupted. We wondered how to take care. The processes of surveillant social control that we were investigating came into sharper focus and closed in all around us. The virus intensified supervision at every level. From the institutional to the interpersonal, pandemic protocol now brings entrenched methods of such supervision and its discriminatory modalities to the fore of public consciousness. Astute commentators such as Paul B. Preciado proclaim that those with the privilege to work from home under lockdown can no longer deny that “the cybernetic biosurveillance” of twenty-first century life has turned the domestic space into a “soft prison” (2020, 82–84). Meanwhile, those risking their lives for a livelihood based on “essential work” make wage labor's disciplinary shackles plain. People without employment, without the soft prison of a home, or within the literal, hard-hearted carceral system unduly suffer. Social distinctions over-determine who experiences which surveillant repertoires while the range of experiences also limns an overarching continuum of capture–one significantly demarcated by “racial lines” (82). In the US, these underpin disproportionate Covid-19-related fatalities among people whom the Centers for Disease Control identifies as “Hispanic or Latino, non-Hispanic Black, and non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaska Native” (2020). Engineered racial divisions and hierarchies also feed morbid manifestations of Black Americans’ abuse at the hands of law enforcement. This special issue developed amid amplified calls to challenge oversight for social justice. Demands to abolish the police, reckon with white settler colonialism, and topple monumental eyes/“I”'s resounded far and wide.² At the same time, we weighed public health directives to embrace the role of vigilant monitor for the social good. “Monitor yourself.” “Keep an eye on those in your midst.” “Check the curve in your county.” During the editing process, those of us involved contended with the proximity between attentiveness and bigoted authoritarianism—could we practice one without playing into the other?

When confronting racializing surveillance, not only where but also how cultural workers direct our attention is pivotal. Exploring phenomena that exceed what hegemonic society has trained us to perceive—phenomena that present opportunities for living otherwise and attentiveness that fuels an abolitionist feminist imagination—demands deliberate reading strategies. As much as surveillance studies discourse hinges on terms of visibility and transparency, invisibility and opacity, “Views from the Larger Somewhere” asks: what is actually invisible and what is a failure to read? Here again, we draw insight from Browne who, following Michele Wallace (1990) and Evelyn Hammonds (1994), uses the analogy of a black hole to explain how deft reading strategies can make the effects of a previously un-intelligible phenomenon detectable. The black hole itself goes “unseen,” but because “its energy dis- torts and disrupts that around it,” we can invent ways to analyze its presence (Browne 2015, 16).

Devising their own strategies, this special issue's contributors read into potentialities for outmaneuvering and undermining oppressive oversight—often where no potential seems to exist. Christina Aushana “examines how police vision is trained, tested, and scripted,” by probing sites of vulnerability within the dramaturgy that underlies pedagogical interactions among training officers and their recruits. With sharp analysis and wit, Aushana's article “Inescapable Scripts: Role-Playing Feminist (Re)visions and Rehearsing Racialized State Violence in Police Training Scenarios” recounts her work as a volunteer role-play actor in a police academy's scenario-based simulations. She reflects on her attempts to inhabit, understand, and unsettle the citational practices, which police interpellate and enact in their encounters with racialized others. Ra Malika Imhotep, Sarah Jessica Johnson, and C. Riley Snorton also harness participant-observer and performance studies perspectives. Their article, “‘Hell You Talmbout?’ Sighting Confusion in The Performance of Black Revolt” dwells on and in the critical capacities of confusion to evade surveillant capture. The authors parse their experiences as reenactors in Dread Scott's Slave Rebellion Reenactment (2019) of Louisiana's 1811 uprising to reveal how, within SRR's tightly scripted and spectacular program, confusion opened up a space of refuge, “routing,” and “temporal drag”—a space for attending to violence and conflicts embedded within the historical revolt's narration.

Layla Zami, on the other hand, turns to art that deliberately enlivens queer feminist dissidence and narrative dissonance. Zami's creative essay, “Dissidence, Dissidance: Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore's Visions and/in Oxana Chi's Motions” meditates on Chi's performance Killjoy (2012-). Channeling partners Cahun and Moore's lifework under multiple conditions of imprisonment, including Nazi occupation, “Chi dances her way out of the oppressive tentacles of the media-medicine-military complex.” Thus, Zami's study, as Aushana's, and Imhotep, Johnson, and Snorton's, takes seriously the task of locating and critically assuming embodied scores that uphold discriminatory regimes. These authors model how performative and contextually informed methods are ripe for infiltrating surveillant apparatuses.

Other contributors underscore subversive approaches to the aesthetics and operations of informational exchange woven within state security and racist social networks. Jeannine Tang's article “Persons and Profiles: Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani's Index of the Disappeared (2004-)” tracks such approaches through Ganesh and Ghani's multi-faceted, multi-media art project. This work, Index of the Disappeared, repurposed post- 9/11 techniques of intelligence gathering and personal identification aimed at disappearing, detaining, and deporting South Asian and Muslim immigrant communities. Focusing on Index's “aesthetic promiscuity,” Tang elucidates how Ganesh and Ghani reformulate the formal and functional properties of both state profiling and archiving as counter-surveillant tactics that foster community to protect brown and Black life. Likewise, Francesca Romeo's text pursues how social networks might be weaponized to facilitate counter-discourse “to that of the state and its auxiliary components, including law enforcement and the judicial system.” Her article “Networked Testimony as Necroresistance” offers a layered reading of Diamond Reynolds’ live stream video, narrating her partner Philando Castile's fatal interaction with the police. Romeo provocatively argues that, by targeting the levers of necropolitical violence, Reynold's testimony constitutes an act of necroresistance. Juxtaposing virtually circulated recordings of police brutality with the social media of lynching photography in both anti-and pro-lynching circles, Romeo grapples with “an irreconcilable paradox concerning the necessity of producing visual evidence of anti-Black violence as a means to counter it and the trauma inherent upon viewing such images” that often forecloses the recognition of Black agency. For Romeo, however, digital forums that enable “image governance authored by the oppressed and powered by the public” are crucial to the self-authorizing and sousveillant dynamics of Reynolds’ Facebook Live video. Like Tang, Romeo articulates how visual formats of regulatory and racializing systems morph with them. Interestingly, both authors’ art historical emphasis further clarifies how such visual formats might bring together the very affects and alliances of these surveillant systems’ undoing.

To be sure, this special issue construes “Race, Vision, and Surveillance” as inextricably intertwined. At the same time, its critiques go beyond epistemologies of sight. Alone, such epistemologies do not fully describe the processes that keep racialized others “in their place,” nor the processes that cast certain people as racialized others in the first place. Even as race has been comprehended as a bodily sign, it has surpassed the visible to denote supposedly innate/inherited invisible characteristics. As Wendy Chun notes, racial markers connect the visible to the invisible, the interior to the exterior while the gaps between these locate racial markers within “an ever-shifting chain of signification” (2012, 43). Recent digital developments are prompting debates about the unseen aspects of racializing surveillance. The screens that mirror the world back to us rely on invisible filters, which exacerbate the un/conscious biases of programmers and institutional mandates. Meanwhile, the technological work of race proliferates on the micro-level of information, genetic, and biological reductionism unavailable to eyesight. Paralleling the reduction of all matter to elementary particles and identities to data is the hyper-abstraction of capital into credit, dividends, stock, bitcoin, and bundles. Although difficult to represent, these financial forces drive racial disparities with material consequences. Yet the invisible coding of race is not exclusive to our present moment. Racial markers have never been just visual. In fact, to the extent that race can ever be said to appear, it always does so in ways that are highly coded, contextual, and contested.

Accordingly, a number of this issue's contributors interrogate vision's presumed role as the conduit of racializing surveillance. Nora Khan considers how the seductive, slow creep of technological surveillance is primarily hidden from view. Like Romeo, Khan queries online authorship and spectatorship, but warns that algorithmically generated media have profoundly compromised the digital consumer's critical viewing and reading practices. These technologies, often tethered to our own bodies, push “an authoritarian bent towards streams of videos and images as well as the represented people and their lives.” Those of us enmeshed in this cyber-ecosystem readily lose sight of our own tendencies and desires to police. Writing a history of Covid-19 in real-time, Khan's Ampersand essay “Mind Goes Where Eyes Can't Follow: Internalizing the Logics of Capture” presents language as a tool for cognitively mapping cyber-social control. In one respect or another, all contributors here participate in linguistic mapping as a means of rendering the invisible say-able and even newly see-able. Sue Jeong Ka plots carceral architectures impenetrable to the public eye. With The Banned Book List and her accompanying short essay, Ka inspects opaque guidelines that bar hundreds of thousands of publications in US prisons. Ka also elaborates on a Parsons School of Design class's 1967unrealized rendering for a prison reading space intended to afford the women of Rikers Island's Correctional Institution at least a modicum of free thinking. Ka re-fashions this design as an art installation proposal for displaying the banned books whose titles the literal list component of her project feature. This work provides points of departure for re-assessing how knowledge could break through the prison industrial complex and even for building totally different frameworks of public safety—in other words, frameworks that do not sever those deemed offenders from possibilities for self-respect and self-realization.

Artists Bridget Chappell and Joel Sherwood-Spring's practices tackle another perceptual dimension of captivity. Along with curator Thomas Ragnar, they discuss “sonic armatures” of state power, especially those inflicted on lndigenous people. In their conversation “Hearing, Loss and No Comment,” the three Australia-based cultural workers stress the visceral effects of sonic surveillance as well as its long-term educational, medical, psychological, and penal consequences. Ragnar talks to Chappell and Sherwood-Spring about how their respective works—Hearing, Loss, which deploys an otoscope and No Comment, which tampers with police sirens—invert “instruments of power” to counter colonizing and controlling uses of sound. Like digital algorithms and carceral architectures, sonic armatures target the mind's eye.

As Haraway states, “the only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular” (1988, 590). We believe that this issue's assemblage of particular views from varying social conditions, locations, and temporalities might bring to life what she calls “situated knowledge.” Our contributors showcase how scholars and other cultural workers are often part of the performances they study. In different modes of address, they acknowledge their own participation in the constellation of eyes and interpretations that this special issue charts. The resulting multidisciplinary, multimedia dialogue puts international, activist, analytical, artistic, and experimental views on a shared map. Together this issue's works picture a small part of a crowd-sourced roadmap—a guide to resisting, revising, and surviving surveillance in a future bending, shuddering, and shifting in time.

As editors who variously identify as practitioners and educators as well as scholars, we are interested in how this issue's archive of perspectives might yield not only theories of performance, but also prompts for performances to come. To this end, we invited submissions allied with intersectional Black feminism, which merges through fleshy, material power relations and praxis. To this point, the Combahee River Collective writes, “Black women have always embodied, if only in their physical manifestation, an adversary stance to white male rule and have actively resisted its inroads upon them and their communities in both dramatic and subtle ways” (1979, 363). Indeed, Black-fem bodies incarnate and carry knowledges of resistance—knowledges accumulated through both individual and inherited histories of survival under an order of white male rule.³ Correspondingly, the Combahee River Collective demonstrates that from the particularities of one's own material experiences and practical concerns a politics unfolds. Following suit, “Views from the Larger Somewhere” locates specific sites from which racialized surveillance emanates. Taking on not just one, but an amalgam of adversary stances, the contributions here trace prejudiced and predatory oversight consolidated within the school, the spectacular narrative, media networks, governmental databases, metadata and elsewhere. Our authors probe vulnerabilities within such contexts of capture. They set up, test out, rehearse and record interpretative traps, potential escape routes, and/or choreographies of redress for readers to make their own.

In many respects, performance-based and speculative imaginations drive this issue. A kinetic and time-based medium, performance tails us while projecting us into space we have yet to inhabit. It allows the performer and audience to fathom how our ancestors—the watchers and the watched—moved through the spectacular world, how their vision might still be with us, and how our gestures will one day be viewed from a later vantage point. As much as performance offers a way of learning and understanding, it also concretizes the limits of our learning and understanding. Likewise, the works here reveal the power of embodiment, sight, and language in world-making endeavors that are at once urgent, innovative, and historical as well as incomplete and imperfect. Far from naïve, these speculative considerations take stock of the mechanisms that underpin racializing surveillance while investigating how to reprogram them, how to reduce harm, and perhaps even how to make reparations. Such reprograming would necessitate the valorization of emotional, affective, attentive, and critical labor. This, however, is the kind of labor that usually is not valorized, not seen, and not documented for further study. It occurs under the radar and sometimes can only transpire in secret, fugitive ways. Without impinging on their feminist stealth, this issue attempts to support and sustain investigations into critical and caring confrontations with the eyes/“I”'s that make monsters.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kim Bobier

Kim Bobier is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute's Department of the History of Art and Design. She earned her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and specializes in modern and contemporary periods. Her practice emphasizes critical race art history and the politics of representation, especially through the lens of Black studies and gender and sexuality studies. Bobier is the recipient of fellowships from institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program, the Mellon Black Metropolis Research Consortium, and the Luce American Council of Learned Societies. Her writing appears in Afterimage, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Art Journal, International Review of African American Art, Panorama: Association of Historians of American Art, the anthology Social Practice Art in Turbulent Times, and elsewhere. She is at work on a book project provisionally titled Monitoring and Modeling Citizenship: The Convergence of Racialized Surveillance and Studio Bodies in Contemporary Art.

Marisa Williamson

Marisa Williamson is a project-based artist who works in video, image-making, installation and performance around themes of history, race, feminism, and technology. She has produced site-specific works at Monticello, and by commission from Storm King Art Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Monument Lab, and the National Park Service. She has had solo exhibitions at the University of Virginia, the University of Washington, and SPACES in Cleveland. Her work has been exhibited at Real Art Ways (Hartford), The Print Center (Philadelphia), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (Berlin), BRIC (Brooklyn), Human Resources (LA), Centro Pecci in Prato and Stefania Miscetti gallery in Rome. Williamson has received grants from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation and the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. She was a 2012 Skowhegan participant and attended the Whitney ISP from 2014–2015. Williamson holds a BA from Harvard and an MFA from CalArts. She lives and works in New Jersey and Connecticut, serving as an assistant professor of media arts at the University of Hartford.

Notes

1 For more on the ways in which assumptions surrounding normalized abilities, such as vision, interact with and exacerbate gendered, racialized, and other interlocking vectors of oppression see Bailey and Mobley (2019).

2 We borrow this formulation of eyes/“I”'s from Imhotep, Johnson, and Snorton's article featured here.

3 Chelsea M. Frazier introduces the descriptor black-fem to, among other things, “mark the liminal spaces between distinct (and not to be conflated) categories of Black woman, Black female, and Black (queer) femme,” thereby unsettling narrow suppositions about Black feminism's subjects (2018, 173). Katherine McKittrick's theorization of “the interplay of domination (such as transatlantic slavery and racial-sexual displacement) and black women's geographies (such as their knowledges, negotiations, and experiences)” inspires our remarks on embodied “knowledges” (2006, x).