Surveillance, Race, Culture

This collection of essays engages with a wide range of disciplines including art, performance, film and literature, to examine the myriad effects of contemporary surveillance on our cultural psyche. The volume expertly articulates the manner in which cultural productions have been complicit in watching, seeing and purporting to ‘know’ race. In our increasingly mediated world, our sense of community is becoming progressively virtual, and surveillant technologies impact upon subjectivity, resulting in multiple forms of artistic and cultural expression. As such, art, film, and literature provide a lens for the reflection of sociocultural concerns. In Surveillance, Race, Culture Flynn and Mackay skilfully draw together a diverse range of contributions to investigate the fundamental question of exactly how surveillant technologies have informed our notions of race, identity and belonging. 

Introduction.- SECTION 1: SURVEILLANT TECHNOLOGIES.- Articulating Race: Reading Skin Colour as Taxonomy and as Biodata.- Government Surveillance, Racism, and Civic Virtue in the United States.- Sampled Sirens in the City of Los Angeles: Sounding Surveillance on the Black Contemporary Film Screen.- Medical Gazing and the ‘Oprah Effect’ in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2017).- SECTION 2: SCREEN.- Images of Black Identity: Spaces in-Between.-Knowing the Double Agent: Islam, Uncertainty and the Fragility of the Surveillant Gaze in Homeland.- Allegories of Apartheid: Abjection, Torture and Surveillance in Neill Blomkamp’s District 9.- Intersectional Digital Dynamics and Racially Profiled Black Celebrities.- SECTION 3: LITERATURE, ART, PERFORMANCE, ACTION.- Let him be left to feel his way in the dark;” Frederick Douglass: White Surveillance and Dark Sousveillance.- Perceptions of Prisoners: Re/Constructing Meaning Inside the Frame of War.- Cops and Incarceration: Constructing Racial Narratives in Reality TV’s Prisons.- Pan-African Pessimism: The Man Who Cried I Am and the Limits of Black Nationalism.- We lived with death right at our backs.” Surveillance Experiences of Black Panther Party Activists.- Epilogue: Surveilling Culture.