Dark Matters

<div>In <i>Dark Matters</i> Simone Browne locates the conditions of blackness as a key site through which surveillance is practiced narrated and resisted. She shows how contemporary surveillance technologies and practices are informed by the long history of racial formation and by the methods of policing black life under slavery such as branding runaway slave notices and lantern laws. Placing surveillance studies into conversation with the archive of transatlantic slavery and its afterlife Browne draws from black feminist theory sociology and cultural studies to analyze texts as diverse as the methods of surveilling blackness she discusses: from the design of the eighteenth-century slave ship <i>Brooks</i> Jeremy Bentham's <i>Panopticon</i> and <i>The Book of Negroes</i> to contemporary art literature biometrics and post-9/11 airport security practices. Surveillance Browne asserts is both a discursive and material practice that reifies boundaries borders and bodies around racial lines so much so that the surveillance of blackness has long been and continues to be a social and political norm. </div><div> </div>