Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-xtgtn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T19:23:01.064Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Watching from Below: Racialized Surveillance and Vulnerable Sousveillance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Kelly Ross
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

By relying on Foucauldian panopticism as a universally explanatory theory, surveillance studies has collapsed two separate issues: the power relations between watcher and watched and the visibility or nonvisibility of the watcher. The presumption that the watcher's visibility or nonvisibility is irrelevant is especially dangerous for observers of color, who are already more vulnerable because of racial hypervisibility. This essay examines the simultaneous operation of surveillance (watching from above) and sousveillance (watching from below), both predicated on racial hypervisibility. To demonstrate the continuity of racial hypervisibility across a broad historical period, I compare the risks taken by sousveillants of color making smart‐phone recordings of police brutality in the twenty‐first century with the dangers faced by visible African American sousveillants in nineteenth‐century slave narratives by Charles Ball, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs. (KR)

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 135 , Issue 2 , March 2020 , pp. 299 - 314
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 Kelly Ross

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

“Advertisement.” The Sun, Vol. 16, No. 48, 15 Jan. 1845, p. [2]. Readex: America's Historical Newspapers, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=EANX&docref=image/v2:11343008E4D07040@EANX-11A5FBC1A123E300@2394947-11A5FBC1C50E2C98@1-11A5FBC249746CE8@Advertisement.Google Scholar
Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865. U of Illinois P, 1986.Google Scholar
Axelrod, J. B. C., and Axelrod, Rise B. “Reading Frederick Douglass through Foucault's Panoptic Lens: A Proposal for Teaching Close Reading.” Pacific Coast Philology, Vol. 39, 2004, pp. 112–27.Google Scholar
Bair, Madeleine. “Caught on Camera: Police Abuse in the US.” Witness Media Lab, Witness, lab.witness.org/caught-on-camera-police-abuse-in-the-u-s/.Google Scholar
Ball, Charles. Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball. John W. Shugert, 1836.Google Scholar
Ball, Charles Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball. 2nd ed., John S. Taylor, 1837.Google Scholar
Blackwood, Sarah. “Fugitive Obscura: Runaway Slave Portraiture and Early Photographic Technology.” American Literature, Vol. 81, No. 1, Mar. 2009, pp. 93–125.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke UP, 2015.Google Scholar
Burnham, Michelle. “Loopholes of Resistance: Harriet Jacobs' Slave Narrative and the Critique of Agency in Foucault.” Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 2, Summer 1993, pp. 53–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burns, Robert. “On the Late Captain Grose's Peregrinations thro' Scotland, Collecting the Antiquities of That Kingdom.” The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, edited by James Kinsley, Vol. 1, Oxford UP, 1968, pp. 494–96. Oxford Scholarly Editions Online, www.oxfordscholarlyeditions.com/view/10.1093/actrade/9780198701118.book.1/actrade-9780198701118-div2–278?rskey=L1zDH6&result=2&p=emailAwBVGhubHWZ8Y&d=/10.1093/actrade/9780198701118.book.1/actrade-9780198701118-div2–278.Google Scholar
Chaney, Michael A. Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative. Indiana UP, 2008.Google Scholar
Davis, Angela Y. “Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition.” The Angela Y. Davis Reader, edited by Davis, and James, Joy, Blackwell Publishing, 1998, pp. 96–110.Google Scholar
De Guzman, Orlando, and Olive, Lorien. “A Bigger Brother.” Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera Media Network, 16 Dec. 2015, www.aljazeera.com/programmes/rebelgeeks/2015/12/bigger-brother-151216102151145.html.Google Scholar
DeLombard, Jeannine Marie. Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture. U of North Carolina P, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. 1855. Edited by John David Smith, Penguin Books, 2003.Google Scholar
Douglass, Frederick Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. 1845. The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader, edited by William L. Andrews, Oxford UP, 1996, pp. 21–97.Google Scholar
Epperson, Terrence W. “Panoptic Plantations: The Garden Sights of Thomas Jefferson and George Mason.” Lines That Divide: Historical Archaeologies of Race, Class, and Gender, edited by Delle, James A. et al., U of Tennessee P, 2000, pp. 58–77.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Sheridan, Alan, Vintage Books, 1979.Google Scholar
Gould, Phillip. “The Rise, Development, and Circulation of the Slave Narrative.” The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative, edited by Fisch, Audrey A., Cambridge UP, 2007, pp. 11–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haase, Felix. “‘Within the Circle’: Space and Surveillance in Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.” Aspeers, Vol. 8, 2015, pp. 71–88.Google Scholar
Hadden, Sally E. Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Harvard UP, 2001.Google Scholar
Haggerty, Kevin D. “Tear Down the Walls: On Demolishing the Panopticon.” Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond, edited by Lyon, David, Willan Publishing, 2006, pp. 23–45.Google Scholar
Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford UP, 1997.Google Scholar
hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. South End Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Introduction. Ball, Slavery [1837], pp. i-x.Google Scholar
Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself. Edited by L. Maria Child. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, Now with “A True Tale of Slavery” by John S. Jacobs, edited by Yellin, Jean Fagan, Harvard UP, 2000, pp. 1–205.Google Scholar
Jarenski, Shelly. “‘Delighted and Instructed’: African American Challenges to Panoramic Aesthetics in J. P. Ball, Kara Walker, and Frederick Douglass.” American Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 1, 2013, pp. 119–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaurin, Dragana. “The Price of Filming Police Violence.” Motherboard, Vice Media, 27 Apr. 2018, motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evqw9z/filming-police-brutality-retaliation.Google Scholar
“Kianga Mwamba: Cops Try to Delete Video of Violent, Unwarranted Arrest, but Fortunately It's Backed Up to the Cloud.” Witness Media Lab, Witness, lab.witness.org/portfolio_page/kianga-mwamba/.Google Scholar
Laughland, Oliver, and Swaine, Jon. “‘I Dream about It Every Night’: What Happens to Americans Who Film Police Violence?” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 17 Aug. 2015, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/15/filming-police-violence-walter-scott-michael-brown-shooting.Google Scholar
Levine, Robert S. The Lives of Frederick Douglass. Harvard UP, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Loughran, Trish. The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870. Columbia UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Lyon, David. “The Search for Surveillance Theories.” Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond, edited by Lyon, , Willan Publishing, 2006, pp. 3–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mann, Steve. “Veillance and Reciprocal Transparency: Surveillance versus Sousveillance, AR Glass, Lifeglogging, and Wearable Computing.” Weartech, wearcam.org/veillance/veillance.pdf. PDF download.Google Scholar
Matlack, James. “The Autobiographies of Frederick Douglass.” Phylon, Vol. 40, No. 1, 1979, pp. 15–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Duke UP, 2011.Google Scholar
Nielsen, Cynthia R. “Resistance Is Not Futile: Frederick Douglass on Panoptic Plantations and the Un-making of Docile Bodies and Enslaved Souls.” Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 35, No. 2, 2011, pp. 251–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nielson, Erik. “‘Go in de Wilderness’: Evading the ‘Eyes of Others’ in the Slave Songs.” Western Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 35, No. 2, 2011, pp. 106–17.Google Scholar
Parenti, Christian. The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America: From Slavery to the War on Terror. Basic Books, 2003.Google Scholar
Perry, Imani. More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States. New York UP, 2011.Google Scholar
Roy, Michaël. “The Vanishing Slave: Publishing the Narrative of Charles Ball, from Slavery in the United States (1836) to Fifty Years in Chains (1858).” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Vol. 11, No. 4, Dec. 2017, pp. 513–45.Google Scholar
Rudoff, Shaindy. “Tarring the Garden: The Bible and the Aesthetics of Slavery in Douglass's Narrative.” ESQ, Vol. 46, No. 4, 2000, pp. 213–37.Google Scholar
Singleton, Theresa A. “Nineteenth-Century Built Landscape of Plantation Slavery in Comparative Perspective.” The Archaeology of Slavery: A Comparative Approach to Captivity and Coercion, edited by Marshall, Lydia Wilson, Southern Illinois UP, 2015, pp. 93–115.Google Scholar
Sundquist, Eric. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Harvard UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Tuhkanen, Mikko. “The Optical Trade: From Slave-Breaking in Frederick Douglass's Narrative to Self-Breaking in Richard Wright's Black Boy.” American Studies, Vol. 46, No. 2, 2005, pp. 91–116.Google Scholar
Wallace, Maurice O. Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men's Literature and Culture, 1775–1995. Duke UP, 2002.Google Scholar
“Walter Scott: Bystander Video Released after Police Report of Fatal Shooting Results in Massive Media Attention and Immediate Arrest of Officer.” Witness Media Lab, Witness, lab.witness.org/portfolio_page/walter-scott/.Google Scholar
Wenger, Yvonne. “Baltimore City to Pay $60,000 Settlement to Woman Who Recorded Arrest.” The Baltimore Sun, Baltimore Sun Media Group, 19 Jan. 2016, www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-ci-settlements-20160119-story.html.Google Scholar
Wiegman, Robyn. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Duke UP, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wood, Marcus. Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865. Routledge, 2000.Google Scholar
Yellin, Jean Fagan. Introduction. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, Now with “A True Tale of Slavery” by John S. Jacobs, edited by Yellin, , Harvard UP, 2000, pp. xv-xli.Google Scholar