Surveillance, Race, Culture

Susan Flynn, Antonia Mackay, Susan Flynn, Antonia Mackay

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319779379
• eBook ISBN: 9783319779386
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

© The Author(s) 2018

Susan Flynn and Antonia Mackay (eds.)Surveillance, Race, Culture https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77938-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. “Introduction”

Susan Flynn¹ and Antonia Mackay²

(1)

University of the Arts London, London, UK

(2)

Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK

Susan Flynn (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Antonia Mackay

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Notions of surveillance have long captivated the creative imagination and have been envisioned at multiple sites through narratives, images, and performances. Although such growth in the field of surveillance studies has been most prevalent in the social sciences, science, and technology fields, the encroachment on civil liberties and privacy as well as the national security aspects of surveillance have come to overshadow classical debates on the watching of others. Surveillance studies ostensibly concern the production of new theoretical and empirical understanding of human behaviour vis-à-vis the burgeoning field of technological development; however, the project of this collection is to lay claim to surveillance studies for a cultural understanding of their human and bodily manifestations. Operating within the paradigm of cultural studies, we seek to reclaim the terrain of surveillance studies so that we may explore the critical juncture at which our time has become one of watching, categorizing, and purporting to ‘know’ others.

***

As the field of surveillance studies has established, being watched extends beyond the physicality of the camera eye and into social and cultural paradigms that affect bodily and subjective narratives. Recent technological advances, such as a new device which can see through bodies without the need for X-rays (as reported on the BBC website in September 2017) and so-called futuristic schools where the students are ‘always on camera’ (BBC World Magazine, 4 July 2017), suggest that surveillant practices stretch far beyond Orwellian notions of malignant forces. Although these surveillant systems are praised for their potential, there remains a deep-rooted anxiety attached to the implicit ‘being watched-ness.’ The futuristic schools (known as ‘Alt-Schools’), which employ tailored and personalised technology via a computerised teaching plan, also open up the possibility of personal data mining at the very earliest stages of child development. Data were once mined from internet surfing and purchasing, but the ‘Alt-School’ system suggests a child’s development can be surveilled, manipulated, and reworked as the child develops. Furthermore, by building software that seeks to engage with primary school children on an individual level, algorithms take the place of the traditional bodily overseer (the teacher), leaving only the surveillance cameras to ‘watch over’ the children. These futuristic schools (currently being trialled in the US) not only remove the bodily presence of adults, but transpose a child’s learning onto a computerised system. Both the schools and the medical device illustrate the necessity of technological development in our modern world for humanity to advance, but it is our investment and obsession with these systems that warrant caution. The inherent power play between all-seeing machine and man has long been a dystopian fantasy, from Terminator (1984) and The Matrix (1999) to television’s The Handmaid’s Tale (2016) and the recent Blade Runner 2049 (2017), yet all these narratives share a common theme: the need to watch, and hence to identify ‘us’ from ‘the other .’

This collection aims to articulate the manner in which cultural productions have been complicit in viewing, seeing, and purporting to ‘know’ race , and it examines some of the ways in which surveillant technologies have been complicit in the definition of racial categorisation . The pervasive accumulation and commercialisation of ‘personal data’ as well as the ubiquity of the camera’s roving eye, incur categorisations, labels, and distinctions which can problematize nationality, belonging, and racial identity. In our increasingly mediated world, our sense of community, of belonging, of ‘who’ we are, is increasingly virtual and informed by many artistic and cultural productions, some of which are analysed here. The essays each propose, in different ways, that surveillant technologies impact upon the psyche, having an effect on notions of race and of racial categories. As such, art, film , and literature provide a lens with which to view sociocultural concerns. This book, then, brings together literary, cultural, and artistic studies to provide a multidisciplinary approach to the fundamental question of how surveillant technologies have informed our notions of race , of identities, and of belonging, examining the manner in which race has been, and continues to be, constructed by surveillant technologies.

Extending the dialogues contained in our previous collection (Spaces of Surveillance: States and Selves 2017), this collection of essays engages with a wide range of disciplines including art, photography, performance, film , literature, and media technologies to examine the myriad effects of contemporary surveillance on our cultural psyche. The unique contribution of this edited collection is its approach to the culturally expressed manifestations of surveillance and the resultant effects on racial categories as they are portrayed, asserted, and felt. As well as examining popular cultural productions and how these contribute to our understanding of surveillant assemblages, this collection examines technologies such as drone surveillance , webcams, metadata, and the effect of these multiple ‘gazes’ on racial and cultural narratives. Seeking to excavate the effects of ubiquitous surveillance on identity formation and on the framing of racial identity, this book offers a critical insight into the varied interior experiences of being surveilled. The collection acknowledges that contemporary daily life inculcates various assemblages of interconnectivity and extends current work in the humanities to forge a new understanding of interior responses to such exposure. This work acknowledges that we are often complicit with modern forms of surveillance : we have bought into social networking, sousveillance, diagnostics, biometrics, and the promise of security. The often ‘somatic’ nuances of this trade-off are examined here, offering a new view of our relationship with surveillant technologies, seeking to expose the way in which cultural narratives of race are constructed via surveillance .

Surveillance, Race , Culture aims to bring together multidisciplinary readings of technological advancement into one cohesive and comprehensive new volume for scholars and academics in the humanities and social sciences, seeking to merge cultural explorations of surveillance with the issue of race . We wish to examine how culture produces or reproduces power relations via the surveillant technologies that have captured the cultural imagination. Through a critical reading of contemporary and historic narratives of race and surveillance , we seek to illustrate the ongoing cultural fascination with technologies of control and surveillance .

Theoretical Framework

Stuart Hall wrote that the practices of representation always implicate the positions from which we speak or write—the positions of enunciation (Hall 2000). This collection seizes this critical juncture to consider how surveillance is implicated in such an enunciation. Hall, Williams, and others at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham raised the call for academic study to bridge the gulf between high culture and lived experience: between theory and practice, both past and contemporary. For many years, we have looked to cultural studies to provide a context for our interest in class stratification and power structures within cultures, to articulate the lived experience of social stratification.

Although some might say that cultural studies have no ‘house-approved’ methodology, the interdisciplinary nature of cultural studies highlights the need to think through the social and political contexts of cultural expression. Our previous collection, Spaces of Surveillance: States and Selves (2017), engaged with the surveillant regimes of our current moment in history. It opened a discussion with respect to the material conditions of people’s lives in an age of watching and being watched, examining the ‘felt dimensions’ of surveillance as it is represented in film , art, and literature. Spaces of Surveillance attempted to critique the ideological underpinnings of contemporary surveillance through a range of cultural productions and a selection of methodological lenses. From these analyses, the consideration of race emerged as a pertinent issue. Through the various studies in the collection, we saw the narratives of film , art, and literature employ surveillant regimes for the delineation of race categories, as a tool for marginalisation and a weapon of injustice. This cultural study enabled us to see how surveillance (as a technology of power ) is embedded in our cultural psyche and inculcated in many of the judgements we make in our everyday lives.

In determining this collection’s focus on race , it is necessary to examine the postcolonial theories which lie at the heart of the following chapters. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) is perhaps one of the most influential postcolonial critical texts, with Orientalism used by scholars throughout the humanities to elucidate the imitation of aspects of the Middle East, South Asian, North African, and East Asian cultures in art, literature, and cultural studies. At its core, Said suggests there exists a condescending attitude in the West directed toward ‘other ’ Eastern societies, in direct contrast to the developed, rational, fixed, and superior West (Said 1978). As he writes, Orientalism “has less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ [Western] world” (p. 12) and, therefore, in creating a different ‘other ,’ the West accumulates power over the East: “to have… knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it” (p. 32). By creating a body of knowledge and a Western discourse of the East (other), Said suggests Western narratives limit any genuine understanding of other cultures beyond their own. Said also claims that much of this othering occurs at an aesthetic level, or “the exteriority of representation ” (p. 21), resulting in the othering of bodies that do not fit the white Western ideal. Orientalism has more recently branched into the field of Black Orientalism , examining the representation of African Americans and American Islam , and the casting of the Arab Muslim world as a precursor and imitator of the West. Sherman Jackson’s chapter “Black Orientalism ” in his seminal work Islam and the Blackamerican (2005) considers the West’s history of anti-blackness as one that is tied to the West’s anti-Arab feeling. Jackson extends Said’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. “Introduction”
• Part I. Surveillant Technologies
• Part II. Screen
• Part III. Literature, Art, Performance, Action
• Back Matter