Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Browne (review)

What would it mean to read blackness across space, time, and in a variety of texts? How might the plan of the Brooks slave ship, the layout of an airport, and singer Solange Knowles's Afro serve as different sites for reading the surveillance of blackness over time? In Dark Matters, Simone Browne assembles a truly impressive array of texts in order to examine the ways in which race shapes practices of surveillance. Browne is interested too in what she terms "dark sousveillance," the resistive modes of being that allow black people to counter racialized forms of scrutiny. Heavy-hitting theorists such as Frantz Fanon, bell hooks, and Sylvia Wynter provide a framework for this study's sharp analysis of the racialized dimensions of contemporary technologies of observation and control that are billed as neutral.