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

In Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Browne explains the racial logics that subtend surveillance practices of the contemporary security state, charting the trajectory of the hyper-surveillance of Black people from its origin in the transatlantic slave trade to the contemporary moment. Browne expertly reveals that Blackness has been at the epicenter of the development of strategies, technologies, and infrastructures of surveillance, despite the erasure of Black subjects' dominant narratives of surveillance, which privilege colorblind discussions of Bentham and Foucault. Taking a long view of past, present, and future conditions of the surveillance of Blackness, Browne argues, "can help social theorists understand our contemporary conditions of surveillance" and thus help frame the conditions of anti-Blackness related to the aggrandizement of the security state (8). She uses the metaphor of dark matter, "that nonluminous component of the universe that is said to exist but cannot be observed" to demonstrate that "blackness (is) often unperceivable within the study of surveillance," even though it is "that nonnameable matter that matters to the racialized disciplinary society" (9). Put differently, Blackness is indeed present—material—but elusive or difficult to detect, slipping (purposefully) just out of view. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, including architectural diagrams, slave narratives, internet art, popular film, and research and development plans, Browne reveals that surveillance is "the fact of antiblackness" (10).

Browne offers two terms to frame how she understands the relationship between racism, specifically Blackness, and surveillance: "racializing surveillance" and "dark sousveillance." She defines racializing surveillance as "a technology of social control where surveillance practices, policies, and performances concern the production of norms pertaining to race and a 'power to define what is in or out of place'" (16). Racializing surveillance is a mode of surveillance that "reif(ies) boundaries, borders, and bodies along racial lines," and frequently produces "discriminatory treatment of those who are negatively racialized" (16). Browne also reveals that racializing surveillance created an opportunity for those constructed by such practices to resist and rebel. In what she terms "dark sousveillance," Browne outlines the "imaginative place from which to mobilize a critique of racializing surveillance" that often takes the form of "antisurveillance, countersurveillance, and other freedom practices" (21). By attending to how and in what ways Black subjects rejected the terms of their own supervision, Browne shows that the system of surveillance was a constant negotiation in which those targets of surveillance "appropriated, co-opted, repurposed, and challenged" racializing surveillance technologies "in order to facilitate survival and escape" (21).

Dark Matters makes crucial contributions to contemporary Black studies. At its most ambitious, it seeks to reframe the terms of panopticism. On the one hand, Browne reveals the underlying racial project of panopticism by linking Bentham's prison design to similar architectural features of the slave ship. On the other, she refutes Michel Foucault's premise that spectacles of sovereign power were less prevalent than disciplinary exercises, arguing instead that "when that body (in the grip of power) is Black, the grip hardly loosened during slavery and continued post-Emancipation with, for example, the mob violence of lynching and other acts of racial terrorism" (38). Throughout, Browne details how surveillance practices employed during slavery laid the groundwork for those used today. Through an analysis of the plans of the slave ship Brooks, for example, she details the range of possibilities that circumscribed captive Blacks, how and in what ways they could rebel, and what the effects of those rebellions could be. Under slavery, for example, the expectations of docility surveillance preconditioned enabled unique forms of resistance; slaves could escape by carefully navigating the terrain of fugitive slave laws and "perform(ing) freedom" (77). Moreover, she concludes that certain affective comportments, including "facetines," "bol'face(dness)," and "backchat," all comprised forms of " looking and talking back" (72). This was true of slaves in the Caribbean in the eighteenth century and is true of Black women today; for example, Solange Knowles responded to Transportation Security Administration...