Dark Dark Dark

Simone Browne is doing a lot of work in the opening to her text “Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness”. Browne is clear that she is offering us two key terms through which to think through surveillance studies with a committed rigor to blackness. She offers racialized surveillance and dark sousveillance. For Brown racialized surveillance is "a technology of social control where surveillance practices, policies, and performances concern the production of norms pertaining to race and exercise a “power to define what is in or out of place.” (Browne 16). This means that surveillance becomes not only a disciplining act as Foucault would argue but is also an ontologically defining practice by which blackness, or rather the category of blackness, as da Silva would say, is made. Racializing surveillance for Browne is about the reifying of race itself and the use of race as a normative practice of maintaining boundaries, borders, and bodies. The aspect of this that is really interesting to me are the ways that Browne is working with time through this concept. Because Browne situates her investments in surveillance through the act and aftermath of chattel slavery, she is looking at an entirely different set of surveillant and sousveillant practices and tactics found in the everyday lives of black people. Most importantly this focus allows for what she terms dark sousveillance to be born from the intimate engagement that black people had with surveillance practices on and off the plantation. Dark sousviellance can be understood as "the tactics employed to render one’s self out of sight, and strategies used in the flight to freedom from slavery as necessarily ones of undersight.” (Browne 21). This allows Browne to find the ways that black epistemologies make sense of various forms of surveillance and then “co-opt, repurpose, and challenge” the authority from which the surveilling eye sees. By returning to the ways that black people circumvent the surveillant practices of the plantation, we are able to consider surveillance as something partial and vulnerable rather than complete and totalizing as Foucault’s approach to the panopticon would suggest. By returning to slave narratives that tell of bondage and escape Browne begins to locate "how black performative practices and creative acts (fiddling, songs, and dancing) also functioned as sousveillance acts and were employed by people as a way to escape and resist enslavement, and in so being were freedom acts. As a way of knowing, dark sousveillance speaks not only to observing those in authority (the slave patroller or the plantation overseer, for instance) but also to the use of a keen and experiential insight of plantation surveillance in order to resist it. Forging slave passes and freedom papers or passing as free are examples of this.” (Browne 22). I’m really struck by this passage as it beings to outline a dark sousveillance beyond the act of becoming unseen but as a form of knowledge and meaning making in itself, forged through black performance and cultural encoding. I found this really provocative and pertinent to some of my own work thinking through black computational thought and cultural encoding as computational practice.