Watching from Below: Racialized Surveillance and Vulnerable Sousveillance

PMLA ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 135 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-314
Author(s):  
Kelly Ross
Keyword(s):  
Smart Phone ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
First Century ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Simultaneous Operation ◽  
Explanatory Theory ◽  
Surveillance Studies

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)

scholarly journals Aspects of the Narratives of Slavery in the Afro-American Literature as Represented by Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass’ Works

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 105-109
Author(s):  
Hasan Marwan Yahay Al Saleem
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
American People ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
White American ◽  
Male Side ◽  
American Society ◽  
Free People

Harriet Ann Jacobs’ Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl (1861) and Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (1845) are two very significant works to show slave narratives Afro-American Literature. They provide many aspects in attempting to portray the complex sufferings and different kinds of frustrations, especially that the threat to the existence of their families and their rights as human beings in American society. The works present real stories and scenes lived by both writers in that dark era. The article makes a kind of comparison between them to highlight how both sexes suffered to the same extent. Jacobs represented the female side while Douglass represented the male side of black slaves in America through their works. The article aims to shed light on the brutal effect of slave and the crimes of the racist white American people upon these vulnerable people in a society of an ideal country in which the worst forms of racism are still practiced and the murder of George Floyd’s crime is not far from us. Therefore, it is the duty of the free people of the whole world to expose these heinous acts and work to prevent them and support the oppressed.

Slave Narratives

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Ernest
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
The United States ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Autobiographical Accounts

Slave narratives emerged in the 18th century to testify to the inhumanity of the practice of slavery. Often autobiographical accounts, but sometimes written by others or dictated to an amanuensis who took dictation, these accounts were celebrated in the United States as a powerful new genre, and they became associated primarily with slavery in the United States. Published both before and after the abolition of slavery, the narratives were never devoted solely to the abolition of slavery. Rather, they were attempts to represent the experiences, and argue for the authority, of those who experienced first-hand the ideological contradictions and the racial oppression fundamental to the maintenance of the system of slavery. These were stories deeply relevant long after the legal end of slavery—but the slave narratives were for many years either overlooked or decidedly dismissed as reliable historical sources, and they were not recognized as valuable literary documents for even longer. Eventually, historians and literary scholars alike began to embrace this genre of writing and recognized as well that it was a genre defined less by form than by purpose. Although often associated with book-length autobiographies by such prominent figures as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, or Booker T. Washington, the genre of slave narratives has come to include virtually any testimony of the enslaved, related in whatever form. What has come to matter, in the end, is precisely the authority of the enslaved that early writers struggled to establish.

Racial Violence, Racial Capitalism, and Reading Revolution: Harriet Jacobs, John Jones, Kerry James Marshall, and Kyle Baker

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Neary
Keyword(s):  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Narrative Tradition ◽  
Black Bodies

Meditating on the continued racial speculation on black bodies in our contemporary moment, the epilogue brings the link between racial violence, capitalism, and evidentiary epistemology into sharper focus. Drawing on Harriet Jacobs’s insights into the role racial violence-as-spectacle plays in the construction of wealth, the epilogue considers what ex-slave narrators bring to contemporary debates around racial violence, such as the debate over whether or not police body cameras will resolve or lessen unremitting episodes of police brutality on people of color. While the book opens with an analysis of contemporary visual slave narratives at the end of the 20th century, the epilogue ends with a consideration of the slave narrative form in the 21st century, considering works that contribute to contemporary figurations of slavery but are not all strictly within the slave narrative tradition I have defined, including John Jones, Kerry James Marshall, and Kyle Baker.

Slavery and Class in the American South

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Andrews
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American South ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
William Wells Brown ◽  
The American South ◽  
Work Family

In this study of an entire generation of slave narrators, more than sixty mid-nineteenth-century narratives reveal how work, family, skills, and connections made for social and economic differences among the enslaved of the South. Slavery and Class in the American South explains why social and economic distinctions developed and how they functioned among the enslaved. Andrews also reveals how class awareness shaped the views and values of some of the most celebrated African Americans of the nineteenth century. Slave narrators discerned class-based reasons for violence between “impudent,” “gentleman,” and “lady” slaves and their resentful “mean masters.” Status and class played key roles in the lives and liberation of the most celebrated fugitives from US slavery, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and William and Ellen Craft. By examining the lives of the most- and least-acclaimed heroes and heroines of the African American slave narrative, Andrews shows how the dividing edge of social class cut two ways, sometimes separating upper and lower strata of slaves to their enslavers’ advantage, but at other times fueling convictions among even the most privileged of the enslaved that they deserved nothing less than complete freedom.

Reconciling Results on Racial Differences in Police Shootings

2018 ◽  
Vol 108 ◽  
pp. 228-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roland G. Fryer
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Racial Differences ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
First Century ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Investigative Journalism ◽  
Police Use Of Force ◽  
Lethal Force ◽  
The Social

Police use of force, particularly lethal force, is one of the most divisive issues of the twenty-first century. To understand the nexus of race, criminal justice, and police brutality, academics and journalists have begun to amass impressive datasets on officer-involved-shootings (OIS). I compare the data and methods of three investigative journalism articles and two publications in the social sciences on a set of five rubrics and conclude that the stark differences between their findings are due to differences in what qualifies for a valid research design and not underlying differences in the datasets.

scholarly journals UNDERGROUND BURIALS OF THE ANCIENT MINGACHEVIR (SAMUNIS)

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-26
Author(s):  
Emin Vagif Mammadov
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Information ◽  
Local Population ◽  
First Century ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
North Caucasus ◽  
South Caucasus ◽  
The Third ◽  
The North ◽  
Funerary Rituals ◽  
Underground Burial

The article is dedicated to the analysis of archeological excavation as a result of researches discovered in the Mingachevir conducted in the middle of the 20th century of the different type of underground burials of the ancient period. These burials are covered the significant historical period from the second half of the 1st millenium and the first century AD and are the important source of the scientific information on many issues of material and spiritual culture of the population of Caucasus Albania. Underground burials of the ancient period in the Mingachevir zone by the method of placing the deceased in them are divided into three types: 1) burials with a backbone stretched out on the back; 2) burials with a weakly crouched skeleton on the left or right side; 3) burials with a heavily crouched skeleton on the left or right side. The article gives a detailed analysis of all these three types of burials. The author of the article, along with a number of other researchers come to the conclusion that the first type of underground burial is considered to be innovation for the whole of the South Caucasus and its emergence is associated with the penetration of mobile tribes from the North Caucasus in particular the Scythian. Part of these Scythians finally settled in the Mingachevir zone and subsequently merged with the local population, which eventually leads to the appearance of a second type of underground burial in the form of underground graves with poorly crouched skeleton. The third type of underground burial of Mingachevir (Samunis) of the ancient period, namely burials with a heavily crouched skeleton belong to local autochthonous tribes, consolidation of which became the basis for the formation of the state of Caucasian Albania in the 4th – 3rd centuries BC. This type of underground burial has deep local roots and is based on centuries-old local funerary rituals.

The Birth of Pork: Local Appropriations in America’s First Century

2018 ◽  
Vol 112 (3) ◽  
pp. 564-579 ◽  
Author(s):  
SANFORD C. GORDON ◽  
HANNAH K. SIMPSON
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Distributive Politics ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Pork Barrel ◽  
Historical Factors ◽  
Credit Claiming ◽  
Ideological Structure ◽  
The U.S

After describing a newly assembled dataset consisting of almost 9,000 local appropriations made by the U.S. Congress between 1789 and 1882, we test competing accounts of the politics surrounding them before offering a more nuanced, historically contingent view of the emergence of the pork barrel. We demonstrate that for most of this historical period—despite contemporary accusations of crass electoral motives—the pattern of appropriations is largely inconsistent with accounts of distributive politics grounded in a logic of legislative credit-claiming. Instead, support for appropriations in the House mapped cleanly onto the partisan/ideological structure of Congress for most of this period, and only in the 1870s produced the universalistic coalitions commonly associated with pork-barrel spending. We trace this shift to two historical factors: the emergence of a solid Democratic South, and growth in the fraction of appropriations funding recurrent expenditures on extant projects rather than new starts.

scholarly journals Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Variability in the Community Earth System Model: Evaluation and Transient Dynamics during the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (13) ◽  
pp. 4447-4475 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gretchen Keppel-Aleks ◽  
James T. Randerson ◽  
Keith Lindsay ◽  
Britton B. Stephens ◽  
J. Keith Moore ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Northern Hemisphere ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
First Century ◽  
Atmospheric Co2 ◽  
System Model ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Community Earth System Model ◽  
The Mean ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Fossil Fuel Emissions

Abstract Changes in atmospheric CO2 variability during the twenty-first century may provide insight about ecosystem responses to climate change and have implications for the design of carbon monitoring programs. This paper describes changes in the three-dimensional structure of atmospheric CO2 for several representative concentration pathways (RCPs 4.5 and 8.5) using the Community Earth System Model–Biogeochemistry (CESM1-BGC). CO2 simulated for the historical period was first compared to surface, aircraft, and column observations. In a second step, the evolution of spatial and temporal gradients during the twenty-first century was examined. The mean annual cycle in atmospheric CO2 was underestimated for the historical period throughout the Northern Hemisphere, suggesting that the growing season net flux in the Community Land Model (the land component of CESM) was too weak. Consistent with weak summer drawdown in Northern Hemisphere high latitudes, simulated CO2 showed correspondingly weak north–south and vertical gradients during the summer. In the simulations of the twenty-first century, CESM predicted increases in the mean annual cycle of atmospheric CO2 and larger horizontal gradients. Not only did the mean north–south gradient increase due to fossil fuel emissions, but east–west contrasts in CO2 also strengthened because of changing patterns in fossil fuel emissions and terrestrial carbon exchange. In the RCP8.5 simulation, where CO2 increased to 1150 ppm by 2100, the CESM predicted increases in interannual variability in the Northern Hemisphere midlatitudes of up to 60% relative to present variability for time series filtered with a 2–10-yr bandpass. Such an increase in variability may impact detection of changing surface fluxes from atmospheric observations.

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