Simone Browne

Digital Epidermalization: Race, Identity and Biometrics

This article considers the ways in which what Paul Gilroy terms ‘epidermal thinking’ operates in the discourses surrounding certain surveillance practices and their applications, with a focus on identification documents and biometric technologies in particular. My aim is not to re-ontologize race, but instead to outline the notion of digital epidermalization, stemming from Frantz Fanon’s concept of epidermalization, as it allows for thinking through race, ontological insecurity and the ways in which the body materializes with and against biometric technologies. I examine key research in surveillance studies, governmental policy documents concerning biometric enabled identification documents and the 2003 ‘deportation’ to India of a Canadian citizen through the issuance of an expedited removal order by the US Immigration and Naturalization Services. By interrogating how digital epidermalization gains meaning and is put into practice, this article seeks to posit a space for refusals of such epidermal thinking through a critical biometric consciousness.

Getting Carded: Border Control and the Politics of Canada's Permanent Resident Card

This article is concerned with the ways in which border control has been reconstituted through Canadas Permanent Resident Card (PRC). Some questions examined with this paper include: how did the PRC come to exist as a technology of border control? Does it function as a symbol of the Canadian nation-states imperative to manage transnational movement and access to the geopolitical space of the nation and, if so, how? Through what means does the PRC and the events surrounding its introduction and use facilitate processes of serialization and racialization? Does the PRC, as a technique of reason of state, do the work of producing the category “responsible immigrants”? The notions of “economies of bodies” and “bordering” are important here. “Bordering” opens up the concept of the border from a fixed place to a verb, or a process. Given this, bordering does not only occur at the territorial boundaries of the nation-state, it can also be internal to it. By examining how the category of “permanent resident” is organized, gains meaning and is maintained, this article demonstrates how the technology of the PRC and similar technologies of the regulation of mobility operate as practices of bordering and nation-making and constitute Canadian citizenship.

EVERYBODY'S GOT A LITTLE LIGHT UNDER THE SUN

This article examines the production of The Book of Negroes during the British evacuation of New York in 1783 and situates it as the first government-issued document for state regulated migration between the United States and Canada that explicitly links corporeal identifiers to the right to travel. I do this to argue that the body made legible with the modern passport system has a history in the technologies of tracking blackness. I explore surveillance technologies of transatlantic slavery, namely lantern laws, and I examine arbitration that took place at Fraunces Tavern in New York City in 1783 between fugitive slaves exercising mobility rights claims by seeking to be included in The Book of Negroes and those who claimed them as property. Coupling the archive of The Book of Negroes with a discussion of rituals and practices engaged by free and enslaved blacks, I suggest that these interactions with surveillance served as both strategies of coping and critique, and in so being represent acts of freedom. This article begins with a story of black escape by taking up the surveillance-based reality television programme Mantracker to question how certain technologies instituted through slavery to track blackness as property anticipate the contemporary surveillance of the racial body.