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Archives of Suffering and Desire: Describing and Combatting Police and Civilian Racial Violence
Topics: Socialist and Critical Geographies
, Black Geographies
, Urban Geography
Keywords: racial violence, police Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract Day: Monday Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) Room: Virtual 59
Authors:
Ted Rutland, Concordia University
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Abstract
This paper is framed by a constant tension in the struggle against police and (white) civilian racial violence. On the one hand, this violence is animated partly by its own internal logic. It is both a means and an end in itself, and cannot be described or combatted without recognizing this. On the other hand, to describe this logic, as Saidiya Hartman famously argued, risks participating in its reproduction, as descriptions of the violated body, in particular, can nourish the same desires that produced the violation in the first place. The paper explores how different scholars and activists have navigated this tension in two historical moments. First, the Jim Crow era, where police and white civilians fashioned an economy of racial violence in which not only their own desires, but those who consumed images of the violence second-hand, were nourished. Second, the ongoing Black Lives Matter era, where competing images of Black suffering and Black criminality are circulated to mobilize and manage seemingly competing desires.
Archives of Suffering and Desire: Describing and Combatting Police and Civilian Racial Violence