Cultures, Citizenship and Human Rights

Rosemarie Buikema, Antoine Buyse, Antonius C. G. M. Robben, Rosemarie Buikema, Antoine Buyse, Antonius C. G. M. Robben

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429582011
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

In Cultures, Citizenship and Human Rights the combined analytical efforts of the fields of human rights law, conflict studies, anthropology, history, media studies, gender studies, and critical race and postcolonial studies raise a comprehensive understanding of the discursive and visual mediation of migration and manifestations of belonging and citizenship.

More insight into the convergence – but also the tensions – between the cultural and the legal foundations of citizenship, has proven to be vital to the understanding of societies past and present, especially to assess processes of inclusion and exclusion. Citizenship is more than a collection of rights and privileges held by the individual members of a state but involves cultural and historical interpretations, legal contestation and regulation, as well as an active engagement with national, regional, and local state and other institutions about the boundaries of those (implicitly gendered and raced) rights and privileges.

Highlighting and assessing the transformations of what citizenship entails today is crucially important to the future of Europe, which both as an idea and as a practical project faces challenges that range from the crisis of legitimacy to the problems posed by mass migration. Many of the issues addressed in this book, however, also play out in other parts of the world, as several of the chapters reflect.

This book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. They have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Part I

Mediation

Chapter 1

Persistent looking in the space of appearance #BlackLivesMatter

Nicholas Mirzoeff

Police killings captured on cell-phone video or photographs and the protests that resulted have become the defining feature of present-day United States visual culture. The 1960s, in all their complex contradictions, have come to be known by a handful of photographs of protest and the Vietnam War. So too have these low-resolution scenes become definitive. What these photographs and videos have revealed is the operations of the maintenance of a law-and-order society that inflicts violence on Black people. The America that is seen here is at the intersection of three streams of manifestation. First, there are the witnessing of these scenes, depicted in cell-phone videos and photographs. These are supplemented by machine-generated imagery, taken by body cameras, dash cams, and CCTV footage. Next, there are the embodied protests and actions taken to claim justice and to make injustice visible. Finally, there is the sharing of these images and actions by social media that in turn have made their way into mainstream media. These appearances take place in specific spaces. People are being killed in racialized spaces – housing projects and urban neighborhoods that are marked racially by the visible lack of care. The Black Lives Matter protests reclaim spaces of connection – roads, transport, infrastructure, malls, intersections, train stations, political rallies, concert halls, sports arenas, libraries, and lecture halls. It is the function of the police and the prison industrial complex, the infrastructures of white supremacy, to keep such spaces separate, which is to say, segregated. By articulating racialized space with spaces of connection in protest at police violence, Black Lives Matter created a new means to prefigure a different “America,” one in which it might finally be possible for citizens of all kinds to appear to each other. America instead chose to make itself “great again,” meaning, as everyone understood, “white again.”

These, then, are not just images. Nor are they just images (in the sense of justice) by themselves. Like any other fragment recuperated from the totalizing ambition of the carceral state, they need to be activated, forced out of the continuum of capitalism’s ever-advancing time, so as to be collectively inhabited and experienced by means of re-enactment. I want to appropriate Hannah Arendt’s evocative phrase “the space of appearance” (199) to describe the doubled experience of revealed police violence and subsequent protests in the same or similar spaces. I will be using it in a very different way. Arendt situated this space in the ancient Greek city state, or polis, which was founded (as she herself attests) on the exclusion of women, children, non-Greeks, and enslaved human beings. It was more exactly a space of representation because those admitted represented the category of free male citizens. In keeping with one thread of Arendt scholarship, it can be said that the space of appearance was understood this way as an articulation (conscious or not) of white supremacy (Bernasconi 169–187; Allen; Gines). Appearance is not representation, neither in the political nor cultural sense, but is the very possibility of appearing directly.¹ In her recent reconsideration of Arendt, through which I have thought this piece, Judith Butler claims a “right to appear” (26) that is nonetheless at once constrained by “norms of recognition that are themselves hierarchical and exclusionary” (38). Black Lives Matter protests are instead an example of what she calls “anarchist moments or anarchist passages … [which] lay claim to the public in a way that is not yet codified into law and that can never be fully codified into law” (75). The anarchism of these moments is not just the suspension of law but the pre-figuration of the very possibility of appearing as Black in a way that is not codified by white supremacy. In so doing, it reveals what Fred Moten has called “the constitutive disorder of the polis,” (205) in which who can appear and who cannot and why are the proper political questions. Who has the right to appear in urban space? “Whose streets?” people ask on protests. This is what it now means to be intersectional: who gets to hold the intersection?

At present to be in any American jurisdiction and to be visibly identifiable by the police as Black is to be subject to an extensive code of regulated appearance, as defined by the writer Garnette Cadogan for his walks in New York City:

no running especially at night; no sudden movements; no hoodies; no objects – especially shiny ones – in hand; no waiting for friends on street corners, lest I be mistaken for a drug dealer; no standing near a corner on the cell phone (same reason).

(139)

Any person, like myself, who can do any of these things without being stopped by the police is “white,” regardless of skin tone. The archive of violent encounters with police created by Black Lives Matter has led the poet Claudia Rankine to create another such list of unpermitted behavior for Black people:

no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black.

(146)

Taken together, these vernacular regulations, a governmentality for the racialized, demonstrate the quotidian operations of anti-blackness. In turn, as a person not subject to these regulations, I am not attempting to speak for Black experience but against such forms of anti-blackness to articulate an anti-anti-blackness.

In this context, “blackness” is a specific formation of the visible and the sayable, produced by the connection of particular but not essential components. As Alexander Weheliye usefully defines it, “blackness designates a changing system of unequal power structures that apportion and delimit which humans can lay claim to full human status and which humans cannot” (3). Those with full human status are designated white, a category that is not always correlated to skin pigmentation. Further, because these relations are articulated across the span of the human, limitations on those designated Black limit everyone. As Alicia Garza, co-founder of the #BlackLivesMatter project with Opal Tometi and Patrisse Kahn-Cullors, has put it:

When we are able to end hyper-criminalization and sexualization of Black people and end the poverty, control, and surveillance of Black people, every single person in this world has a better shot at getting and staying free. When Black people get free, everybody gets free (2014).

Which means that unless Black people get free, nobody gets free. Or put more directly, in the words of Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us” (140). This is solidarity, Afro-pessimism style.

Persistent looking

The prohibitions and exclusions that constitute white supremacy have been challenged during the Black Lives Matter movement by persistent looking, meaning a refusal to look away from what is kept out of sight, off stage, and out of view. This look is sustained by long histories of resistance. It is comprised of a set of grounded, distributed, repeated but not traumatic actions, whose persistence is enabled in part by social media. It calls for us to see what there is to see, to be vulnerable, but not to be traumatized. Looking here is both witnessing and the embodied engagement with space. Such performances of looking are about the recurring present that people choose not to escape and continue to record in digital media. Persistently, they choose to keep looking against the prohibitions of the carceral state and to feel the presence of the absent bodies of those fallen from Michael Brown and Eric Garner to Sandra Bland, Alton Sterling, and Philando Castile – and so many more. In that repeated present, the presence of the future can be felt. Repetition matters here, as a means both of instilling the urgency of the situation in others and for the participants to overcome their first shock in order to understand what has actually happened. The formal similarity and repetition of the actions moves them from being simply protests – meaning an indexical call to the state or other authority to remedy a wrong – and become instead invocations of articulated assemblage (Weheliye 42–53).

There is a history of slavery in the Americas within this looking. Slavery sustained its regime by what I have elsewhere called “oversight,” the felt surveillance of the overseer over enslaved human beings. While this regime was ultimately enabled by spectacular violence, it allowed for the quotidian performance of complicated labor, often not under direct supervision. A French planter from Saint-Domingue mourned after the revolution that created Haiti the passing of

the variety of magic, which gave the empire of opinion to whiteness, and made it so that three or four Whites could sleep in all security, with their doors open, on a property where four or five hundred blacks were subjected to a more or less grievous labor.

(De Saint-Domingue 16)

Under US slavery, the look of the enslaved at an overseer or owner was known as “eye service,” (Johnson 168) and was immediately punishable. It was a particular feature of being “reckless,” any activity by the enslaved that might bring them to the attention and violence of the overseer and his drivers (Cervenak 66–67).

In order to sustain the Haitian revolution, this racialized looking had to be undone. In abolishing slavery, Haiti abolished the primary political distinction between “free” and “slave” that had persisted in the West since Antiquity. What names were the non-enslaveable now to have? In the 1804 Constitution, Haiti made itself into the scandal of modernity by decreeing in Article 12:

No whiteman of whatever nation he may be, shall put his foot on this territory with the title of master or proprietor, neither shall he in future acquire any property therein.

This clause undid colonialism and sought to foreclose any future possibility of white supremacy, neo-colonialism, or segregation. The constitution insisted, against the racialized hierarchy of miscegenation created by slavery, that all persons living in Haiti were to “be known only by the generic appellation of Blacks,” using the term Noir rather than the colonial Nègre. To be present in the decolonial space was to be Black (noir), regardless of past personal histories, rewriting blackness as revolutionary affiliation and as abolition democracy. Since abolition democracy had claimed blackness, visuality as a means of political ordering has since seen its others as “black” (nègre) from then on. In this frame, the colonized Irish were black, so too the radical sans-culottes of the French Revolution and the Paris Commune. But as Thomas Carlyle, the inventor of the concept of visuality in English, put it, the Haitians were “Black beyond remedy” (Mirzoeff 13). That is to say, to revolt is to be Black in a hierarchical system of human difference (Rodriguez qtd. in Weheliye 3). To revolt and be Black (Noir) is to be beyond all recognition and all claim to personhood in this colonial frame. The re-memory of Haiti was present in the Charleston massacre at the African Methodist Episcopal Church on June 17, 2015, just as a number of victims of police killing have been of Caribbean descent, like Akai Gurley, killed on the staircase of his apartment building in East New York on November 20, 2014.

During the Jim Crow period, looking across the color line became by condensation “reckless eyeballing,” with the added connotation of forbidden desire that authorized fatal violence in response. Although it was never formally part of the legal code, such looking was used to aggravate assault charges to rape as recently as 1952 in the case of Matt Ingram (Berry 227–230). However, after pressure from the NAACP and African-American media like Ebony, the state supreme court vacated the conviction because: “it cannot be said that a pedestrian may be assaulted by a look, however frightening, from a person riding in an automobile some distance away… . He may have looked with lustful eyes but there was the absence of any overt act” (State v. Ingram qtd. in Berry 232). That look no longer represented grounds for conviction. “Reckless eyeballing” nonetheless remains part of the informal codes of the prison industrial complex both inside institutions and as part of law enforcement. To cite just one example, in a 2013 case in Florida, a man’s conviction was upheld on appeal in part because a female corrections officer testified that he had performed reckless eyeballing against her.² Remember Freddie Gray in Baltimore. His only offence was that he met the look of a police officer in the eye, leading to an assumption of guilt for which he ended up dead. He appeared always already marked in the space where police believed themselves to be sovereign. To meet the police gaze was lèse-majesté in the language of sovereignty but, as bell hooks named it, simply “uppity” in language of racialized encounters (hooks 168). All the trials of the police officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray resulted in acquittals, with subsequent charges being dropped, as if no one but Gray could be responsible for his death.

Notably, Black Lives Matter protestors have described the experience of the movement as a coming-to-meet the police gaze. In Ferguson, Missouri, Johnetta Elzie (qtd. in K.-Y. Taylor), who tweeted as @Netaaaaaaaa and became a key voice in the movement, described how:

I decided to dare the police to look at the faces of the babies and children their dogs were so ready to chase down. As more people began to look directly at the police and yell their grievances, the more aggravated they became.

(156)

As can be seen in official scene of the crime photographs, St. Louis police used police dogs within hours of Michael Brown’s death to deter protestors, so Elie’s look back was not a metaphor.

Figure 1.1 St Louis Police Department (08/09/14).

Source: Photo entered into evidence in State of Missouri v. Darren Wilson. Released into public domain 11/25/2014.

That look was directly recorded when in November 2015 photographer John J. Kim took a picture of then-sixteen-year-old protestor Lamon Reccord confronting a police sergeant in Chicago. Each stares at the o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Mediation
• Part II Sovereignty
• Part III Contestation
• Editors
• Index