Abstract
The terror attacks of 9/11 in the United States of America greatly intensified a cultural era already mired in surveillance. Contemporary culture has come to view surveillance as part of the sociopolitical economy of great nations. Amongst those nations, Canada struggles with notions of multiculturalism and diversity. Leaning on Simone Browne’s (2015) recent work on Blackness and surveillance, which highlights the oft-ignored intertwined histories of race and surveillance, the following chapter utilizes Browne’s theoretical framework, along with a psychoanalytically constructed understanding of castration, to exhibit how Canada’s vaunted national integration policy (Multiculturalism 1971) results in the management, exclusion, and psychic oppression of Black people. Historically, and in comparison to the US, Canada is often presented as an oasis of racial equality and multiculturalism. Contrary to the touted qualities of Canada as open, accommodating, and integrated, the authors highlight the daily threats of castration through mechanisms of control that operate to limit Black lives within a paradoxical narrative of national hopefulness and singular oppression. For Browne, even when shrouded in invisibility, Blackness and surveillance have always been constitutive of each other. The authors view racial profiling as a form of neoliberal management; and extend the critical examination of surveillance into three politicized spheres and social spaces, namely higher education, popular culture, and activism. The critical analysis of Canadian socialization, policies, and politics uncovers how Blackness persistently signifies problemhood (DuBois 1904) within Canada’s multicultural logic and discourse.The PhD students from York University’s collaborative paper uncovers the realities of the unsound placing of blackness (and by extension, black bodies) in multicultural discourses, as well as the profound difficulties of black life in Canada. Within the context of multiculturalism, mechanisms of control operate to contain black bodies, both physically and psychically, within a paradoxical reality of national hopefulness and singular oppression.
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Tecle, S., Chimbganda, T., D’Amico, F., Tewelde, Y. (2017). Castrating Blackness: Surveillance, Profiling and Management in the Canadian Context. In: Flynn, S., Mackay, A. (eds) Spaces of Surveillance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49085-4_11
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