In Violence Work Micol Seigel offers a new theorization of the quintessential incarnation of stat... more In Violence Work Micol Seigel offers a new theorization of the quintessential incarnation of state power: the police. Foregrounding the interdependence of policing, the state, and global capital, Seigel redefines policing as “violence work,” showing how it is shaped by its role of channeling state violence. She traces this dynamic by examining the formation, demise, and aftermath of the U.S. State Department's Office of Public Safety (OPS), which between 1962 and 1974 specialized in training police forces internationally. Officially a civilian agency, the OPS grew and operated in military and counterinsurgency realms in ways that transgressed the borders that are meant to contain the police within civilian, public, and local spheres. Tracing the career paths of OPS agents after their agency closed, Seigel shows how police practices writ large are rooted in violence—especially against people of color, the poor, and working people—and how understanding police as a civilian, public, and local institution legitimizes state violence while preserving the myth of state benevolence.
Prison is the most powerful engine of racialization in the United States today. While radical imp... more Prison is the most powerful engine of racialization in the United States today. While radical imprisoned intellectuals have compelled large activist-scholar audiences, the ones who are not radicalized by their prison experiences are just as important to understand. This essay explores racial identification among people incarcerated at a medium-security facility in Indiana where the author teaches, noting both reactionary anti-racialism and expressions of commonality with African American history and struggle. The author brings together Foucault, Gramsci, Stuart Hall, theorists of anti-blackness, and abolitionist scholar-activists to analyze this complex white supremacist anti-racialism. Keywords: race, prison, white supremacy, anti-blackness, racialization, Indiana, abolition ********** Quando voce for convidado prasubirno adro Da fundacao casa de Jorge Amado Pra ver do alto a fila de soldados, quase todos pretos Dando porrada na nuca de malandros pretos De ladroes mulatos e outros ...
Comparable or Connected? Afro-Diasporic Subjectivity and State Response in 1920s Sao Paulo and Ch... more Comparable or Connected? Afro-Diasporic Subjectivity and State Response in 1920s Sao Paulo and Chicago Micol Seigel Bowdoin College The descendants of Africans brought to the Americas as slaves have met racism with a dazzling array of responses. When observers have ...
There is great joy in owing so much to the many people who have guided and supported me through t... more There is great joy in owing so much to the many people who have guided and supported me through this work. I thank them here in roughly chronological chunks but with no particular internal order. In the dissertation stage, I was blessed with a brilliant set of mentors: my adviser, Robin D. G. Kelley; exam and dissertation readers Lisa Duggan and George Yúdice; and dissertation readers Diana Taylor and Olívia Gomes da Cunha. I benefited immeasurably from my other professors and mentors at NYU, including Nikhil Pal Singh, Robert Stam, Martha Hodes, Ada Ferrer, and Judith Halberstam. From my first dissertation research to my last moments of revision, I have leaned heavily on Rio de Janeiro friends and mentors, including
Dislocations across the Americas" speaks to a moment of stark interest in interdependent relation... more Dislocations across the Americas" speaks to a moment of stark interest in interdependent relations of power, violence, and place. If scholarship interested in global and hemispheric scales has traditionally tended more toward comparisons than connections, transnational studies have in the past decade brought interdependencies into clearer view. Transnational method, unconfined to any given field, has been a welcoming site for the accumulation of border-transcending insights across the (inter)disciplines. Indeed, the youth and indeterminacy of transnational study may make this proto-field better able to foster such insights, thanks to the very absence of recognizable borders, obvious objects of study, and leading figures on which to pin its tenets. The approach has yet to clarify that its practitioners neither assume nations to be obsolete nor simply study the whole wide world, and certainly it still continues to suffer from confusion over what distinguishes it from the related concepts of globalization and migration. Its very ambiguity seems to make transnational method particularly productive for spatially focused innovation. Transnational method is one of the ways scholars around the globe are attempting to make sense with space. Gone is the epistemological privilege of time; questions of temporality, of our point along the timelines of modernity or coloniality, are fatally rent by critiques of their normative evolutionism. Temporality is instead now an integrated piece of the "spatial turn," the analytic toolkit of critical geography so useful to historicize the narrative lines of globalization. 1 With attention to the generative centrality of complex interrelations of scale and of phenomena that resist the spacetime of the nation-state, transnational scholarship joins border studies,
Pp. 456. $65.00 cloth. "Anthropology," writes Arturo Escobar, "wants to remain a discipline" (xi)... more Pp. 456. $65.00 cloth. "Anthropology," writes Arturo Escobar, "wants to remain a discipline" (xi). Escobar sets this drive against the profound inter-or "undisciplinarity" of his own Territories of Difference, thereby gesturing to a tension between, among, and across disciplines that inspires and distorts work on race in Latin America today. Students of sociology, anthropology, history, literature, and the various "studies" (Africana, American, Latin American, ethnic) all struggle to reconcile disciplinary training and norms with ubiquitous calls for interdisciplinarity in the U.S. academy. Whether one chooses to heed, refuse, or ignore these calls, it is striking how notions of race remain resolutely grounded in specifi c disciplines. Stanley Bailey's Legacies of Race introduced me to the useful schema of bright versus blurred, hard versus soft, and thick versus thin boundaries. As we shall see, researchers in the humanities and in the social sciences often speak to one another across the hard-bright boundary between qualitative and quantitative paradigms and between defi nitional and disciplinary camps.
ALSO BY THOMAS BENDER Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Americ... more ALSO BY THOMAS BENDER Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century America The Making of American Society (coauthor) Community and Social Change in America New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York, from 1750 to the Beginnings ...
In Violence Work Micol Seigel offers a new theorization of the quintessential incarnation of stat... more In Violence Work Micol Seigel offers a new theorization of the quintessential incarnation of state power: the police. Foregrounding the interdependence of policing, the state, and global capital, Seigel redefines policing as “violence work,” showing how it is shaped by its role of channeling state violence. She traces this dynamic by examining the formation, demise, and aftermath of the U.S. State Department's Office of Public Safety (OPS), which between 1962 and 1974 specialized in training police forces internationally. Officially a civilian agency, the OPS grew and operated in military and counterinsurgency realms in ways that transgressed the borders that are meant to contain the police within civilian, public, and local spheres. Tracing the career paths of OPS agents after their agency closed, Seigel shows how police practices writ large are rooted in violence—especially against people of color, the poor, and working people—and how understanding police as a civilian, public, and local institution legitimizes state violence while preserving the myth of state benevolence.
Prison is the most powerful engine of racialization in the United States today. While radical imp... more Prison is the most powerful engine of racialization in the United States today. While radical imprisoned intellectuals have compelled large activist-scholar audiences, the ones who are not radicalized by their prison experiences are just as important to understand. This essay explores racial identification among people incarcerated at a medium-security facility in Indiana where the author teaches, noting both reactionary anti-racialism and expressions of commonality with African American history and struggle. The author brings together Foucault, Gramsci, Stuart Hall, theorists of anti-blackness, and abolitionist scholar-activists to analyze this complex white supremacist anti-racialism. Keywords: race, prison, white supremacy, anti-blackness, racialization, Indiana, abolition ********** Quando voce for convidado prasubirno adro Da fundacao casa de Jorge Amado Pra ver do alto a fila de soldados, quase todos pretos Dando porrada na nuca de malandros pretos De ladroes mulatos e outros ...
Comparable or Connected? Afro-Diasporic Subjectivity and State Response in 1920s Sao Paulo and Ch... more Comparable or Connected? Afro-Diasporic Subjectivity and State Response in 1920s Sao Paulo and Chicago Micol Seigel Bowdoin College The descendants of Africans brought to the Americas as slaves have met racism with a dazzling array of responses. When observers have ...
There is great joy in owing so much to the many people who have guided and supported me through t... more There is great joy in owing so much to the many people who have guided and supported me through this work. I thank them here in roughly chronological chunks but with no particular internal order. In the dissertation stage, I was blessed with a brilliant set of mentors: my adviser, Robin D. G. Kelley; exam and dissertation readers Lisa Duggan and George Yúdice; and dissertation readers Diana Taylor and Olívia Gomes da Cunha. I benefited immeasurably from my other professors and mentors at NYU, including Nikhil Pal Singh, Robert Stam, Martha Hodes, Ada Ferrer, and Judith Halberstam. From my first dissertation research to my last moments of revision, I have leaned heavily on Rio de Janeiro friends and mentors, including
Dislocations across the Americas" speaks to a moment of stark interest in interdependent relation... more Dislocations across the Americas" speaks to a moment of stark interest in interdependent relations of power, violence, and place. If scholarship interested in global and hemispheric scales has traditionally tended more toward comparisons than connections, transnational studies have in the past decade brought interdependencies into clearer view. Transnational method, unconfined to any given field, has been a welcoming site for the accumulation of border-transcending insights across the (inter)disciplines. Indeed, the youth and indeterminacy of transnational study may make this proto-field better able to foster such insights, thanks to the very absence of recognizable borders, obvious objects of study, and leading figures on which to pin its tenets. The approach has yet to clarify that its practitioners neither assume nations to be obsolete nor simply study the whole wide world, and certainly it still continues to suffer from confusion over what distinguishes it from the related concepts of globalization and migration. Its very ambiguity seems to make transnational method particularly productive for spatially focused innovation. Transnational method is one of the ways scholars around the globe are attempting to make sense with space. Gone is the epistemological privilege of time; questions of temporality, of our point along the timelines of modernity or coloniality, are fatally rent by critiques of their normative evolutionism. Temporality is instead now an integrated piece of the "spatial turn," the analytic toolkit of critical geography so useful to historicize the narrative lines of globalization. 1 With attention to the generative centrality of complex interrelations of scale and of phenomena that resist the spacetime of the nation-state, transnational scholarship joins border studies,
Pp. 456. $65.00 cloth. "Anthropology," writes Arturo Escobar, "wants to remain a discipline" (xi)... more Pp. 456. $65.00 cloth. "Anthropology," writes Arturo Escobar, "wants to remain a discipline" (xi). Escobar sets this drive against the profound inter-or "undisciplinarity" of his own Territories of Difference, thereby gesturing to a tension between, among, and across disciplines that inspires and distorts work on race in Latin America today. Students of sociology, anthropology, history, literature, and the various "studies" (Africana, American, Latin American, ethnic) all struggle to reconcile disciplinary training and norms with ubiquitous calls for interdisciplinarity in the U.S. academy. Whether one chooses to heed, refuse, or ignore these calls, it is striking how notions of race remain resolutely grounded in specifi c disciplines. Stanley Bailey's Legacies of Race introduced me to the useful schema of bright versus blurred, hard versus soft, and thick versus thin boundaries. As we shall see, researchers in the humanities and in the social sciences often speak to one another across the hard-bright boundary between qualitative and quantitative paradigms and between defi nitional and disciplinary camps.
ALSO BY THOMAS BENDER Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Americ... more ALSO BY THOMAS BENDER Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century America The Making of American Society (coauthor) Community and Social Change in America New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York, from 1750 to the Beginnings ...
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