Librería Portfolio

Making Surveillance States: Transnational Histories opens up new and exciting perspectives on how systems of state surveillance developed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Taking a transnational approach, the book challenges us to rethink the presumed novelty of contemporary surveillance practices, while developing critical analyses of the ways in which state surveillance has profoundly shaped the emergence of contemporary societies.

Contributors engage with a range of surveillance practices, including medical and disease surveillance, systems of documentation and identification, and policing and security. These approaches enable us to understand how surveillance has underpinned the emergence of modern states, sustained systems of state security, enabled practices of colonial rule, perpetuated racist and gendered forms of identification and classification, regulated and policed migration, shaped the eugenically inflected medicalization of disability and sexuality, and contained dissent. While surveillance is thus bound up with complex relations of power, it is also contested. Emerging from the book is a sense of how state actors understood and legitimized their own surveillance practices, as well as how these practices have been implemented in different times and places. At the same time, contributors explore the myriad ways in which these systems of surveillance have been resisted, challenged, and subverted.



Table of Contents:

List of Illustrations
Foreword by David Lyon
Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Unpacking State Surveillance: Histories, Theories, and Global Contexts
Emily van der Meulen, Ryerson University and Robert Heynen, York University

Section One: Medical, Disease, and Health Surveillance

2. Coolie Control: State Surveillance and the Labour of Disinfection across the Late Victorian British Empire
Jacob Steere-Williams, College of Charleston

3. Surveillance, Medicine, and the Misterios de la Naturaleza: Campaigns to Cure Deafness in Late-Nineteenth Century Mexico City
Holly Caldwell, Chestnut Hill College

4. Masquerading as a Woman: The South African Disguises Acts and the Ghosts of Apartheid Surveillance, 1906-2004
B Camminga, University of Wits

Section Two: Identification, Regulation, and Colonial Rule

5. The Penal Surveillant Assemblage: Attainder and Tickets of Leave in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Australia
Ian Warren, Deakin University and Darren Palmer, Deakin University

6. Controlling Transnational Asian Mobilities: A Comparison of Documentary Systems in Australia and South Africa, 1890s to 1940s
Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, University of the Western Cape and Margaret Allen, University of Adelaide

7. Bodies as Risky Resources: Japan´s Colonial Identification Systems in Northeastern China
Midori Ogasawara, Queen´s University

8. A State of Exception: Frameworks and Institutions of Israeli Surveillance of Palestinians, 1948-1967
Ahmad H Sa´di, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Section Three: State Security, Policing, and Dissent

9. Dossierveillance in Communist Romania: Collaboration with the Securitate, 1945-1989
Cristina Plamadeala, Concordia University

10. The FBI and the American Friends Service Committee: Surveilling United States Religious Expression in the Cold War Era
Kathryn Montalbano, Neumann University

11. When under Surveillance, Always Put on a Good Show: Representations of Surveillance in the United States Underground Press, 1968-1972
Elisabetta Ferrari, University of Pennsylvania and John Remensperger, University of Pennsylvania

12. That´s Not a Conversation That Belongs to the Museum: The (In)visibility of Surveillance History at Police Museums in Ontario, Canada
Matthew Ferguson, University of Ottawa, Justin Piché, University of Ottawa, and Kevin Walby, University of Winnipeg

Afterword
Simone Browne, University of Texas at Austin

List of Contributors
Index