Postcolonial Surveillance

Anouk Madörin is a lecturer in cultural studies at the University of Potsdam, Germany.

Postcolonial Surveillance considers the long history of European border regimes, focusing on the colonial predecessors of today’s border technologies. Undertaking a longue durée approach to uncover how Europe’s pre-digital colonial history continues to shape the high-tech political present, Madörin shows how colonial practices live on in the European Union’s border migration policies, border security, and surveillance apparatuses. She exposes the consistent racial hierarchies and power relations that form these systems, highlighting key moments when the past and present interact and collide, such as in panoptic surveillance, biopolitical registers, and biometric sorting. This specialized work will appeal strongly to those researching surveillance regimes, racism, migration, and postcolonialism more generally. Highly recommended. Faculty, researchers, and professionals.

• Acknowledgments Preface Chapter 1: The European Border Regime: Conditions of Emergence in a Mediated World Chapter 2: The View From Above: The Traffic of Non-White Bodies in the Mediterranean World Chapter 3: Data on Bodies: Colonial Ordering from Windhoek to Lesbos Chapter 4: Bodies of Data: (Early) Biometrics from the Colony to the Border Chapter 5: Viral Deterrence: Sex, Risk, and Contagion ca. 1920 and 2015Chapter 6: A Thousand Crises: Notes on the State of Exception Works Cited About the Author