Killing the Black Body
Necropolitics and Racial Hierarchies in Digital Gaming
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.44.2.08Keywords:
video games, antiblackness, necropolitics, Black death, raceAbstract
The purpose of this essay is to explore the patterns of antiblackness within contemporary gaming. Video games are sites of necropolitical logics that use Black death to propel narratives. But even more concerning, is that these games might make sense of larger desires of white colonial supremacy, attempting to remove and destroy its troubled racialized past. Ethnographic observations also engage gaming as a carceral logic that seeks to surveil, police, and criminal Blackness. Under these conditions, it is imperative to explore how the continuation of the institution of slavery within policing is actively embedded into technical and digital practices, leading to carceral conditions for those subject to its power and gaming provides a pathway to engage this trend.
Downloads
References
Bonilla, Yarimar, and Jonathan Rosa. “#Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States.” American Ethnologist 42, no. 1 (February 2015): 4–17. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12112.
Day, Doris, vocalist. “Dream a Little Dream of Me.” By Fabian Andre, Wilbur Schwandt, and Gus Kahn. Track 4 on Day by Night. Released November 11, 1957. Columbia CL 1053, 33⅓ rpm.
Dillon, Stephen. “Possessed by Death: The Neoliberal-Carceral State, Black Feminism, and the Afterlife of Slavery.” Radical History Review 2012, no. 112 (Winter 2012): 113–25. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-1416196.
Drakulich, Kevin, Kevin H. Wozniak, John Hagan, and Devon Johnson. “Race and Policing in the 2016 Presidential Election: Black Lives Matter, the Police, and Dog Whistle Politics.” Criminology 58, no. 2 (May 2020): 370–402. https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12239.
Fletcher, Akil. “Black Gamer’s Refuge: Finding Community within the Magic Circle of Whiteness.” In The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology, edited by Elisabetta Costa, Patricia G. Lange, Nell Haynes, and Jolynna Sinanan, 368–78. London: Routledge, 2022.
Goard, Javon. “Gamifying Blackness: A Discussion on Black Gamers and Black Portrayals in Contemporary Videogames.” In “Racism and Sexism in Virtual Comic and Gaming Environments,” edited by Rhys M. Hall and David G. Embrick, 42–53. Special issue, Sociation 22, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2023).
Gray, Kishonna L. Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020.
Gray, Kishonna L., and Krysten Stein. “ ‘We “Said Her Name” and Got Zucked’: Black Women Calling-out the Carceral Logics of Digital Platforms.” Gender and Society 35, no. 4 (August 2021): 538–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/08912432211029393.
Gregory, Anthony. “Policing Jim Crow America: Enforcers’ Agency and Structural Transformations.” Law and History Review 40, no. 1 (February 2022): 91–122. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0738248021000456.
Hatt, Michael. “Sculpting and Lynching: The Making and Unmaking of the Black Citizen in Late Nineteenth-Century America.” Oxford Art Journal 24, no. 1 (2001): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/24.1.1.
Jackson II, Ronald L. Scripting the Black Masculine Body: Identity, Discourse, and Racial Politics in Popular Media. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006.
Johnson, Jasmine. Review of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, by Ashon Crawley. Dance Research Journal 49, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 109–11. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0149767717000274.
Klarman, Michael J. “How Brown Changed Race Relations: The Backlash Thesis.” Journal of American History 81, no. 1 (June 1994): 81–118. https://doi.org/10.2307/2080994.
Kunzelman, Cameron. “Destroyed in the Cut.” Bullet Points Monthly, July 22, 2020. https://bulletpointsmonthly.com/2020/07/22/destroyed-in-the-cut-the-last-of-us-part-ii.
Kunzelman, Cameron. The World Is Born From Zero: Understanding Speculation and Video Games. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022.
Kuo, Rachel, and Alice Marwick. “Critical Disinformation Studies: History, Power, and Politics.” Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review 2, no. 4 (August 2021): 1–11. https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-76.
Leonard, David. “Live in Your World, Play in Ours: Race, Video Games, and Consuming the Other.” SIMILE: Studies in Media and Information Literacy Education 3, no. 4 (November 2003): 1–9.
Leonard, David. “Unsettling the Military Entertainment Complex: Video Games and a Pedagogy of Peace.” SIMILE: Studies in Media and Information Literacy Education 4, no. 4 (November 2004): 1–8.
Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Translated by Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 11–40. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11.
Mowatt, Rasul A. “Black Lives as Snuff: The Silent Complicity in Viewing Black Death.” Biography 41, no. 4 (Fall 2018): 777–806. https://doi.org/10.1353/bio.2018.0079.
Ono, Kent A. Contemporary Media Culture and the Remnants of a Colonial Past. New York: Peter Lang, 2009.
Ore, Ersula J. “Twenty-First Century Discourses of American Lynching.” Critical Discourse Studies 20, no. 5 (2022): 508–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2022.2090978.
Puwar, Nirmal. Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place. Oxford: Berg, 2004.
Reddi, Madhavi, Rachel Kuo, and Daniel Kreiss. “Identity Propaganda: Racial Narratives and Disinformation.” In “Farm Media,” edited by Zenia Kish and Benjamin Peters, special issue, New Media and Society 25, no. 8 (August 2023): 2201–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211029293. First published online in 2021.
Shakur, Assata. “Women in Prison: How We Are.” The Black Scholar 9, no. 7 (April 1978): 8–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.1978.11414002.
Spielmann, Nathalie, Susan Dobscha, and L. J. Shrum. “Brands and Social Justice Movements: The Effects of True versus Performative Allyship on Brand Evaluation.” Journal of the Association for Consumer Research 8, no. 1 (January 2023): 83–94. https://doi.org/10.1086/722697.
Weitzer, Ronald. “Theorizing Racial Discord over Policing Before and After Ferguson.” Justice Quarterly 34, no. 7 (2017): 1129–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/07418825.2017.1362461.
Williams, Sherri. “#SayHerName: Using Digital Activism to Document Violence against Black Women.” Feminist Media Studies 16, no. 5 (2016): 922–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2016.1213574.
Zack, Naomi. White Privilege and Black Rights: The Injustice of U.S. Police Racial Profiling and Homicide. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 ZRC-SAZU
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors guarantee that the work is their own original creation and does not infringe any statutory or common-law copyright or any proprietary right of any third party. In case of claims by third parties, authors commit their self to defend the interests of the publisher, and shall cover any potential costs.
More in: Submission chapter
