Black sites, “dark sides”: War power, police power, and the violence of the (un)known

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Bibliographische Detailangaben
Beteiligte: Linnemann, Travis, Medley, Corina
In: Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal, 15, 2019, 2, S. 341-358
veröffentlicht:
SAGE Publications
Medientyp: Artikel, E-Artikel

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Umfang: 341-358
ISSN: 1741-6590
1741-6604
DOI: 10.1177/1741659018777779
veröffentlicht in: Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal
Sprache: Englisch
Schlagwörter:
Kollektion: SAGE Publications (CrossRef)
Inhaltsangabe

<jats:p>The US Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture and the Guardian’s exposé of the Chicago Police Department’s “off-the-books interrogation compound” at Homan Square have again thrust torture into debates concerning the nature and limits of state and police violence. Following a longstanding pattern, key actors framed both cases as revelatory and exceptional and used them as fodder for public condemnation and calls for reform. In order to confront and contest similar patterns of facile outrage, we theorize a cultural-cognitive process of disavowal, whereby the inherent violence of the US state is willfully situated by its subjects in politically and culturally redacted black spaces. Here, black spaces allow political subjects to disavow the many horrors—rendition, torture, murder—committed on their behalf and in the name of security. We argue that these are not simply metaphorical, imaginary spaces, but rather material landscapes linking the certainties of US imperial violence to routine and uncontested acts of police violence and the interrogation rooms, jail cells, and prisons of an intensely racialized, yet largely disowned mass-carceral regime. Our aim, then, is to map the state’s black spaces in order to demonstrate the reciprocities between war and police and to situate the politics of redaction within broader systems of violence and dispossession.</jats:p>