Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life ed. by Ruha Benjamin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life ed. by Ruha Benjamin Jennifer L. Lieberman Ruha Benjamin, ed. Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life. Durham: Duke UP, 2019. 416 pp. $29.95. Captivating Technology is a rigorous, imaginative, and impressively multifarious collection of essays. Composed of fourteen chapters, plus a Foreword and Introduction, it astutely critiques different aspects of science and technology that relate to carcerality—and it moves beyond criticism to identify techniques for liberation and resistance. It offers essential contributions to critical race studies, American studies, and science and technology studies. Troy Duster provides the Foreword, illuminating that the racial bias that gets coded into algorithms is only visible within specific cultural contexts. Ruha Benjamin elaborates on this point in her Introduction, "Discriminatory Design, Liberating Imagination," by defining what she calls "The New Jim Code": the use of technologies and policies that appear objective but deceptively extend racist social practices. Benjamin is a master of turning presumptions on their heads, asking such evocative questions as, "Could it be that we don't need technocorrections to make us secure, that we need social insecurity to justify technocorrections?" (2). The chapters that follow share Benjamin's innovative and attentive analysis. They are organized into three parts. "Part I: Carceral Techniques from Plantation to Prison" begins with a chapter by Britt Rusert: "Naturalizing Coercion: The Tuskegee Experiments and the Laboratory Life of the Plantation." This chapter sheds light on the presumptions about blackness and hygiene that informed public health efforts at Tuskegee, ranging from Booker T. Washington's "Negro Health Week" to the notorious syphilis study. Rusert suggests that Walter Rodney's thesis about the underdevelopment of Africa might be expanded to include "uneven development" within the United States (39). This chapter also includes a reading of Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Tales (1899), which suggests that "African American literature exposed the logic and history of the Tuskegee syphilis study decades before they were uncovered" (41). For example, Rusert argues that Chesnutt's story "Po' Sandy" narrativizes how the plantation functions as a laboratory: By turning into a tree that can be milled into lumber, Po' Sandy allegorizes "how black bodies continued to be acted upon as commodifiable" even after emancipation (43). The second chapter, "Consumed by Disease: Medical Archives, Latino Fictions, and Carceral Health Imaginaries" by Christopher Perreira, also considers fiction as an important object of historical inquiry as it reads Alejandro Morales's The Captain of All These Men of [End Page 258] Death in conversation with the "discourses of racialized disease" that were promulgated within the context of "California public health" (52). The third chapter, "Billions Served: Prison Food Regimes, Nutritional Punishment, and Gastronomical Resistance" by Anthony Ryan Hatch, confronts the little-studied issue of food in prisons. Ryan analyzes everything from the prison farm to the hunger strike, and from the software companies that win exclusive contracts (which are appallingly unregulated by the FDA or USDA) to supply food to prisoners as cheaply as possible to the dubiously hopeful act of food hacking. Chapters four and five both analyze predictive policing. Andrea Miller's "Shadows of War, Traces of Policing: The Weaponization of Space and the Sensible in Preemption" interprets preemptive policing tools such as license-plate readers and PredPol predictive policing software in Atlanta as part of "a speculative military economy" (94). R. Joshua Scannell's "This Is Not Minority Report: Predictive Policing and Population Racism" also examines such tools as PredPol and HunchLab, putting them in conversation with Philip K. Dick's 1956 short story "The Minority Report" and its whitewashed filmic adaptation to interrogate the racial and economic logics that underwrite the assumption that crime can be preempted. Scannell compellingly argues that "Policing does not have a 'racist history.' Policing makes race" (108). "Part II: Surveillance Systems from Facebook to Fast Fashion" begins with chapter six, "Racialized Surveillance in the Digital Service Economy" by Winifred R. Poster. This chapter introduces the useful theoretical concept of "multi-surveillance," which connotes how "consumers [who] may be unified in their aims to counteract surveillance by firms … may surveill [sic] each other for factors like race" (135). Poster...