Looking Back : Racializing Assemblages and the Biopolitics of Resistance

Sammanfattning: The topic of this thesis is the biopolitics of video activism vis-à-vis racialized police violence. It is written against the backdrop of recent developments in the critique of two central concepts in field of biopolitics, namely Giorgio Agamben’s bare life and Michel Foucault’s biopower. Offsetting their respective framework, Alexander G. Weheliye (et al.) has introduced the imposition of race onto bodies as anterior to biopolitics. I incorporate this in a critique of Pasi Väliaho’s notion of biopolitical screens. To facilitate grounded theorizing, a field study of police accountability video activist groups in the United States was conducted. I argue that their observed practices should be seen as forms of embodied counter-surveillance and I situate them in the racially saturated field of visibility specific to the U.S. context. Moreover, I argue that the practices entail an extension of corporealities which is not inherently political in the sense of overt discursive iconography. It is, however, ideologically disrupting in how it networks politicized bodies through time and space. I conclude that raising the video camera to “look back” in the face of racializing assemblages constitutes a rights claim to a political subjectivity, however not necessarily in terms of polity or citizenship. Instead, the media practices are transversal and hold the potential to entail a political subjectivity ontologically anterior to state sovereignty.