Redacted: On Prisons, Police, Black Sites and “Dark Sides”

• In Event: Visualizing State Power

Abstract

The US Senate 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. Yet a number of historical and contemporary accounts illustrate how torture administered by state agents at so-called “black sites” is a long-standing, accepted practice of the American security state and thus no revelation, even to the uninformed public. In order to confront and contest similar patterns of facile outrage, this paper theorizes a cultural-cognitive process of disavowal, whereby the horrific acts of US military and police are situated by its subjects in politically and culturally redacted black spaces. Operating on both symbolic and material landscapes, black spaces take shape as the “black operations” of routine and uncontested police violence, the interrogation rooms and cells of “black site” jails and prisons and the intensely racialized, yet disowned spaces of a mass-carceral regime. The aim then, is to map the state’s black spaces in order to more fully theorize the police and state power at work in broader systems of violence and dispossession.

Author

• Travis Linnemann, Eastern Kentucky University