The Fire This Time: How Policing Holds Together Race, Space, and Time

• In Event: International and Comparative Perspectives on Punishment, Social Control, and Crime

Abstract

Policing is an act that shapes race, space, and time. In this article, I examine how modernity, as a racial-spatial project, is constructed in part through the policing of Black mobility. Drawing on archival materials from the National Library of South Africa in Cape Town and the Mayibuye (Robben Island) Archives, I find that during apartheid, Black mobility was policed in ways to portray white-ruled South Africa as modern. I argue that the presence of Blackness, in or moving through white South African space, troubled the racial-spatial understandings of modernity because Blackness was read as pre-modern or a future problem for urban white space, resulting in Black criminalization and policing. I conclude with the implications of this research and call for scholars to consider policing as a racial-spatial act that has physical, temporal, and ontological consequences.

Author

• Korey Tillman, Northeastern University