KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Rachel Adams, Columbia University

PLENARY SPEAKER: Katherine Johnston, Stony Brook University

“Out of Line: Racializing Surveillance in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen“

This plenary address will consider the conference’s theme of enclosure in relation to surveillance and the work it does “to zone spaces, draw lines, and shape looking relations” (Browne). Focusing on key passages from Claudia Rankine’s American lyric, Citizen, the talk will tease out the relationship between anti-Blackness and pervasive surveillance and profiling in the U.S., elaborating what literature and critical race theory can teach critical data studies about forms of oppositional looking and counter-surveillance. After considering how neoliberal techniques and technologies of surveillance marshal and police affect along racial lines, Johnston will turn to Rankine’s counterstrategies, which mobilize affect to different ends and undermine the supposed detached rationality of data surveillance.

Katherine Johnston is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University where she teaches and researches American Literature, Surveillance Studies, and Critical Data Studies. Her book, Profiles and Plotlines: Data Surveillance and Twenty-first Century Literature, was published this year by the University of Iowa Press as part of their New American Canon Series. Her scholarship has also been published in American Literature, Twentieth Century Literature, Contemporary Women’s Writing, and the American Indian Culture and Research Journal.