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On Civil Rights, Armed Citizens, and Historical Overdose. Lateral - Journal of Cultural Studies. 2020;9 (1).
Publisher's VersionAbstractToday’s radically sovereign Armed Citizen®—a commodity fetish trademarked by the NRA—derives his representational and ethical power from fantasies of self-defensive heroism rooted in historical distortions that obscure the traces of armed settler colonialist violence and racial capitalism. Such historical “overdose” flattens anti-racist civil rights activism, making us “complaisant hostages” of a selective memory that serves self-destructive, necropolitical structures today.
Light C.
"The Worst that Humanity Has to Offer": On Looters and Law-Abiding Citizens in a State of Emergency. In: Guns: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Politics, Policy, and Practice. New York: Routledge ; 2020.
AbstractThis essay represents an effort to uncover the dynamics of reverse victimhood on which law-abiding citizenship rests, a dialectic of white masculine vulnerability and disenfranchisement, while “Black people [signify] terror’s embodiment.” I explore the ways in which implicitly racialized and gendered perceptions of terror mobilize state action in the service of expanding the right to carry lethal weaponry for those perceived as law-abiding citizens. The state’s invocation of natural disasters as “states of exception” necessitates the expansion of DIY Security Citizenship, the spread of neoliberalized self-care in the absence of state protection, and the deputization of the “law-abiding citizens” to protect property from racialized and gendered figures of perceived “stranger danger.” This project examines the dismal underside of American exceptionalism, the facilitating apparatuses of our nation’s exclusionary nationalism, and the pernicious historical amnesias on which they’re based.