Using the famous frontispiece of Hobbes’ Leviathan, this research and manuscript-in-progress questions the division of state and individual sovereignty and recasts both within discourses on race, violence, and white supremacy. State sovereignty is repositioned as a process of repeated failure, one that leads to Black death by distributing the monopoly of violence across a white population.
Dissertation and manuscript-in-progress on the long history of US-Mexico boundary formation and the racial discourses they mediate. The project looks at boundary mapping, monument making, fencing, walling, electronic surveillance, blimps, drones, immigration prisons, indigenous reservations, and Japanese internment as imperial practices of state making and racial categorization.
