"Spaces of Surveillance will prove to be invaluable resources for researchers of surveillance studies, as well as those interested in digital culture, technology, biopolitics, film studies, and literary studies. The quality of the analyses in this highly stimulating volume itself provides a case for reading Flynn and McKay's book, while the novelty of the topics found therein no doubt broadens our perspective on the current state of surveillance and the cultural impact it constitutes." (Barnabás Baranyi, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, Vol. 25 (1), 2019)
1. Introduction.- 2. Equality and Erasure: Response to Subject in the Art of Jill Magid.- 3. Camera Performed: Visualising the Behaviours of Technology in Digital Performance.- 4. She's Not There: Shallow Focus on Privacy, Surveillance and the Emerging Techno-mediated Modes of Being in Spike Jonze's Her.- 5. Surveillance in Zero Dark Thirty: Terrorism, Space and Identity.-6. To see and to be Seen: Surveillance, The Vampiric Lens and the Undead Subject.- 7. Watching Through Windows: Bret Easton Ellis and Urban Surveillance.- 8. Participating in '1984': The Surveillance of Sousveillance from White Noise to Right Now.- 9. Surveillance in Post-Postmodern American Fiction: Dave Eggers The Circle, Jonathan Franzen's Purity, and Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story.- 9. Citizen: Claudia Rankine, from the First to the Second Person.- 10. Castrating Blackness: Surveillance, Profiling and Management in the Canadian Context'.- 11. Sousveillance as a Tool in US Civic Polity.- 12. Medical Surveillance and Bodily Privacy: Secret Selves and Graph Diaspora.-
Susan Flynn lectures at University of the Arts, London, UK, in Media Communications and Cultural Studies. A graduate of the Equality Studies Centre at University College Dublin, Republic of Ireland, her work to date has focussed on media representations of ability, medical surveillance and non-normative identities.
Antonia Mackay lectures at Oxford Brookes University and Goldsmiths University of London, UK. Specialising in American literature, culture and theatre, her work is centred on American identity and the concerns of the 20th and 21st century.
In a world of ubiquitous surveillance, watching and being watched are the salient features of the lives depicted in many of our cultural productions. This collection examines surveillance as it is portrayed in art, literature, film and popular culture, and makes the connection between our sense of ‘self’ and what is ‘seen’. In our post-panoptical world which purports to proffer freedom of movement, technology notes our movements and habits at every turn. Surveillance seeps out from businesses and power structures to blur the lines of security and confidentiality. This unsettling loss of privacy plays out in contemporary narratives, where the ‘selves’ we create are troubled by surveillance. This collection will appeal to scholars of media and cultural studies, contemporary literature, film and art and American studies.