Who’s Calling the Emergency? The Black Panthers, Securitisation and the Question of Identity
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Who’s Calling the Emergency? The Black Panthers, Securitisation and the Question of Identity. / Illner, Peer.
In: Culture Unbound, Vol. 7, No. 3, 2015, p. 479-495.Research output: Contribution to journal › Journal article › Research › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Who’s Calling the Emergency? The Black Panthers, Securitisation and the Question of Identity
AU - Illner, Peer
PY - 2015
Y1 - 2015
N2 - This article intervenes in a debate in cultural disaster studies that interprets disastersas objects, whose study opens up an understanding of societies’ fears, anxieties andvulnerabilities. Widening the scope of disaster studies, it proposes to view disasternot as an object but as an optics, a matrix that frames elements of social life as anemergency. Presenting the case of the American Black Panther Party for Self-Defensethrough a framework of security studies, the article explores the Black Panthers’politics as a process of societal securitisation that allowed African Americansto mobilise politically by proclaiming an emergency. It traces a political trajectorythat ranged from an early endorsement of revolutionary violence to the promotionof community services and casts this journey as a negotiation of the question ofidentity and ontological security in times of crisis. Drawing on Black studies andon stigma theory, it suggests finally, that the Panthers’ abandonment of violencerepresented a shift from identity-politics to an engagement with structural positionality.
AB - This article intervenes in a debate in cultural disaster studies that interprets disastersas objects, whose study opens up an understanding of societies’ fears, anxieties andvulnerabilities. Widening the scope of disaster studies, it proposes to view disasternot as an object but as an optics, a matrix that frames elements of social life as anemergency. Presenting the case of the American Black Panther Party for Self-Defensethrough a framework of security studies, the article explores the Black Panthers’politics as a process of societal securitisation that allowed African Americansto mobilise politically by proclaiming an emergency. It traces a political trajectorythat ranged from an early endorsement of revolutionary violence to the promotionof community services and casts this journey as a negotiation of the question ofidentity and ontological security in times of crisis. Drawing on Black studies andon stigma theory, it suggests finally, that the Panthers’ abandonment of violencerepresented a shift from identity-politics to an engagement with structural positionality.
M3 - Journal article
VL - 7
SP - 479
EP - 495
JO - Culture Unbound
JF - Culture Unbound
SN - 2000-1525
IS - 3
ER -
ID: 162157097