"Authoritative Images: Technologies of Language, Race, and State” with Joshua Babcock

Please join the Center for Global Ethnography for “Authoritative Images: Technologies of Language, Race, and State,” a talk by Joshua Babcock, (Anthropology, University of Chicago).

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Abstract:

How do images gain authority to not only represent reality, but also to stand in for it? This talk explores how raciolinguistic technologies—technologies that mediate co-naturalizations of language and race (Rosa and Flores 2017; Benjamin 2019)—get mobilized by and marshalled beyond the Singaporean state. Despite extensive, ongoing critiques of the state’s “visible hand” (Lim 1983), I examine how images afforded by state technologies, from social surveys to instruments of standardization, get detached from both their technological sources and from the state projects that originally animated their production. I show how these images come to be felt at a range of scales as immediate, authoritative (if ultimately partial) realities rather than as historically, institutionally, and interactionally mediated.