Postcolonialism, time, and body-worn cameras

Abstract

This paper draws on postcolonial temporal analysis to make sense of police use of body-worn cameras (BWCs). We argue that the potential of BWCs to make racist policing visible, as originally hoped, is compromised by the inability of “real-time” video to capture the complexity of historical and on-going colonial relations. Drawing on postcolonial literary and visual theory, and especially Homi Bhabha’s (2004) postcolonial analysis of “belated-ness” and Andrea Smith’s (2015) anti-colonial analysis of “not-seeing,” we argue that BWCs reproduce a white settler gaze in which the complex histories of colonialism become temporally incommensurate with real-time images of policing social order.