It's written on the body
Subtitle: Malleus Africanus, crime and racial dialectic in Western ontology.
Published: 2005
Language: eng
Number of pages: 415
Subjects: Stereotypes (Social psychology); Africans -- Canada.; Blacks in mass media.; Criminal behavior -- Canada.; Race discrimination -- Canada.; Fear.; Aggressiveness.; Canada -- Race relations.
Description: It's Written on the Body: Malleus Africanus, crime and racial dialectic in Western ontology examines the historical roots and the contemporary production of the myth of "Black" men's criminality as an artefact of everyday life in urban Canada. My dissertation demonstrates that the belief that African Canadian men are culturally or genetically prone to commit more crime than "White" and other males has no sound empirical basis. Rather, it persists as a consequence of the "White"  empirics of belief and racist Western ontological dependence on anti-blackness and anti-African racism. In addition to this psycho-history, I suggest that the myth of "Black" crime arises in European Canadian history from the criminalizing contexts of law, slavery, segregation, penology and the social psychology of scapegoating generated by capitalist social relations. I argue that "primary definers" whose organizational imperatives for control are legitimated by articulating "moral panic" within 'landscapes of fear' converge with the pedagogy of scapegoating in society. I demonstrate that African males are positioned in this 'landscape of fear' as a threatening cultural force. In effect by demystifying the ideology that crime is violent and interpersonal, I illustrate that police ideology and practices of containing "danger" coincide with racist "ceremonies of degradation" and "character assassination" in the press and society. Through the process of the Malleus Maleficarum , a diffusion of the power of surveillance in civil society and the State apparatus, African Canadian men are suspected of criminality in ways that have ontological significance for "White" subjects. By means of the Malleus, I suggest that projection of anxieties generated by capitalist social relations and racist traditions legitimate the scapegoating of African Canadian men as targets for "White" aggression and marginalization.
Notes: Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2005.

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Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-06, Section: A, page: 2395.