Surveillance Frontierism
BY SUSAN CAHILL
“The end goal of denaturalizing settler colonial geographies cannot be to show that colonial violence has remapped the land in genocidal ways for Indigenous peoples….Where is the place for attending to vibrant Indigenous lives and futures in these unmappings? ”
Shaheer Tarar, Jack Pine, 2019. Installation view (on left and right walls) from Scaffolds I can no longer see, InterAccess, Toronto, 06 November to 07 December 2019. Also in the frame: work by Guillaume Pascale and Shar Te. Image by Natalie Logan.
When I first encountered Shaheer Tarar’s installation, Jack Pine (2019), I was taken in by the title and its deliberate reference to Tom Thomson’s oil painting, The Jack Pine (1916-7). The Thomson version is arguably one of the best-known images in the history of Canadian art. Depicting a single pine tree at the forefront of a wilderness landscape at sunset, Thomson’s painting affirms white settler imaginings of uninhabited landscapes available for national expansion and colonial projects. Considered the founder/grandfather of modern Canadian art, Thomson became prominent through his depictions of the northern wilderness regions of Ontario and helped establish an aesthetic style that was made famous by the Group of Seven.
For Tarar, intentionally titling his piece with such a prominent reference lends a particular interpretative context to his digital work. However, Tarar's Jack Pine bears very little aesthetic resemblance to its namesake. Jack Pine was included as part of the group show “Scaffolds I can no longer see,” which was mounted at InterAccess in Toronto from November to December 2019. The intent of the show, as a whole, was to bring together a series of works by four artists that, in the words of curators Sophia Oppel and Philip Leonard Ocampo, could “[address] the unobserved algorithms that govern digital infrastructures and survey physical space,” and “[highlight] the exploitative underpinnings hidden within informational apparatuses” (2019, n.p.). To do this, Tarar’s Jack Pine intersperses projections of live feeds from unsecured surveillance cameras from around Canada, with a map of the Canadian territory that charts the specific geographical locales of the cameras.
Shaheer Tarar, The Jack Pine, 2019. Channel 2, showing live camera locations across Canada on 18 February 2021.
Shaheer Tarar, The Jack Pine, 2019. Channel 1, showing live camera locations across Canada on 18 February 2021.
While different in medium and aesthetics, Tarar’s artwork draws upon the well-known history of Thompson’s painting not only by using the same title but also by making explicit connections between territories of contemporary surveillance structures, representations of colonial expansion, and raising questions of for whom the land is marked and protected. Tarar himself articulated the vision for this piece as a way to think about “a new Canadian landscape” that critically forefronts a “specific colonial lens” (Tarar 2021). Tarar’s use of livestreamed footage of surveilled public spaces, showing how this footage remaps the Canadian terrain through its own lens, situates this artwork as a critical decolonial intervention into the types of representations that have become part of the dominant Canadian colonial canon.
An artwork like Tarar’s highlights the complex relationship of surveillance infrastructure with colonial mappings of the land. However, as critical Muslim Studies scholar Shaista Patel articulates in the quotation at the start of this piece, acknowledging (racialized diasporic and white) settler re-envisionings of the land cannot be the end goal of decolonizing work. Rather, these actions of “unmappings” are one part of the roadmap to reframing the normalized geographic, historical, and cultural expectations of Canadian settler nation-hood, particularly as they relate to supporting and bolstering Indigenous histories and futurities. Following Patel here, I bring Tarar’s work forward as an example of a larger project of “unmapping” the settler state as part–but not the end goal–of the decolonial project of complicating the relationship and role of surveillance in histories of colonial-capital extraction (Taffel 2021).
Much scholarship and popular culture representations of “surveillance” do not account enough for the colonial histories and geographies inherent to its inception, nor to the logic that underscores the technological and legal implications of its applications. “Surveillance,” as both a term and a concept, is deployed so often and in so many contexts that it becomes emptied of specificity and precision. To this end, I propose using the term “surveillance frontierism” to make present the histories of surveillance with ongoing colonial capitalism, which includes white supremacy, resource extraction, and technological innovation as salvation.
For critical Muslim Studies scholar Anouar Majid, the birth of surveillance as we generally understand it today can be traced to major world events of 1492: the Spanish conquering of Granada, which was the last Muslim stronghold in Europe; the Spanish Inquisition and the expulsion of Jews; and Christopher Columbus’s expedition and the violent takeover of the Americas (Majid 2009). All of these events are interconnected through time, but also through ideology that makes claims of power anchored in policing, surveilling, and containing certain people and populations. They are also connected in an underlying belief system tied to cultural and racial ‘purity’, and the racist belief of white Europeans as an inevitably dominant force.
For Majid, then, surveillance as a practice developed in conjunction with colonial imaginaries, whereby the policing, containment, removal, and subjugation of racialized people enabled territorial occupation and excavation of the land by white Europeans. That is, surveillance is intrinsic to the colonial process. Yet the idea of surveillance itself, particularly in contemporary discussions, is most often defined as high-tech, uber-modern technologies of the present moment, or as a disembodied, all-seeing, omnipresent form of looking, one that presumably transcends space and localities. In considering the colonial history of surveillance, I am trying to think of surveillance not just as the technologies and policies, but as a logic, an underlying and pervasive set of beliefs that justify and rationalize surveillance structures. And to be sure, I am following the work of notable scholars, particularly Black technology and surveillance studies scholars such as Ruha Benjamin and Simone Browne, who articulate racialized surveillance beliefs and structures in historical and contemporary life.
My goal, then, is to connect contemporary surveillance with the histories of the settlement of the land. I modify and expand the term “surveillance” to “surveillance frontierism” in order to forefront the colonial-capitalist histories of its genesis and ongoing historical applications, and to highlight the belief and logic of surveillance that underscore and rationalize its implementation. I use the term “frontierism” as this modifier purposefully, however not without issue or criticality. “Frontierism” is a historical term applied to white settlement, land and resource extraction, the violent displacement of Indigenous peoples, and the enslavement of Black people in North America. It is tied to heroic narratives of the settlement of the Americas by white Europeans and the imagining of Manifest Destiny and historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis in 1893. “Frontierism” refers not only to the accumulation of materials and resources, but also to the logic that justifies and drives this accumulation. It also asserts the importance of discovering and exploiting new terrains, pushing and redefining boundaries and borders. Surveillance—broadly defined as the will and capacity to monitor what people were free to move, settle, and live, and what people were not—was, and is, central to enacting this frontier logic.
Surveillance, then, in its historical and contemporary logic has temporal and geographic dimensions that need to be accounted for in discussions of the technologies that identify its use, the policies that govern it, and the representations that make it familiar. I am somewhat wary of proposing this term, cognizant of the problem in the territorial claim of an idea, what geographer Max Liboiron cautions as “firsting” in academia. However, my intention is less about staking a claim to this concept, and more about forefronting for other scholars, specifically settler scholars, the need to find clear and specific ways to articulate the historical and ongoing colonial-capitalist implications of surveillance as a logic, rather than purely as a technological or social practice.
An artwork like Tarar’s Jack Pine visualizes the complexities of contemporary surveillance. It also participates in Patel’s proposition of the process of “unmapping,” the installation operating as a representation of surveillance as a clear apparatus for territorial dominance and colonial extraction. Tarar’s work articulates the frontierist logic at the heart of contemporary surveillance structures, and elucidates how expansive projects of security and surveillance work in reciprocity with ongoing histories of colonial capitalism, empire-building, and white supremacy. As such, this artwork—and my own engagement with it—operates as part of the decolonial project to dismantle the naturalization of the settler surveillance imaginary, and in solidarity for a remapping of Indigenous histories, presence, and futurities.
Benjamin, R. 2019. Race After Technology. Polity.
Browne, S. 2015. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press.
Liboiron, M. (2021). Firsting in Research. Heliotrope. March 3. https://environmentalmedialab.com/heliotrope/firsting-in-research
Majid, A. 2021. We Are All Moors. University of Minnesota Press.
Oppel, S. and Ocampo, P. (2019). Scaffolds I can no longer see, curatorial essay. https://sophia-oppel-art.format.com/collaborations/scaffolds-i-can-no-longer-see
Patel, S. (2021). Talking complicity, breathing coloniality: Interrogating settler-centric pedagogy of teaching about white settler colonialism. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy. 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1080/15505170.2020.1871450
Taffel, S. (2021). Data and Oil: Metaphor, materiality, and metabolic rifts. New Media & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211017887
Tarar, S. (2021). Interview with author about art practice, 25 February, via Zoom.
Susan Cahill (she/her) is a white settler scholar who lives and works in Moh’kinsstis | Calgary on the traditional territories of the peoples of the Treaty 7 region. She is an independent filmmaker, curator, and Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Calgary.