Overview

In The Cybernetic Border, Ivan Chaar Lopez argues that the settler US nation requires the production and targeting of a racialized enemy that threatens the empire. The cybernetic border is organized through practices of data capture, storage, processing, circulation, and communication that police bodies and constitute the nation as a bounded, territorial space. Chaar Lopez historicizes the US government's use of border enforcement technologies on Mexicans, Arabs, and Muslims from the mid-twentieth century to the present, showing how data systems are presented as solutions to unauthorized border crossing. Contrary to enduring fantasies of the purported neutrality of drones, smart walls, artificial intelligence, and biometric technologies, the cybernetic border represents the consolidation of calculation and automation in the exercise of racialized violence. Chaar Lopez draws on corporate, military, and government records, promotional documents and films, technical reports, news reporting, surveillance footage, and activist and artist practices. These materials reveal how logics of enmity are embedded into information infrastructures that shape border control and modern sovereignty.

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9781478030034

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Reviews

“The Cybernetic Border is an in-depth and long overdue interrogation of the complicated history and brutal impacts of America’s evolving technological war against migrants. Iván Chaar López’s book is a must-read for scholars of migration, science and technology studies, and American history that examines the increasingly blurring line between science fiction and reality along the US/Mexico border while giving us a frightening look into the future of global boundary enforcement.” -- Jason De León, author of * Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling *

“The Cybernetic Border is an in-depth and long overdue interrogation of the complicated history and brutal impacts of America’s evolving technological war against migrants. Iván Chaar López’s book is a must-read for scholars of migration, science and technology studies, and American history that examines the increasingly blurring line between science fiction and reality along the US/Mexico border while giving us a frightening look into the future of global boundary enforcement.” -- Jason De León, author of * Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling * “In this important book, Iván Chaar López reveals how surveillance drones, data infrastructures, and other technologies have been employed to transform the US/Mexico Border into a cybernetic weapon against racialized intruders. It is a must-read for anyone interested in how technology and data networks are being developed as systems of surveillance and control, especially against racialized communities. Readers will also be interested in the ways in which Chaar López illuminates the courageous efforts of activists and artists who deploy aesthetic dissent to challenge the technopolitical regime governing the southern border.” -- Juan De Lara, author of * Inland Shift: Race, Space, and Capital in Southern California *

Author Information

Iván Chaar López is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Principal Investigator of the Border Tech Lab at the University of Texas at Austin and coauthor of Technoprecarious.

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