Telegraphic Surveillance, Psychic Dislocation, and the Data of Black Biography

Abstract: Scholars have turned their attention to digital technologies' role in surveilling Blackness, but the ideas of privacy, data, and exploitation that inform this emerging research cannot be understood apart from their interlocked histories. This article examines encounters with the telegraph in mid-nineteenth century Black biography, focusing on the technology's role as a surveillance network that reshaped freedom-seekers' concept of American location. This historical precedent to location tracking inflicted a severe form of psychic dislocation that calls into question conventional understandings of the data of slavery. The existential disorientation recorded in this genre challenges inherited notions of history, while also guiding our navigation of contemporary technoculture and the social disparities it sustains.