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THESES

AND DISSERTATIONS

A repository for master’s theses and doctoral dissertations by BCSA and NBGN members. NBGN members can enter information about their thesis and upload pdfs, website administrators will approve final postings.

It’s Written on the Body: Malleus Africanus, crime and racial dialectic in Western ontology

Abstract 326

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.

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DOCUMENT INFORMATION

Author

Kitossa, Tamari

Title

It’s Written on the Body: Malleus Africanus, crime and racial dialectic in Western ontology

Subjects

Anti-Black Racism, Black Men, Canadian History, Criminality

Document Type

PhD dissertation

Source

University of Toronto

Language

English

Publication Date

2005