W(h)ither the State? State Power through Absence in American Crime

• In Event: Genre, Subcultures, and Politics

Abstract

While the conference theme, Democracy: Retrenchment, Renovation, and Reimagination, most obviously points our attention in the direction of the state, this paper considers important questions of justice in the absence of the visible state through an analysis of American Crime, Season 3 (ABC 2017). An anthology series from John Ridley, American Crime is a bleak, sometimes horrifying account of how limited the choices of most individuals are when confronted by a world of unequal and sedimented power whether emanating from the state, religion, or the lines of race, nationality, class, and gender. The third season explores the intersections of labor, capital, ownership, and exploitation in the community of Alamance County, North Carolina through a series of interwoven narratives featuring the contemporary slavery and human trafficking underlying contemporary capitalism in the form of documented and undocumented migrant and domestic labor; violence, sexual and physical, in tomato fields, domestic labor, and sex work; and the limited options available to those seeking redress for themselves or those affected.

This paper is a piece of a book manuscript, (tentatively) titled Gender, the State, and Power: From Visibility to Structural Analysis, in which we trace how some recent television shows that depict violence against women provide imaginative space – space that does not yet exist in reality – to imagine a more small-d democratic vision of the state’s power. What do we want the state to do? What don’t we want the state to do? We are interested in considering how these shows portray relationships between gender, power, and the state in ways that may foster a politically meaningful imaginative response – in particular, one that that moves from a frame of personal or individual responsibility to overcome patriarchy, racism, and classism to one that sees patriarchal, racist, and classist structures and institutions as the site of collective responsibility. This responsibility, then, becomes a political question rather than a personal one.

With regard to this particular manuscript, we start with American Crime’s portrayal of the complexity of modern economic structures and the fragility of those who are caught up in them. What becomes apparent in this account is how vulnerable individuals are in a society driven largely by economic structures that foreground profit for some at the expense of the desperate labor of many, in which a state that preserves fair labor conditions and upholds reasonable immigration policies is largely absent. State agents are largely absent from the depicted drama, and yet the state and its power saturate practically every scene. This raises important questions, such as what might we learn from the absence of a just state in late-stage capitalism? How do economic and state power intersect? What kinds of power are deployed, and by whom, in the shadow of the state? Whose well-being does that power enable or prevent? We suggest that without a regulatory and active state that works to counter the inequalities of capitalism, patriarchy, nationalism, and racism, individuals - whether citizens or not - are vulnerable to multiple and intersecting forms of oppression with no site of refuge. In a world where the state exists primarily to secure property rights, narrowly-defined, individuals who are without property are exposed to depredations that recall Hobbes’ state of nature: a war of all against all.

Authors

• Heather N. Pool, Denison University

• Allison Rank, SUNY, Oswego State