Theorizing cumulative dehumanization: An embodied praxis of "becoming" and resisting state‐sanctioned violence. Issue 1 (16th December 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Bustamante, Priscilla; Jashnani, Gaurav; Stoudt, Brett G.
• Is Part Of: Social and personality psychology compass. Volume 13:Issue 1(2019)
• Page Start: n/a
• Page End: n/a
• Publication Date: 2018-12-16
• Subjects: Social psychology -- Periodicals; Personality -- Periodicals; 302
• DOI: 10.1111/spc3.12429
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1751-9004

Abstract

Abstract: This paper introduces a new conceptual framework referred to as "cumulative dehumanization" to better understand the ways in which dehumanization penetrates individual and collective bodies and minds, cutting across policy and ideology and accumulating materially and affectively over time and space. Cumulative dehumanization illuminates a web of vertical and horizontal, synthetic, and dynamic processes that result in an ongoing racialized, state‐sanctioned dehumanization that is fundamentally cumulative—both temporally and spatially—with a profusion of consequences attached. Within the landscape of aggressive surveillance and policing, we illuminate how cumulative dehumanization can be conceptualized as (i) an active condition of becoming, experienced as an accumulation of dehumanizing moments, structurally imposed on racialized communities under siege; (ii) a wearing down of the racialized and affective body, creating circuits of dispossession for entire communities; (iii) a product and (re)producer of the material and ideological modes undergirding racial capitalism; and (iv) a force met with individual and collective resistance. Linking literature on racial capitalism and affect, to the embodied social psychological phenomenon of dehumanization, cumulative dehumanization serves as a useful conceptual tool to examine the historical legacy of, processes embedded within, and entirety of collective consequences including resistance as inextricably linked. In doing so, we reveal the indivisibility of cognitive, embodied, psychological, social, material, ideological, and political circuits.