Among the various theoretical pieces regarding policing, such as Nicolazzo’s “Police Archives Before the Police”, Davis’s concept of the “prison industrial complex”, Burden-Stelly’s “Modern U.S. Racial Capitalism”, and many more, I personally find that Foucault’s concept of panopticism and Miller’s “The Novel and The Police” paint a relatively clear picture of how the depiction of the police in novels, under the power-discipline complex portrayed by panopticism, forces novels into the struggles of policing concepts. I want to use this opportunity to explore the underlying concepts in Hopkinson’s novel “Brown Girl in the Ring”. Although the novel does not contain any intentions that may hint a heated discussion on the police, the way Hopkinson describes authority and quasi-police in later chapters overlaps with Miller’s argument in his piece and further strengthens the existence and efficacy of panopticism.
“The Novel and the Police” and “Panopticism”
How the police are described in novels is extensively analyzed by Miller in “The Novel and the Police”. In the beginning of the essay, Miller argues that “the marginality is dramatized as a gradual process of marginalization, in which police work becomes less and less relevant to what the novel is ‘really’ about” (2, 3). Nevertheless, Miller also states that “In the economy of the ‘mainstream’ novel, a more obviously circumscribed police apparatus functions somewhat analogously to define the field that exceeds its range” (3). In other words, the police in novels are sometimes portrayed as an entity that gets marginalized under the self-regulating sphere of middle-class domesticity. In general, the marginalization, humiliation, and overextension are main stereotypes of descriptions of police in novels (Miller 2, 3). On his view on Dicken’s novel, Miller points out that “. . . as Dickens stresses the coherence and systematic nature of delinquency, he makes it an enclosed world from which it is all but impossible to escape” (5). This resonates with panopticism, which Foucault describes it as “the general principle of a new ‘political anatomy’ whose object and end are not the relations of sovereignty but the relations of discipline” (228). Because characters, though “may move from more to less advantageous positions in the system, . . . they never depart from it altogether” (Miller 5). As characters try to translate themselves into other positions, they, in fact, have succumbed to “a method that maintains the stability in a society” (Wu 2), which, in turn, theoretically and optimistically speaking, “‘arranges power’ with the main intent being the aim ‘to strengthen the social forces – to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the public morality’ and garner overall control over society (Foucault 207, 208)” (Sandhu 2). Putting societal betterment aside, panopticism simply arranges power to have society working as stably as possible. Miller also provides his own stance on Foucault’s panopticism, claiming that “I have been implying, of course, that discipline provides the novel with its essential ‘content’” (18), whereby the correlation between panopticism and discipline can be interpreted as “[a program] at the level of an elementary and easily transferable mechanism, the basic functioning of a society penetrated through and through with disciplinary mechanisms” (Foucault 228). Those connections established above clarify panopticism as a disciplinary mechanism to help novels establish their standpoint on authority and power, and more specifically, the police, with the standpoint being how discipline is, when not being treated with discretion, a conspicuous practice (Miller 19). Miller further develops the argument by stating that “if such novels typically tell the story of how their heroes come to be destroyed by the forces of social regulation and standardization, they inevitably tell it with regret” (19). Because panopticism, a discipline-mechanism portrayed by Foucault, can also be further interpreted as a means of providing stability via discipline, the police, and even authority (from a broader standpoint), utilize panopticism in order to provide stability in societies, which will be reflected in the Hopkinson novel. And since policing and authorities, according to Miller, are already described as a form of overextension tied with, according to Foucault, disciplinary backgrounds in novels, the police are, panoptically speaking, fixed to this image of stabilization via discipline.
Brown Girl in the Ring
In the novel “Brown Girl in the Ring” by Hopkinson, there are several instances where authorities are mentioned, which connects almost perfectly with the analysis in the previous paragraph. When the protagonist was describing her situation in Toronto after the financial collapse that led to a total breakdown of civilization, she came across another narrative (that from the newspaper) that explains the events and aftermath happened during the collapse, with one of them reading “Cave-in Protest Sparks Riot: Thousands Riot: Thousands Injured, Dead . . . . Riot Cops Lay Down Arms, Army Called in: Toronto is ‘War Zone,’ Says Head of Police Union” (Hopkinson 11). This narrative depicts a scenario from the authority’s perspective regarding police and army response to riots due to a massive financial collapse in fictional Toronto. This is a situation where the police depicted in the novel where the police are acting within their power – maintain stability through force in the face of a riot. However, as the story continues, it writes that “Army Occupation of Toronto Ends: Now What?” (Hopkinson 12). Interestingly, after this, we immediately encounter a post-apocalyptic Toronto, with a lack of official police force – run-down, filled with danger, and operated by a criminal gang led by the antagonist, Rudy. This coincides with the argument of police marginalization Miller made. The argument is further strengthened because after this brief mention of police authorities in the novel, the entity of the police never shows up again. Continuing the analysis, the plot of the novel is basically the protagonist, Ti-Jeanne, trying to end Rudy’s reign. This implicitly establishes Rudy and his gang as an authority figure, similar to that of the police. Rudy’s iron fist on his subjects and victims, evident from “[one of his subjects] hadn’t been able to shield his ears from the sounds of a knife ripping through skin or his nose from the smells of blood and human waste” (Hopkinson 135), a scene describing the skinning and decapitation of a human body with the human herself being alive during the process, reflects the overextension of authority figures described in novels by Miller. Rudy has the power to perform disgusting and horrifying rituals without the chains of morality, allowing him to further expand his repertoire of torture and actions he may take as the tyrant of Toronto. Such overextension clearly reflects the undermining of regulations against authorities, an extreme version of the exercise of discipline, echoing Foucault’s argument of “the discipline-blockade [as opposed to the discipline-mechanism discussed before], the enclosed institution, established on the edges of society, turned inwards towards negative functions: arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending time” (228). As the novel introduces its readers to the iconic quasi-police representation near the ending, interpretations from the representation yield interesting results. “Two of the Vultures knelt at Mami’s side, began checking the machine’s connections” (Hopkinson 152) introduces the entity called Vultures, a quasi-police force under Rudy. This scene describes how the Vultures interact with their subject, achieve their goal, and pay little attention to other matters. For instance, their interaction with Ti-Jeanne after securing the assassinated subject – Ti-Jeanne’s grandmother – onto the ambulance “The words came faster, like a litany: ‘[generic thank you for your donation phrase]’” (Hopkinson 153) is fairly ignorant, impatient, and blatantly rude. The Vultures only care about their mission at hand, ruthlessly operating without a sense of morality, a rather appropriate result under Rudy’s rule. This is also a marginalization and, to some extent, a humiliation of the police, marginalizing the morality of the police and humiliating the dehumanizing interactions by the police, a reflection from Miller’s argument. In conclusion, the three examples of police representation reveal the policing concepts behind seemingly innocent novels, to which I will expand my analysis on panopticism in the next paragraph.
Conclusion
I have been an avid supporter for the argument that panopticism can be interpreted in a broader societal way. It can be interpreted further than a mere discipline-mechanism that is based on the division of power. Rather, it can be a form of providing stabilization through discipline. And by stabilization, I refer to the fixation of perspectives. This fixation stems from ultimately how panopticism is a discipline-mechanism but having unintentional consequences such as the stabilization mentioned. By discovering policing undertones in “Brown Girls in the Ring”, which does not explicitly discuss the police itself, it has become apparent how this fixation of perspective, expanded and argued by Miller, presents itself in this novel. The marginalization, humiliation, and overextension of the police is fixated into our perspectives such that descriptions of such in novels have become a norm, regardless of the relatability of the perspective, unveiling the omniscient entity of panopticism within the novel.
Works Cited
Foucault, Michel. “III: DISCIPLINE 3. Panopticism.” Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. 195-228. Print.
Hopkinson, Nalo. Brown Girl in the Ring. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2012. Print. 1 December 2021.
Miller, D. A. “The Novel and the Police.” Miller, D. A. n.d. 32. Print.
Sandhu, Bhalpriya. Foucault Critical Synopsis. Critical Synopsis. Berkeley, 2021.
Wu, Yun-Fan. “Critical Synopsis on Panopticons.” (2021): 2. Print.
Yun-Fan Wu 