Rights Information

World rights available.

After the assassinations of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in the USA, the need for a durable change in
the mentality of the police hat become obvious – worldwide. For Europe, too, the question arises: How to
explain the extent of police violence and police discrimination against people of color? Where to start the
urgently needed changes for a new police culture?
In her essay, Georgiana Banita shows: The powerful image of the “stranger” has always been a target and
even the ideological foundation of Western police apparatus. The narrative of the suspicious, potentially
dangerous “stranger” was at he origin and still is the backdrop of a general police suspicion against people
with a migration background, black people and people of color.
In the USA, for example, the police introduced lethal firearms only after the abolition of slavery in order to
discipline freed slaves, and Europe also militarized its police force as a result of migration from rural and colonial
areas to the industrial centers. Banita‘s analysis on the use of firearms, racial profiling, computer searches
and AI-supported crime prognoses, on deportation, border protection and infection protection
shows: The logic and practices of police control architectures cannot be imagined without the idea of a necessary
defense from the (supposed) foreigner.
“Phantombilder” unfolds a cultural history of police suspicion and creates the basis for a constructive debate
that we urgently need.

Author Biography

Dr. Georgiana Banita is a Research Associate at the Trimberg Research Academy,
University of Bamberg. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor in
Literature and Media at the University of Bamberg and a Postdoctoral Fellow at
the United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney. In 2009 she obtained a
PhD in American Studies, with a thesis on US American and British literature
(minors: Comparative Literature and Media Studies) at the University of Konstanz,
and spent a year as a Doctoral Fellow at the English Department of Yale
University. Her studies began at the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Iași,
Romania, where she read English and German Philology for two years before
moving to Konstanz as an exchange student. Banita‘s interests currently cluster
around two themes: (1) the intersections of race, immigration and law enforcement in the United States
and Europe, with a focus on racial profiling, police brutality, and biased pre-crime algorithms; (2) Energy
Humanities, especially the transition from fossil fuels to renewables.