ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book deals with an account of the June 2015 shooting by white supremacist Dylann Roof, tracing how media representations direct explanation for his violence toward his unreasonable state of mind and away from the neocolonial security state. It explores how nets of suspect descriptions, early warning signs, and screening questionnaires are cast to capture potential prodromes. The book traces the coils through a colonizing desire-to-know, proposing that when the desire collides with a white supremacy capacitated by ignorance, it entangles with a fear-of-regressing to make paranoia. It concludes by proposing magical ideationas a methodology of the oppressed that – demanding both servitude to decolonizing movements and weaponless psychologies – may help revive the psykhe of our studies and our response-ability within times of intensifying white supremacy, of breathlessness.
