Introduction: US Gun Culture and the Performance of Racial Sovereignty

Abstract

This introduction examines gun culture in the United States and argues that it is a product of the longstanding practices of settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, and misogyny that have shaped life in the United States. Invoking an anthropological definition of culture, it argues that gun violence is a central facet of US political and social life and that performances of gun use and ownership, particularly when enacted by white men, embody a kind of 'racial sovereignty,' or a violent limitation of the practical applicability of citizenship to those who promulgate whiteness, maleness, and violence as primary markers of full belonging in the civic community.

Keywords

• gun culture
• anti-blackness
• settler colonialism
• sovereignty
• performance