The 1820s and 1830s have received less attention than the 1840s and 1850s in histories of US abolition. Attending to African American antislavery activism of the 1820s and 1830s reveals that these were transformative decades, particularly regarding the issues of colonization, immediate abolition, and kidnapping. These specific political concerns of an often-overshadowed constituency, African Americans themselves, shaped the literary conventions of slave narratives published in these earlier two decades. Fugitive slave narratives of the 1820s and 1830s feature an active practice of vigilant watchfulness that anticipates and counters the threat of surveillance through sousveillance (watching from below). Sousveillance is thus a specific narrative manifestation of the vigilance urged by black political activists. Later slave narratives, shaped by the priorities of white-dominated institutional abolition, downplay the agency of African American sousveillants in favor of a more passive story of victimization.

Beyoncé’s and The Chicks’ performance at the 2016 Country Music Awards Show sparked unprecedented backlash on digital media spaces. For some viewers, the performance challenged the perceived boundaries of country music as fundamentally wrapped up in white identity. Consequently, white fans’ digital dialogue surrounding the performance attempted to maintain country music’s whiteness through surveillant rhetorical tactics. In this chapter, Hutten develops a theory of genre surveillance to describe how the boundaries of country music are policed not only by significant country music institutions but by a faction of country music fans. Hutten situates Beyoncé’s and The Chicks’ performance, and the digital reactions to it, within the history and politics of country music’s sonic color line. Additionally, Hutten mobilizes Browne’s (2015) theory of dark sousveillance to demonstrate how the performance functions as an act of musical resistance.