How feelings about race are normalized by media culture

Amid fervent conversations about antiracism and police violence, Media and the Affective Life of Slavery delivers vital new ideas, analyzing how media culture instructs viewers to act and feel in accordance with new racial norms created for an era supposedly defined by an end to legal racism. Author Allison Page examines U.S. media from the 1960s to today and argues that visual culture works through emotion, a powerful lever for shaping and managing racialized subjectivity. On this episode, Page joins collaborator and friend Brittany Farr in conversation.

Allison Page is assistant professor of media studies with a joint appointment in the Institute for the Humanities and the Department of Communication and Theatre Arts at Old Dominion University. Page is the author of Media and the Affective Live of Slavery.

Brittany Farr is an assistant professor of law at New York University School of Law. Farr’s areas of research include civil rights, contract law, legal history, property, and race.

REFERENCES:

-Saidiya Hartman

-Represent and Destroy (Jodi Melamed)

-Slavery Footprint (website; slaveryfootprint.org)

-Ask a Slave (Azie Mira Dungey, YouTube web series; askaslave.com)

-A Subtlety (Kara Walker, public project)

-Lorraine Hansberry, playwright

-Roots (television miniseries)

-Dark Matters (Simone Browne)

-Alex Haley, writer

-Stephanie Smallwood

-Christina Sharpe

-On Agency (Walter Johnson)

-Black Feminism Reimagined (Jennifer Nash)