Allison Page | Rutgers University-Camden (original) (raw)
Books by Allison Page
University of Minnesota Press, 2022
From the classic television miniseries Roots to the edutainment video game Mission 2: Flight to F... more From the classic television miniseries Roots to the edutainment video game Mission 2: Flight to Freedom and the popular website slaveryfootprint.org, Media and the Affective Life of Slavery provides an in-depth look at the capitalist and cultural artifacts that teach the U.S. public about slavery. Page theorizes media not only as a system of representation but also as a technology of citizenship and subjectivity, wherein race is seen as a problem to be solved. Ultimately, she argues that visual culture works through emotion, a powerful lever for shaping and managing racialized subjectivity.
Papers by Allison Page
Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 2015
In this essay, we situate the murder of Trayvon Martin within the history of the relationship bet... more In this essay, we situate the murder of Trayvon Martin within the history of the relationship between evidence and anti-blackness, suggesting that evidence and facts are rendered irrelevant when it comes to racialized violence and terror. Through an examination of the circulated “media narrative” images of Martin and Zimmerman, we argue that the failure of evidence is bound up with a racialized optics rooted in U.S. chattel slavery that overdetermines blackness as a political ontology of criminality. One cannot prove blackness innocent because guilt is a foregone conclusion.
Anti-Feminisms in Media Culture, 2022
Feminist Media Studies, 2021
Over the past decade, U.S. police departments have incorporated media technologies that promise t... more Over the past decade, U.S. police departments have incorporated media technologies that promise to make policing more efficient and “race-neutral,” including body and dash cameras, drones, and predictive analytics. Such tools are positioned as unbiased and therefore reliable instruments that will hold both the state and citizens accountable during police interactions. This neutrality occurs along axes of race and affect, and presumes these technologies as anti-emotional third-party witnesses to exchanges between the state and public. In this article, we connect the expansion of high-tech policing to the racialized and gendered management of affect, underscoring how the supposed accountability offered by these technologies does not upend the disciplining of emotion. We examine the relationship between affective governance and media technologies through an analysis of Diamond Reynolds’ Facebook Live video of police killing her boyfriend Philando Castile, which we theorize alongside the dash camera video of Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old Black woman who was pulled over by a police officer and arrested, and who allegedly died by suicide in jail three days later. We argue that taken together, the videos demonstrate the ongoing racialized and gendered imperative that Black women regulate their emotional reactions to state violence both despite and because of the presence of recording devices.
Cultural Studies, 2021
This article analyses an emergent category of pre-pandemic YouTube video devoted to documenting a... more This article analyses an emergent category of pre-pandemic YouTube video
devoted to documenting and assessing the experience of business/first class
air travel. We understand these videos as texts enmeshed in a broader
culture of diminished and fraught customer service, inextricable from the
complex status economy that has emerged under neoliberal capitalism in
general and with particular intensity in commercial aviation. In contrast to
the increasingly combative micro social relations of the coach cabin, the
videos portray the lavishness, courtesy, and attentiveness associated with a
luxury experience – in particular, the conspicuous provision of service they
depict is implicitly juxtaposed with its withdrawal elsewhere. Among other
things, they offer us a means of capturing rapidly shifting and sometimes
amorphous norms of consumer selfhood and testify to the affordances of
digital media to craft new vernacular cultures of consumerism. The videos
aestheticize luxury in an era of intensified class stratification and extreme
inequality, and simultaneously exemplify the rise of self-branding and
influencer culture as tools on offer to mitigate the devastations of
neoliberalism. The first-class cabin as a space of intense privilege with
implications for broader class and labour stratification has been largely
unexamined by scholars. Here, we are especially attentive to how the
triangulation between three populations – the first-class flier, the airline
worker, and the coach passenger – indexes a number of characteristics of
late-stage capitalism, including the growth of self-service alongside flexible
and precarious labour.
America Unfiltered, 2020
Blog post for America Unfiltered
Communication, Culture and Critique, 2019
Participants in the #MeToo movement on Twitter expressed emotions like rage, pain, and solidarity... more Participants in the #MeToo movement on Twitter expressed emotions like rage, pain, and solidarity in their personal accounts of sexual violence. This article explores the digital circulation of these affects and considers how the outpouring of tweets about sexual harassment and abuse contribute to a feminist politics centered on collective healing. The particular emotions expressed in the #MeToo Twitter archive subvert the logics of quan-tification and visibility that undergird popular feminism and the attention economy, and produce an affective excess that works toward movement founder Tarana Burke's original project of "mass healing." At a moment wherein popular feminism emphasizes individual empowerment and consumption, and carceral feminism relies on criminalization and incarceration, the #MeToo movement's focus on shared emotions represents the potential for a feminist politics rooted in collective support and restorative justice.
International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2019
In 2016, the A&E cable network partnered with the Clark County Jail in Jeffersonville, Indiana, t... more In 2016, the A&E cable network partnered with the Clark County Jail in Jeffersonville, Indiana, to incarcerate seven volunteers as undercover prisoners for two months. This article takes the reality television franchise 60 Days In as a case study for analyzing the convergence of prison and television, and the rise of what we call the prison-televisual complex in the United States, which denotes the imbrication of the prison system with the television industry, not simply television as an ideological apparatus. 60 Days In represents an entanglement between punishment and the culture industries, whereby carceral logics flow into the business and cultural practices of entertainment, and the demands of the attention economy-ratings, content, profitability, sharing-come to bear on the prison as a disciplinary institution. The prison-televisual complex, we argue, participates in and facilitates carceral governing practices, including the TV industry's involvement in the classification, criminalization, and warehousing of dispossessed populations.
International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2019
In 2016, the A&E cable network partnered with the Clark County Jail in Jeffersonville, Indiana, t... more In 2016, the A&E cable network partnered with the Clark County Jail in Jeffersonville, Indiana, to incarcerate seven volunteers as undercover prisoners for two months. This article takes the reality television franchise 60 Days In as a case study for analyzing the convergence of prison and television, and the rise of what we call the prison-televisual complex in the United States, which denotes the imbrication of the prison system with the television industry, not simply television as an ideological apparatus. 60 Days In represents an entanglement between punishment and the culture industries, whereby carceral logics flow into the business and cultural practices of entertainment, and the demands of the attention economy-ratings, content, profitability, sharing-come to bear on the prison as a disciplinary institution. The prison-televisual complex, we argue, participates in and facilitates carceral governing practices, including the TV industry's involvement in the classification, criminalization, and warehousing of dispossessed populations.
Journal of Consumer Culture
In this article, I examine slaveryfootprint.org to consider the complexities of so-called ethical... more In this article, I examine slaveryfootprint.org to consider the complexities of so-called ethical consumption in a transnational, neoliberal context reliant on new media. I argue that the characterization of slavery on slaveryfootprint.org (and the process of de-fetishizing this labor) attempts to shore up a distinction between “free” and forced labor, but unwittingly illuminates the ambiguity of this divide. At the same time, the website uses U.S. chattel slavery to add moral heft and urgency to address what it calls modern-day slavery. In so doing, slaveryfootprint.org locates slavery elsewhere both temporally and spatially, and therefore erases the afterlife of slavery and the salience of antiblackness to contemporary everyday life.
Television and New Media , Jul 2015
The surge of U.S. reality television shows focused on “making over” contestants has paralleled th... more The surge of U.S. reality television shows focused on “making over” contestants has paralleled the decline of the welfare state, the eradication of Affirmative Action, and the rise of the prison-industrial complex. This article examines MTV’s "From G’s to Gents" to consider questions of neoliberal governmentality and race. By analyzing the show's relationship to the prison system, enterprise culture, and heteronormativity, I argue that the show functions as a technology that governs black freedom under neoliberalism.
Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies, special issue on Trayvon Martin
In this essay, we situate the murder of Trayvon Martin within the history of the relationship bet... more In this essay, we situate the murder of Trayvon Martin within the history of the relationship between evidence and antiblackness, suggesting that evidence and facts are rendered irrelevant when it comes to racialized violence and terror. Through an examination of the circulated "media narrative" images of Martin and Zimmerman, we argue that the failure of evidence is bound up with a racialized optics rooted in U.S. chattel slavery that overdetermines blackness as a political ontology of criminality. One cannot prove blackness innocent because guilt is a foregone conclusion.
University of Minnesota Press, 2022
From the classic television miniseries Roots to the edutainment video game Mission 2: Flight to F... more From the classic television miniseries Roots to the edutainment video game Mission 2: Flight to Freedom and the popular website slaveryfootprint.org, Media and the Affective Life of Slavery provides an in-depth look at the capitalist and cultural artifacts that teach the U.S. public about slavery. Page theorizes media not only as a system of representation but also as a technology of citizenship and subjectivity, wherein race is seen as a problem to be solved. Ultimately, she argues that visual culture works through emotion, a powerful lever for shaping and managing racialized subjectivity.
Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 2015
In this essay, we situate the murder of Trayvon Martin within the history of the relationship bet... more In this essay, we situate the murder of Trayvon Martin within the history of the relationship between evidence and anti-blackness, suggesting that evidence and facts are rendered irrelevant when it comes to racialized violence and terror. Through an examination of the circulated “media narrative” images of Martin and Zimmerman, we argue that the failure of evidence is bound up with a racialized optics rooted in U.S. chattel slavery that overdetermines blackness as a political ontology of criminality. One cannot prove blackness innocent because guilt is a foregone conclusion.
Anti-Feminisms in Media Culture, 2022
Feminist Media Studies, 2021
Over the past decade, U.S. police departments have incorporated media technologies that promise t... more Over the past decade, U.S. police departments have incorporated media technologies that promise to make policing more efficient and “race-neutral,” including body and dash cameras, drones, and predictive analytics. Such tools are positioned as unbiased and therefore reliable instruments that will hold both the state and citizens accountable during police interactions. This neutrality occurs along axes of race and affect, and presumes these technologies as anti-emotional third-party witnesses to exchanges between the state and public. In this article, we connect the expansion of high-tech policing to the racialized and gendered management of affect, underscoring how the supposed accountability offered by these technologies does not upend the disciplining of emotion. We examine the relationship between affective governance and media technologies through an analysis of Diamond Reynolds’ Facebook Live video of police killing her boyfriend Philando Castile, which we theorize alongside the dash camera video of Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old Black woman who was pulled over by a police officer and arrested, and who allegedly died by suicide in jail three days later. We argue that taken together, the videos demonstrate the ongoing racialized and gendered imperative that Black women regulate their emotional reactions to state violence both despite and because of the presence of recording devices.
Cultural Studies, 2021
This article analyses an emergent category of pre-pandemic YouTube video devoted to documenting a... more This article analyses an emergent category of pre-pandemic YouTube video
devoted to documenting and assessing the experience of business/first class
air travel. We understand these videos as texts enmeshed in a broader
culture of diminished and fraught customer service, inextricable from the
complex status economy that has emerged under neoliberal capitalism in
general and with particular intensity in commercial aviation. In contrast to
the increasingly combative micro social relations of the coach cabin, the
videos portray the lavishness, courtesy, and attentiveness associated with a
luxury experience – in particular, the conspicuous provision of service they
depict is implicitly juxtaposed with its withdrawal elsewhere. Among other
things, they offer us a means of capturing rapidly shifting and sometimes
amorphous norms of consumer selfhood and testify to the affordances of
digital media to craft new vernacular cultures of consumerism. The videos
aestheticize luxury in an era of intensified class stratification and extreme
inequality, and simultaneously exemplify the rise of self-branding and
influencer culture as tools on offer to mitigate the devastations of
neoliberalism. The first-class cabin as a space of intense privilege with
implications for broader class and labour stratification has been largely
unexamined by scholars. Here, we are especially attentive to how the
triangulation between three populations – the first-class flier, the airline
worker, and the coach passenger – indexes a number of characteristics of
late-stage capitalism, including the growth of self-service alongside flexible
and precarious labour.
America Unfiltered, 2020
Blog post for America Unfiltered
Communication, Culture and Critique, 2019
Participants in the #MeToo movement on Twitter expressed emotions like rage, pain, and solidarity... more Participants in the #MeToo movement on Twitter expressed emotions like rage, pain, and solidarity in their personal accounts of sexual violence. This article explores the digital circulation of these affects and considers how the outpouring of tweets about sexual harassment and abuse contribute to a feminist politics centered on collective healing. The particular emotions expressed in the #MeToo Twitter archive subvert the logics of quan-tification and visibility that undergird popular feminism and the attention economy, and produce an affective excess that works toward movement founder Tarana Burke's original project of "mass healing." At a moment wherein popular feminism emphasizes individual empowerment and consumption, and carceral feminism relies on criminalization and incarceration, the #MeToo movement's focus on shared emotions represents the potential for a feminist politics rooted in collective support and restorative justice.
International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2019
In 2016, the A&E cable network partnered with the Clark County Jail in Jeffersonville, Indiana, t... more In 2016, the A&E cable network partnered with the Clark County Jail in Jeffersonville, Indiana, to incarcerate seven volunteers as undercover prisoners for two months. This article takes the reality television franchise 60 Days In as a case study for analyzing the convergence of prison and television, and the rise of what we call the prison-televisual complex in the United States, which denotes the imbrication of the prison system with the television industry, not simply television as an ideological apparatus. 60 Days In represents an entanglement between punishment and the culture industries, whereby carceral logics flow into the business and cultural practices of entertainment, and the demands of the attention economy-ratings, content, profitability, sharing-come to bear on the prison as a disciplinary institution. The prison-televisual complex, we argue, participates in and facilitates carceral governing practices, including the TV industry's involvement in the classification, criminalization, and warehousing of dispossessed populations.
International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2019
In 2016, the A&E cable network partnered with the Clark County Jail in Jeffersonville, Indiana, t... more In 2016, the A&E cable network partnered with the Clark County Jail in Jeffersonville, Indiana, to incarcerate seven volunteers as undercover prisoners for two months. This article takes the reality television franchise 60 Days In as a case study for analyzing the convergence of prison and television, and the rise of what we call the prison-televisual complex in the United States, which denotes the imbrication of the prison system with the television industry, not simply television as an ideological apparatus. 60 Days In represents an entanglement between punishment and the culture industries, whereby carceral logics flow into the business and cultural practices of entertainment, and the demands of the attention economy-ratings, content, profitability, sharing-come to bear on the prison as a disciplinary institution. The prison-televisual complex, we argue, participates in and facilitates carceral governing practices, including the TV industry's involvement in the classification, criminalization, and warehousing of dispossessed populations.
Journal of Consumer Culture
In this article, I examine slaveryfootprint.org to consider the complexities of so-called ethical... more In this article, I examine slaveryfootprint.org to consider the complexities of so-called ethical consumption in a transnational, neoliberal context reliant on new media. I argue that the characterization of slavery on slaveryfootprint.org (and the process of de-fetishizing this labor) attempts to shore up a distinction between “free” and forced labor, but unwittingly illuminates the ambiguity of this divide. At the same time, the website uses U.S. chattel slavery to add moral heft and urgency to address what it calls modern-day slavery. In so doing, slaveryfootprint.org locates slavery elsewhere both temporally and spatially, and therefore erases the afterlife of slavery and the salience of antiblackness to contemporary everyday life.
Television and New Media , Jul 2015
The surge of U.S. reality television shows focused on “making over” contestants has paralleled th... more The surge of U.S. reality television shows focused on “making over” contestants has paralleled the decline of the welfare state, the eradication of Affirmative Action, and the rise of the prison-industrial complex. This article examines MTV’s "From G’s to Gents" to consider questions of neoliberal governmentality and race. By analyzing the show's relationship to the prison system, enterprise culture, and heteronormativity, I argue that the show functions as a technology that governs black freedom under neoliberalism.
Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies, special issue on Trayvon Martin
In this essay, we situate the murder of Trayvon Martin within the history of the relationship bet... more In this essay, we situate the murder of Trayvon Martin within the history of the relationship between evidence and antiblackness, suggesting that evidence and facts are rendered irrelevant when it comes to racialized violence and terror. Through an examination of the circulated "media narrative" images of Martin and Zimmerman, we argue that the failure of evidence is bound up with a racialized optics rooted in U.S. chattel slavery that overdetermines blackness as a political ontology of criminality. One cannot prove blackness innocent because guilt is a foregone conclusion.