Media and the Affective Life of Slavery
Allison Page
University of Minnesota Press
Page examines U.S. media from the 1960s to today, 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. Page provides an in-depth look at the capitalist and cultural artifacts that teach the U.S. public about slavery, theorizing 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.