November 3, 2022 • 51 mins
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)
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Allison Page (00:05):
All these things that appear quote unquote new,
of course, have these muchlonger histories and aren't new.
Brittany Farr (00:11):
Now it seems like people are talking about white
supremacy in a way that theyweren't five, ten years ago. Hi,
Allison. Hi, Britney. So today,we are going to talk about your
book, Media and the AFFECTIVELife of Slavery, which I'm very
excited about because I've kindof seen it from its earliest
(00:33):
days to now it's in print. Andpart of that is because we have
had such a long intellectualfriendship.
And so I thought we could startby introducing ourselves and
then kind of talk about ourfriendship meet cute, before I
make you give the elevator pitchof the book. So why don't you
tell our listeners or listener abit about yourself?
Allison Page (01:00):
Hi. I'm Allison Page. I am an assistant
professor of media studies atOld Dominion University, both in
the Institute for the Humanitiesand the Department of
Communication and Theater Arts.My work is primarily on race and
contemporary media culture. Ialso do feminist media and
cultural studies, and I, have akind of side interest in labor
(01:25):
in in digital media.
Brittany Farr (01:27):
I'm Britney Farr. I am very recently an assistant
professor of law at NYU LawSchool. So I have a law degree,
but like Allison, have a PhD incommunication, but from USC. I
write about racial violence andthe ways that it intersects and
interacts with doctrines ofcontract law, property law, and
(01:47):
tort law. Happy to talk aboutwhat a tort is if anyone wants
to know.
But in my PhD days, was writingmore about the Moynihan Report
and representations of blackwomen. And so Allison and I have
a lot of overlappingintellectual interests, which is
kind of how we met at theAmerican Studies Association
conference in Los Angeles. I wasliving in Los Angeles at the
(02:09):
time. I don't remember the year.
Allison Page (02:12):
I think ASA was in LA in 2015. I was having a
coffee with Britney's advisor,Sarah Bennie Weiser. And Sarah,
I remember, was like, oh, is itokay if my PhD student Britney
comes along? And at the time, Iwas like, oh, sure. Okay.
You know, I was like, I thinkback at it. I'm sure you were
annoyed too.
Brittany Farr (02:32):
I was just try I needed to ask Sarah something,
and I was like, I don't know whothis woman is. I'm just gonna
crash her meeting. Like, I haveto take up Sarah's time.
Allison Page (02:41):
I just love this so much because then when we I
remember we all had coffee, andthen Sarah had to leave. And you
and I, I have such a clearmemory of this. We were outside.
Brittany Farr (02:49):
Mhmm.
Allison Page (02:50):
Somehow, Saidiya Hartman came up. I think I was
saying something about scenes ofsubjection, and you're like, oh,
I love that book. And I waslike, oh, wow. This is amazing.
Because I I felt someintellectual loneliness, I
think, around the kinds ofconversations I was interested
in.
And so I was so excited that youwere also in a comm program and
really wanting to think throughthese questions. Oh my gosh.
(03:11):
City of Hartman.
Brittany Farr (03:12):
I know. That's we both sort of had that reaction.
And then you said, as oftenhappens at conferences, you're
like, oh, let's do, like, areading group together or
exchange writing. And everyother time I've had that
conversation, nothing has comeup. But we actually this is,
like, well before the pandemic,like, met on Skype and read
books, maybe some of the onlybooks I've read cover to cover.
Allison Page (03:32):
I know. I know.
Brittany Farr (03:36):
Many of them are cited in media and the affective
life of slavery, which alsofeels very special because we
read them together. And then westarted exchanging writing, and
then somehow it went from, youknow, a more professional
friendship to really just beingbesties. We applied to
conferences together to hang outbecause we lived on opposite
sides of the country, went tosaid conferences, skipped most
(03:58):
of the country. But
Allison Page (04:02):
If any grad students are listening, don't do
that. Go to the conference.
Brittany Farr (04:06):
It's fine. But yeah. So why don't you give us a
two to three sentencedescription of the book, an
impossible task. But
Allison Page (04:16):
Yes. Oh my gosh. No. I should have this memorized
by now. But, in media and theaffect of life of slavery, I
look at US media about thehistory of slavery from the
nineteen sixties to the presentto think through how media
instructs viewers, how to actand feel in accordance with new
racial norms created for an eradefined by the supposed end of
(04:37):
legal racism, and I can talkabout this a little bit more
when we get into official antiracism.
I look at a range of texts inthe book. I look at an
educational video game aboutslavery. I look at educational
curricula developed around theminiseries roots to think
through and to argue that visualculture works through emotion,
(04:58):
which shapes and manages,racialized subjectivity.
Brittany Farr (05:02):
So I wanted to start actually with this idea of
official anti racism becausewhen you start the book, you
kind of say that this is thebackdrop that all of these
dynamics that I'm writing aboutare kind of happening against,
and it's different from whatcame before in terms of the ways
that people were thinking andtalking about race. And it
happens toward the end of WorldWar two. And in the book, you
(05:22):
say it's when, quote, it becameless acceptable to be openly
racist, which is reallyinteresting also to read now in
2022. So given that this is sucha foundational backdrop to what
you're talking about in thebook, could you just tell us a
little bit more about the shifttoward official anti racism?
What does that actually mean andencompass?
Because, obviously, it doesn'tmean that people stopped being
(05:43):
racist, and kind of how thissets the stage for the the
relationship between race,media, and feelings that you
described throughout the rest ofthe book.
Allison Page (05:51):
So official anti racism, is an idea developed by
Jodi Melamed in her reallyexcellent book, Represent and
Destroy, which I think is aMinnesota press book, little
plug. And this was reallyfoundational, this idea in her
book, to how I began thinkingabout race during this time
period during the kind of postwar moment where overt white
(06:11):
supremacy becomes residual. Sowe have all of these cold war
anxieties happening in this timeperiod where there's this kind
of glaring paradox, right, wherethere's the huge, obviously,
racial inequality at home whileThe US is also espousing all of
this anti Soviet Union rhetoricthat's positioning The US as
open and free in contrast tothis ostensibly closed and
(06:34):
communist form of governance. Soofficial anti racism with
Mohammed, and she looks at,literature actually. So I felt
like literature is a culturaltechnology, producing racialized
subjectivity.
But one of the things her bookis doing here is really
challenging progress narrativesabout, you know, this racial
break in this postwar era wherethere's just, you know, enormous
(06:57):
amount of change happeningaround race, not just in terms
of the cold war, but alsodecolonialization and sort of
global social movements tocontest racism, white supremacy,
colonialism. Right? In thisbook, she has this idea that we
see the state, The USuniversity, and capital
incorporating anti racistdiscourse as this way to
(07:20):
basically modify white supremacyin a new era where racism
becomes covert rather thanovert. It becomes, you know, as
I as I write, less acceptable tobe openly racist. And certainly,
yeah, we can talk about thisidea in relation to our current
moment.
But I think I was reallycompelled by this in relation to
a lot of the media culture andspecifically television of the
nineteen sixties and the waythat it was thinking through and
(07:45):
talking about race and trying tohave these ideas of, okay, look,
we're anti racism, but it's avery sort of surface y,
obviously, right, kind of antiracism that isn't doing anything
to address material inequalityin any any sense. So I think in
terms of the book, I really amso grateful for her excellent
work and thinking about whatdoes it mean when anti racism is
(08:08):
both sort of defanged from,again, like I said, this
material critique or this ideaof resource redistribution to,
oh, we just wanna appear or feelanti racist. And so that's where
I really started thinking abouthow does emotion come into play
here. I will say when I wasthinking about this podcast, I
looked back one of my very firstI think it was my first
publication was in an onlinejournal. It was a book review of
(08:31):
represent and destroy, and Ijust reread it to be like, oh,
yeah.
Let me kind of just refresh. Andit was really amazing to see. I
think there were so many of theseeds of this book in that
review where I was like, I lovewhat Motlana does here. I wonder
how we might make sense of theseideas in relation to feeling and
to media culture and media textand media as a cultural
technology. And and I look backat that now and I'm like, oh,
(08:53):
there was.
It was like a little road map Iwasn't able to see at the time.
Brittany Farr (08:57):
That'll be very exciting for the grad student a
hundred years from now who'swriting about, pages, writings,
and theories. And they're like,we see the earliest seeds of
this idea in this, like,overview, which we think is
their first her firstpublication. And then they'll
find this recording maybe ifthey can listen to it, with
their antique technology andconfirm. But so I wanna just
(09:20):
return to something you saidabout this moment, this shift
toward official anti racismbeing a moment when overt white
supremacy is becoming residual,especially since now it seems
like people are talking aboutwhite supremacy in a way that
they weren't five, ten years agoand identifying things as white
supremacists in a way that Iactually have found surprising.
(09:42):
At a law school where I was afellow, the dean put in an email
to the entire law school kind ofdenouncing white supremacy,
which is not something that Iwould have expected from, you
know, an institutional actor inthat way, but it has become
more, like, politicallyacceptable and salient to do
that.
And so I'm curious. You startedwriting this book in, what,
(10:03):
twenty fourteen, thirteen,twelve? Yeah. Yeah. A long time
ago?
A long time ago, Obama was stillpresident. People were still
talking about post race and, youknow, we have a black president.
We've solved racism, things likethat. Obviously, Trumpism was
kind of nascent, but I don'tthink any of us had any idea
(10:24):
kind of what was on the horizon.And I experienced this when I
look back at my owndissertation, reading it, and
the way that I write about race.
It's a little bit like watchinga horror movie
Allison Page (10:33):
Yeah. With someone, and you
Brittany Farr (10:34):
don't go in that room.
Allison Page (10:35):
Oh my god. Yes.
Brittany Farr (10:37):
She has no idea what's coming. And so but, you
you know, I get to leave mydissertation on a shelf, and you
had to revise it into a book.And so I would love to hear more
about how this shift in thenational conversation around
race and politics comfort withsort of pushing back on the
incorporation of anti racistdiscourse, people being, like,
(10:58):
more comfortable with notfeeling anti racist. Right.
There are just a couple of thosenegatives in there.
So anything that you could sayabout, you know, how your
thinking has changed, or how didyou have, you know, a relatively
stable text as all of thesethings are kind of swirling
around it?
Allison Page (11:15):
I think there's two parts to that. So first, I
thought about this a lot becauseas I was revising my what had
been the fifth chapter of mydissertation was about the
website and app slaveryfootprint. And when Slavery
Footprint came out, it was inthe Obama era. The Obama
administration had funded it.Right.
It was this partnership with theState Department. And so when I
was writing that chapter as partof the dissertation, so much of
(11:37):
it was really about a lot of thediscourse that anti trafficking
movements use just totallyexpunge race, right? Where it's
this really kind of colorblindpost racial. I mean, really,
slavery footprint makes thatvery explicit when they're like,
Lincoln declared the slavesfree, like this is a quote from
their site. And now this is amyth, right?
We actually have more slaverytoday than we ever did. And in
(12:00):
the book, I talk about how thisis part of continuing anti
blackness where you can seeissues of white supremacy, even
though they're not articulatedlike that over there, never at
home. Right? And and the antitrafficking movement, has all
sorts of issues. But as I wasstarting to revise, it's true.
I had just moved to Virginia.Charlottesville just happened.
(12:20):
Right? Like, this I think all ofthe context of that moment
really did inform the revisionfrom the dissertation to the
book. Like, I was inCharlottesville when that white
supremacist rally happened.
The tiki torches. Yeah. Exactly.Right. That was like my
introduction to Virginia.
I mean, I know you and I havetalked about this a lot, that
all these things that appear,quote, unquote, new, of course,
(12:41):
have these much longer historiesand aren't new, and we can
complicate this a lot. But I dothink in terms of discursive
formations that we are seeingclearly, like, post racialism is
residual. I mean, I talk aboutthis a lot with my students who
are always like, are youkidding? Like, no. Of course, we
don't live in a post race world,and I think that's so so
(13:03):
different.
Right? Yeah. Actually, though, Iwanna so this just made me think
of some
Brittany Farr (13:07):
of the Supreme Court decisions that have come
out recently in the last decadeor so at, you know, the Shelby
County, things that are undoinga lot of important parts of
civil rights act and civilrights movement that happened,
part of how the Supreme Courtjustifies this is by saying that
we don't need these thingsanymore because we're not
Allison Page (13:27):
Yes.
Brittany Farr (13:28):
America's not racist. So there's this weird
tension and kind of hypocrisy ofI don't know, maybe it's only
the Supreme Court that's writingthings that say, like, America's
not racist anymore, and the restof us are kind of like, well, we
don't know. But some verypowerful people are still making
that argument.
Allison Page (13:45):
Yes. Yeah. And I think that it's such a good
point, and it's so breathtakingto see that hand in hand with
both the revision that I thinkTrumpism. I don't wanna say
like, oh my god. This is sosurprising.
It's so new. Like, where did allthese, you know, overt racist
come from? But I was thinkingthis morning about how, at least
in terms of, like, anti racistkind of discourse. I remember
(14:08):
when I was an undergrad and thekind of anti racist activism I
was doing so much of the thelanguage around it was really
about structural critique. And Ithink that was important, of
course, because we wanna getaway from for all sorts of
obvious reasons, but just, youknow, the individual as the site
of racism.
And I think about this a lotwith the book because in my
first chapter, you know, theseTV documentaries were really
(14:29):
about sort of, like, changinghearts and minds of white
people, but just in like a verysurfacey, not too deep of a way,
and that will prevent you fromhaving to, like, open up your
neighborhood, right, to blackpeople living there. One of the
things I I think we see now withTrumpism and its rises is that
there's more room to thinkabout, oh, how does how does it
happen on an interpersonallevel? Right? Like, we need to
(14:53):
kind of hold both when we'retalking about anti racism. And I
think with what you're saying interms of the Supreme Court, it's
just this really fascinating andhorrifying, frankly, moment of
this gutting of the civil rightsprotections in the name of,
okay, we don't need it'sirrelevant now, but also then
this revision in this uptake bythose on the the far right.
(15:14):
Right. Of saying, no, we'rebeing oppressed. So, like, I was
looking at the language of theStop Woke Act in Florida and Ron
DeSantis' team is, like, we'restopping white supremacy. Like,
they frame it so much. Yeah.
Through interesting. Okay. Ifyou're talking and and we can
get into this more too becauseso much of it is also
articulated through feelings.Like, we don't want people to
(15:35):
feel they use the terms guiltand anguish.
Brittany Farr (15:38):
So making white people feel guilty is white
supremacist?
Allison Page (15:42):
Right. Right. Like, it's it's really Okay.
Feel like shit. I mean, that'sat least from as far as I can
understand.
So that's why I think it's sofascinating because we have this
total denial, like, race wedon't need to think about race
anymore by several Supreme Courtjustices that Trump appointed
and also Trumpism saying, no.No. No. No. No.
White people are being sooppressed. Right? Like, we need
to sort of prevent this thisracism against white people.
(16:04):
And, of course, this reverseracism claim has such a much
longer history. Again, I wannabe very, very clear about that,
but I do think in this moment,we're seeing it in in kind of
different ways, I would say.
Brittany Farr (16:16):
I wanna put a pin because we've been trying to
figure out what we wouldcoauthor together.
Allison Page (16:21):
And we
Brittany Farr (16:21):
put a pin in the human trafficking thing because
and so I'm I'm sure I've talkedto you about this, and I've made
you read drafts of this articlethat talks about Westlaw, which
is the main one of the main waysthat lawyers find cases. So not
just in legal academics, butpracticing lawyers. And I didn't
know it existed until I got tolaw school. And part of why I
went to law school was because Icouldn't figure out how to find
cases. And it's behind a massivepaywall.
(16:43):
It's very expensive. Andsometimes state that's the only
way you can find cases. Soeverybody uses Westlaw. It's the
norm. And because I do researchon slavery, they have kind of
organized things into they callthem keynotes, but they're just
like headings and subheadings oftopics of legal topics.
So you would have, like, aproperty heading and then real
estate and, like, water rightsor whatever goes under there,
(17:06):
and you can search things bykeynotes. And so there used to
just be a slavery keynote.Right? A freestanding slavery
keynote, which is intense in itsown way, and I would go there
and click around and find cases.And then, I don't know, a year
or two years ago, itdisappeared.
It's like, where did the slaverykeynote go? Guess where it ended
up? In the human trafficking asa subheading under human
(17:28):
trafficking. And I just keeptelling people because in the
hopes that somebody will writeabout it, but I don't know that
it's happened yet. I I need todouble check and make sure, but
I it's just kind of mindboggling to me because and I'm
sure it wasn't done with illintent.
You know, there are people whowork at Westlaw and are
thinking, okay. Humantrafficking is a big area of
law. You know, let's put thatthere. But for you know, if you
(17:50):
know anything about thatdiscourse, it's kind of
contentious to put US chattelslavery under human trafficking.
I was like, if you put itanywhere, put it under property.
I was like, that's that's thelaws that is relevant to. Right.
That people would notice thatand be up in arms. Anyway, so as
you were revising and, you know,maybe parts of the dissertation
(18:11):
that were relevant about theObama administration's
involvement in the slavery, butmaybe it was less. Were there
kind of texts that you decidedto include that weren't in the
original version, or did youkeep all of the the same texts?
Allison Page (18:25):
No. That's a good question. The dissertation had
five chapters, and the book hasfour plus the intro and the
conclusion.
Brittany Farr (18:32):
Oh, actually, let me interrupt you and ask you to
just describe the ones that arein the book and then tell me
which ones
Allison Page (18:37):
are Yes. Yes. Good. Okay. So in the book, I I
had my introduction to thedissertation had been started in
a very different way.
So the book I get to workthrough Azi Dungey's amazing Ask
a Slave. She's a comedian and anactor and this YouTube web
series that she did. So she hadbeen herself an actor at one of
(18:58):
these, like, living historymuseums. Right? And so she
basically is drawing on herexperience of the racist and
sort of horrific things peopleasked her while she was playing
an enslaved person.
Like, what do you do for fun orwhere do you send your kids to
school? Right? So I start thebook by thinking through because
I really wanted to center notjust have it be all of these
kind of hegemonic uses of thehistory of slavery for
(19:20):
essentially, like, nefariousends, but black feminist
contestation of that. And so Istart with Ezzy Dungy, I
conclude with Kara Walker andher stunning piece and audience,
the, short film that she made orshort video, I should say, piece
in response to a subtlety, thehuge sugar sinks that she
installed at the former Domino,factory in Brooklyn. And I had
(19:43):
really wanted to write aboutthat.
So I was like, okay, great. Ihave these spaces. These are
these texts that sort of cameout as I was wrapping up the
dissertation and, you know, youhave to draw lines somewhere.
Also, when I was in Virginia, Imade this friend, Kanisha, who's
a playwright and she and I weretalking I can't remember how
this came up, but we're talkingabout Lorraine Hansberry and how
she had written a screenplay,for television called The
(20:06):
Drinking Gourd about visorslavery. And this was in 1959,
and it was never aired, becauseit was considered, and this is,
like, the quote is is just kindof amazing, like, too much of a
hot potato for television.
And in part, it was because ofhow it portrayed the
relationship between whitenessand blackness. So it like, we
can think about how rootsobviously represents whiteness
(20:28):
or sort of portrays its whitecharacters, but clearly, like
Lorraine Hansberry has a muchricher, much more complex
understanding of theinextricability of whiteness and
blackness and as racialformations in relation to to
slavery in this era she'swriting about. So I wanted to do
some work on that. So I was ableto do some archival research at
the Schomburg and find out bythe time this all was coming,
the the sort of debates withmedia industry people and the
(20:50):
executor of Hansberry's estate,this was posthumous. There was
just a lot like this trail of,you know, this correspondence
where they're sort of debating,like, why they can't air it.
And so that I knew I was alsolike, this is this really
amazing kind of text given thatif we think about so, like,
roots, for instance, was AlexHaley's. And I say this in the
(21:12):
book, like, his, you know,really sort of masculinist hero
narrative. He in the archivalwork I did at USC, you could see
all of his sort of defense of,you know, what we would call,
like, very sort of liberal oreven, like, moderate positions
in relation to race. And thesepotentially richer and
nonmasculinist, almost, youknow, almost, you know, thinking
(21:32):
about gender in a very differentway, narratives were sort of
pushed aside. Right?
Like Lorraine Hansberry wasliterally her screenplay. Never
it was never developed. It neveraired. So the dissertation was
five chapters. I had a chapteron these two made for TV,
basically, like, after schoolspecials Mhmm.
About I read that. Do you youremember that? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
(21:54):
Yeah. So both of them feature,quote, unquote, like, unruly
young black men. They're, like,listening to rap and, you know,
their clothing. This was I thinkthey were made in the late
eighties, early nineties. Soclearly part of this anxiety
about, you know, blackness andyouth as was revived in in 2016,
like Hillary Clinton callingthem super predators.
(22:14):
Right? So it was really of thisparticular moment where they get
sent back to the antebellum erato learn lessons about how to
better appreciate theircontemporary freedoms. I mean,
it's just like Why?
Brittany Farr (22:24):
Why do we keep making movies where we send
black people back to slavery?
Allison Page (22:28):
Oh my gosh. It's yeah. It's and it wasn't like
you know, obviously, OctaviaButler
Brittany Farr (22:33):
Yes. And Sankofa with everybody writes about. But
Allison Page (22:37):
Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Sankofa. Yeah. Totally. Sowhen I was thinking about the
shift from the dissertation tothe book, it did become very
clear.
As soon as I finished thedissertation, I was defending
it. I was like, wait, this wholething is about feelings. And I,
you know, I kind of gesturedtowards it in the dissertation,
but it really I do think there'sa way in which once you finish
something, then you can see,like, oh, what it's actually
(22:59):
about.
Brittany Farr (23:00):
And Yeah. Well and and just to say, your
dissertation was framed aroundpedagogy.
Allison Page (23:05):
Yeah. And citizenship. Right? And sort of
like cultural citizenship. And Ithink that chapter, although I
liked it and and at some points,I was like, maybe I should turn
that into, like, a freestandingarticle.
It kind of goes along with whatyou and I have talked about
where we're both reallyinterested in texts that are not
so obvious. Like, yes, ofcourse, this is, like, extremely
racist and terrible, and we can,like, yes, situate it in
(23:27):
governmentality in terms of thiskind of emerging
multiculturalism, emergingneoliberalism, like, you need to
behave differently. But I kindof felt like that text didn't
present itself as progressive inthe way that these other texts
that I'm looking at orinterested in did. And I I think
that is most compelling to mebecause I I do want to kind of
(23:49):
unpack the things that we thinkof as, quote, unquote, good.
Brittany Farr (23:53):
I'm curious if your approach to the things that
you choose to write about haschanged from early graduate
school days to now. I mean, minecertainly has a fair amount.
Allison Page (24:05):
I think my approach to what I'm thinking
about now, yeah, is reallydifferent. I I mean, this
probably sounds so trite, but,like, reductive understanding of
things is, like, good or bad or,like, radical or not. And now
I'm much more interested in thecomplexity of things. I mean, I
think a lot about one of mymentors, Rod Ferguson, was
always so great about beinginterested in how power power is
(24:26):
repressive, of course, but also,like, power is seductive. And it
says, you know, yes too.
Right? Not just no. And howwe're part of that, like, how
you can kind of get interpolatedinto that. And I I want to sort
of explore those types of thingsrather than, like, like, against
a politics security method whereyou're, like, I'm just gonna
choose this and I can like, tearit apart. You know, I'm much
more interested in complexity, Ithink, in a different way.
Brittany Farr (24:47):
Totally. I mean, yes. I think I started out
writing things that are like,this is good or this is bad, and
this is racist or this is not.
Allison Page (24:54):
And my
Brittany Farr (24:54):
advisers kind of pushed me to be a bit more
complicated. And I have such aclear memory of, in my qual's
defense, Kara Keeling asking mesomething. I had written a
syllabus on, like, feministsomething or other, and one of
the weeks was divided into,like, real violence versus
represented violence. And Karaasks what's sort of what's the
(25:16):
difference, and why do you havethis distinction? Are you making
this distinction just to troubleit for the students?
And can we understand thesethings that separately? And that
really blew my mind in a waythat I think I'm still making
sense of.
Allison Page (25:31):
I see my students really grapple with that kind of
question too. I think if youcome from a particular, maybe,
like, activist bent or, like,like, a political frame, you
know, where it is reallytempting to be like, well, this
is real and this is not. I seethat with my students now when
things are so harrowing in somany ways for them, and they're
like, what's the point of doingcertain things when we have real
(25:52):
things to be thinking about? Youknow? And I'm like, how can we
make sense of that?
Right?
Brittany Farr (25:57):
So you mentioned that maybe your object choice
has changed over time, andyou're really feeling it in
terms of the next project thatyou're working on. And I'll say
briefly that, you know, the nextproject is more focused on
policing. And I remember whenyou were first telling me about
it, I thought, wow. That seemsreally different from what you
were doing.
Allison Page (26:15):
Mhmm.
Brittany Farr (26:16):
But, in the chapter where you are this is
the slavery footprint chapter,which is a website where you can
go and discover how many slaveswork for you, and they have,
quote, unquote, algorithms thatcalculate that. That is kind of
where I see, the beginnings ofthis next project. So I'm just
gonna read this passage beforeyou start talking about it. And
(26:37):
you're talking about slaveryfootprint here. Through their
reliance on algorithms and datato uncover what they term,
quote, slavery, Made in a FreeWorld, which is the the parent
company, Made in a Free Worldpromulgates the notion of the
digital as not only neutral andseparate from race and
capitalism, but as the idealsolution precisely because the
technology obscures race.
(26:59):
Slavery footprint produces aform of ethical that thinks
about and acts againstracialized labor arrangements,
which are never named as such,through consumption and digital
media rather than emotion. Dataand algorithms are key sites for
the production of race, not justreifying existing racial
formations, but modifying andconstituting them as well.
(27:19):
Critically, the ongoingdatafication of race and
racialized bodies constitutes anew racial formation in the
twenty first century, one thatattempts to transcend emotion.
Allison Page (27:30):
It's so interesting to see this now and
to think about sort ofeverything that we've been
talking about. Right? Like, inthe wake of the social movements
arising out of the policekillings of Breonna Taylor and
George Floyd and all thisexplosion of, like, DEI kind of
discourse, which is anotherproject I really wanna work on
at some point, the kind ofhistory of DEI in relation to
(27:53):
the media and also how weunderstand, like, what quote,
unquote diversity means. But Ithink with this, it's so
interesting to see this as I'mI'm really kind of starting to
think about this next projectbecause I was really interested
in and did some work with areally amazing student of mine,
who's now getting her PhD ingender studies at Rutgers. Yay.
But we were starting to thinkabout policing and emotion and
(28:17):
all this discourse of technologyas as neutral, which I think
really when I was meeting withthe student, we were talking a
lot about ideas arising fromthis chapter, you know, where
race becoming something we canunderstand through data, and
this is so neutral, and this isgonna take us out of this
problem, right, of human biasand human error. And this is
(28:37):
actually really a thread that Ithink kind of appears in some
ways throughout the book. Likein chapter one, I talk about in
these TV documentaries in thenineteen sixties that are
focused on race and slavery,geared towards white audiences,
There's often this tensionbetween, you know, we're trying
to create these feelings of fearand anxiety, right, for white
viewers, but also showing data.Like, I actually just taught one
(29:01):
of the documentaries in one ofmy classes and it ends with, and
I talk about this in the book,Mike Wallace bringing in a
statistician to to talk about,like, how white people are
feeling with respect to this wasin the mid nineteen sixties, the
civil rights movement.
And so there's this tensionbetween data and feelings and
sort of them being separatedfrom one another. And as these,
(29:21):
like, how do we think aboutrace? How do we quote, unquote
solve the problem of race that Itake this up in chapter two with
roots that was very explicitly,like, let's feel our way to the
solution. And so I think one ofthe things that was interesting
to me about slavery footprint isthat it really was like, okay.
We're gonna just turn everythinginto that we can solve
everything with an algorithm orapps or sort of datafication.
(29:42):
Within media studies, there's alot of really excellent work
about the rise of datafication,this kind of larger assemblage
of technological solutions toissues. I mean, there's
certainly, like, amazing workand folks at the intersections
of environmental studies and andthinking about climate and and
media culture. And there's a lotof really great work that is
theorizing predictive policing,the kind of implication of
(30:06):
policing with thesetechnologies. And so I I knew
that I wanted to work onpolicing in some ways after I
had read Simone Brown's reallywonderful book, Dark Matters,
which looks at the relationshipbetween blackness and
surveillance in The US and shesort of talks about in some ways
like technologies, like runawayslave posters as this sort of
(30:26):
tool of policing, reallycommunicative tool of policing.
What I want to do in this nextbook is really historicize this
because so often so much of thework on technology and
technology and race is reallycontemporary, which is critical.
Right? We need to think aboutall the ways that these
technologies that really rely onthis discourse of neutrality are
(30:48):
of course not neutral. Right?And then the ways that they are
reinscribing racism and all ofthis kind of racial
categorization in the name ofneutrality. But I wanna look at
the much kind of longer historyof that, and this gets us back
to some of the kind of quotidianobjects that you and I have
talked about where I'm hopingthat when I get to spend some
time in the archive, I'll beable to see, you know, how media
(31:11):
technologies, in particular,were talked about at this kind
of moment of ascendance in termsof policing.
So actually in the nineteensixties, in 1967, Johnson was
really obsessed with, like,commissions and reports. And so
there was a commission onpolicing that had a whole
chapter devoted to how can weuse information technology. This
(31:34):
is the term they use to, again,and this is their language, to
improve policing. Right? Sothere's this really early
interest that I think is superfascinating, and I also really
wanna focus on how highly policecommunities in this time were
really pushing back against andcontesting this emergence of
technology because we do reallysee this push, right, for more
(31:55):
high-tech policing.
I mean, certainly, this isreally ubiquitous today, like,
more cameras. You know, if weuse algorithms, we're gonna be
able to sort of get around thisissue rather than, of course,
that's not the fruit issue of ofpolicing and racism. But I wanna
kind of spend time thinkingabout how did this discourse
that's now so normalized, wherethis this moment how did it kind
(32:17):
of become common sense and andwhere did that sort of happen? I
had this research assistant thissummer do all this work going
through all of these papers thatthe Schomburg had sent me
through these activist groupsbased in New York. I'm working
on the NYPD because it's thelargest police force in The US
and and huge in the world and areally early kind of proponent
(32:39):
of high-tech policing.
Was it as diverse in
Brittany Farr (32:42):
the sixties as it is now?
Allison Page (32:44):
You know what's so interesting is actually when I
was able to get to the archive,I watched this fascinating
recruitment video for the NYPDthat was, I wanna say, like, mid
seventies, and it featured allsorts of black police officers
and and women like, white womenpolice officers, police officers
of of color. Like, it was sortof multiracial where it was
(33:06):
like, this is what I got fromthe NYPD. You know, being a
police officer has allowed me todo blah blah blah. And they had
a little section on, like, I'velearned computer skills. Right?
Like, it was really trying torecruit people through the the
the tech. It was superinteresting. I watched it, like,
four times. I was just like, ah,this is very rich text. I really
I just need to carve out sometime because she really had gone
through all of this material.
(33:27):
I'm also I had another researchassistant last year look at a
lot of institutional stuff, likeall the these police journals
called law enforcement news inthe way that she looked at every
issue from the seventies. She'samazing. Also named Britney. She
pulled out all of the partswhere they were sort of talking
about technology, where theywere talking about wanting to
have more funding for this, howthis would sort of help policing
(33:49):
in, you know, these ways. Youknow, I have to, again, find
some time to really sit downwith that.
But I do find myself more andmore really wanting to kind of
think through what you and Italk about as, like, the mundane
in relation to how this gets sonormalized and becomes such a
kind of hegemonic idea.
Brittany Farr (34:06):
Yeah. I mean, I love the idea of taking
something boring and making itinteresting. That's
Allison Page (34:12):
Yeah. Because often, I mean, what, like, power
so banal, you know, and it'sit's so important to think
through that. Yeah. Exactly.
Brittany Farr (34:20):
I think that's actually something that I kind
of witnessed when I lived in LAbecause I was writing so much
about representation and thenseeing behind the scenes how
stuff got made and how it wasall those little decisions
mostly born of, like, lack oftime or money that resulted in
these upsetting representations.It's like it's little things.
You know? So you've talked a lotabout archives and loving the
(34:42):
archives and going to archives,needing to go to archives. Do
you consider yourself ahistorian?
Like, what is your relationshipto the discipline of history?
Which is maybe not gonna beinteresting for many people, but
it's particularly interesting tome because I recently had to
answer a lot of questions about,you know, am I a historian or
not?
Allison Page (35:00):
You are a legal historian.
Brittany Farr (35:01):
Thank you. Historian. That's the official
answer. So
Allison Page (35:04):
I'm sure real historians would be like, you
are absolutely not a historianto me. Well, I think my advisor,
Laurelette, does a ton ofhistorical work. She really
instilled in me a kind ofrespect for the archives, right,
and this this chance to kind ofget to dig through. It's almost
like I I think as a on apersonal note, like, I love,
like, thrifting. So it's almostlike thrifting through you know,
(35:27):
you just get to sift through abunch of old stuff.
We've talked a lot aboutinterdisciplinarity with one
another, and I I love how I wasable my training was very
interdisciplinary. I think thatproduces really rich work.
That's partly why I wanted to beon Minnesota because I think
Minnesota publishes so muchtheoretically important and rich
(35:47):
and interdisciplinary work, andit really values that, which
really aligns with how I like tothink about scholarship and and
sort of my methods. Let me sayit this way. I looked at
historians like StephanieSmallwood, who I think is
amazing in, you know, the kindof archival work that she does
really, really detailed, right,beautiful, rich, but then the
reading of it and thetheoretical work that she
(36:10):
produces from the archivalresearch, which I think is
possibly unusual for some inhistory as a discipline.
I think Stephanie Smallwood is awonderful example of and I think
your work is a wonderful exampleof Thank you.
Brittany Farr (36:23):
Thank you. Which you can soon read in the UCLA
law review.
Allison Page (36:27):
Yay. Good plug. I'm gonna separate you out
because you are a historian andwe need to, like, really say,
you know, but That doesn't
Brittany Farr (36:36):
matter now. I have a job.
Allison Page (36:37):
Yeah. Yeah. That great. Great. Yeah.
No. I mean, I think we'repointing to the difficulty of
disciplinarity and sort offitting yourself into these by
or making yourself legible inorder to to get a job or to, you
know, know what conversationsyou're speaking to. And that's
why I think interdisciplinarityis so important to me because I
wanna be able to be in severalconversations, and that kind of
(36:58):
work has been so meaningful tomy own thinking. In terms of
historical stuff, I I do tend tolike, I know you and I have
talked a lot about method. Ihave to teach a lot of methods
courses at ODU, which has reallytransformed my relationship to
thinking about method because Iused to be like, I don't know.
I just read. Like, what do I do?What you know, it's hard for, I
think, people who are nothistorians or who are not
(37:19):
ethnographers or who not, youknow, have these, like, very
clear cut methods.
Brittany Farr (37:23):
I mean, what are historians doing other than
reading?
Allison Page (37:25):
Yeah. They read a lot, but they can really you
know, like, having the sexinessof the archival work. Right?
Like, I don't who other than uswould call that sexy, but, you
know I know. It's it is verylegible, right, when you're
trying to describe, like, mycolleague who's a TV study
scholar, he's like, I'm nevergonna get external funding
because no one's ever gonna belike, yeah.
I need to pay you to watch TV.Right? Like, which is obviously
(37:47):
a gross reduction andoversimplification of what he
does. Having to teach methodsand and really working on it and
thinking about it in relation tothis book, I'm like, oh, yeah.
Okay.
I feel much clearer aboutthinking about the politics of
knowledge and sort of how wecome to articulate what we know
through sort of methodologicalterms.
Brittany Farr (38:06):
Mhmm. Mhmm. I mean, I think our shared
approach to history kind of goesback to our love of Saidiya
Hartman, right, who I think ofas a historian, but
Allison Page (38:16):
Two.
Brittany Farr (38:16):
Is not. I keep being shocked to discover she is
not in the history department.Like, are you sure, though?
Like, I I'm like, I don't know.I think she's in a history
department.
Like, she's she's certainly not.And I think as I was sort of
making the shift fromcommunication to legal
scholarship, and figuring outhow to make my work legible to
legal historians, discoveringthat there's just I considered
(38:39):
myself, like, pretty familiarwith scholarship on the history
of slavery, but there's justthere's a whole different track
of stuff about the history ofslavery that's being produced by
historians compared to what somehistorians are writing, but also
cultural studies and English andfilm studies. There's a whole
separate literature that and thetwo of them are not really in
(39:01):
conversation with one another.Right. I think for some
historians, it's very much thebelief that, you know, you can
only say something about thepast.
Right? Like, you're doing hityou're a historian because you
care about history, whereas,like, you're a historian because
you care about the present.Right? Like, the worst thing you
can say to certain historiansis, like, you're a presentist.
They're Oh my gosh.
(39:21):
How dare you? And I'm like,yeah. Of course. Why wouldn't I
be? And I think there's a littlebit of a generational divide
there too because I, you know, Ihave friends who actually have
history PhDs who have a muchmore similar approach to me.
Allison Page (39:36):
Yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking of who you're thinking
of, I imagine. I think one ofthe worst things you could
probably say to a historian is,like, I'm taking a Foucauldian
approach. Like, I wanna, this isa genealogical, like, history of
the present.
There's also an attention topower in a way that I think
cultural studies can give usthat that's why I like to sort
of combine scholarship because Ithink you're absolutely right.
(39:57):
Like, I think about people,like, the work of, like,
Christina Sharp or, like I said,Stephanie Smallwood probably
less so, but certainly, like,people working on chattel
slavery and and questions ofrepresentation and performance
and cultural techno right? Like,all these conversations that are
happening in cultural studies, Ican imagine some of the history
of of slavery books that you'rethinking of, they're not in
(40:19):
conversation with one another.When one of the early readers of
my book was like, here's someother like, Fabiola Glyph's book
and maybe Jennifer Morgan's worktoo. Right?
Like, there's some really greatwork that I think this is the
problem of siloing because thenyou you miss out on all of this.
Brittany Farr (40:34):
Mhmm. Yeah. I know. I thought, you know, I've
got a PhD. I'm good.
And then discovered just so muchstuff I was unaware of and had
to read if I wanted to considermyself a historian of slavery.
But then on the other hand, youhave someone like Walter
Johnson, who is a dyed in thewool historian, write something,
like, on agency, which I wouldput more in the camp of the,
like, Christina Sharps.
Allison Page (40:54):
Yes. Which was really central to my chapter on
games.
Brittany Farr (40:57):
Especially being in a law school, that article
kind of haunts me. Some of thisis just the way that our legal
system is structured, that youhave an individual plaintiff
bringing individual claims infront of a court, and students
are being trained to be zealousadvocates for their clients. And
so I think there's a tendency towant to look at history and
think about it in terms ofagency, and who has agency and
(41:20):
who doesn't have agency. And sobecause I write about poor black
workers right after the civilwar using the law in ways that
people don't expect. One of theways that many people come to
the project is saying, wow, thisis incredible that you have,
like, rediscovered this agencythat they have.
I don't have a good answer for,like, how
Allison Page (41:40):
to actually talk talk about
Brittany Farr (41:42):
it because also, you know, it's very common in
legal scholarship to want tohave, like, a normative
takeaway, which otherdisciplines, nobody wants to do
that. Like, don't ask me whatwould happen. What are you
talking about? Get out of here.But the other thing is sort of,
you know, is this a positivestory of what's happening?
Is this a negative story? Is thelaw doing good here? What should
(42:02):
the law have been? All of thesequestions that I don't have good
answers for, but am haunted by.
Allison Page (42:08):
Right. No. Totally. Because how can like,
the frames that we're so trainedinto seeing in these like,
especially, I think, in terms oflegal work, obviously, I'm not
I'm law adjacent now, I think,given you and my My case is more
Brittany Farr (42:22):
law adjacent. Yeah.
Allison Page (42:25):
We've been talking about this a little bit. Like,
racial feelings are everywhere,both in terms of all of this
kind of explosion around DEI asa one of the key institutional
responses to social movementpushes around anti black
violence. And so we have thatwith all this anti critical race
(42:45):
theory. It's really it is makingme think of Sarah's work on
popular misogyny and popularfeminism sort of existing
intention at the same time. Andso here, I think we can see this
just intensified anti criticalrace theory, this renewed push
to clamp down on how the historyof slavery in particular is
being taught.
Right? Certainly, this extendsto all sorts of things. I think
(43:07):
I saw something the other daythat one school district got rid
of, like, the girls who code,but, like, some book about
coding and girls, which is justreally amazing. I mean Just
because
Brittany Farr (43:19):
talking about girls is sexist.
Allison Page (43:21):
Right. Totally. So there's just this, like,
twisting of social movementlanguage. One of the things I
keep coming back to so in myfirst chapter, I look at, you
know, these televisiondocumentaries about race and
slavery, and I look at this oneand I I don't get to go into it.
I talk a little bit about it inthe book, but it's really has
kind of been something thatstuck with me where the police
(43:42):
were being asked to this policeforce, and it was just like a
throwaway line in one of thedocumentaries, but we're being
asked to undergo training aroundI think they use the word, like,
prejudice maybe anddiscrimination.
And I have been thinking aboutthat more. I just was reading
something in American quarterlyabout, like, the history a
little bit historicizingdiversity work, quote, unquote,
(44:05):
and in terms of institutions.But I really I want to go back
to and try to find some of thosetraining because they were
mediated. Right. Sort of usingvideos and films to shape
behavior and to kind of shapethe ways that people think about
race in an institutional contextin the service of adhering to
new ideas about workplaces anddiscrimination.
(44:27):
And I just keep thinking aboutthis so much. This is, like, my
next next project. Like, I knowI'm gonna do the policing book,
you know, but then I I do reallywanna think about, like, this
history of diversity discourse,how it gets taken up in terms of
media culture. Like, I think allthe time about the videos that,
you know, like, at my job thatwhen I started, like, you need
to watch about, like, harassmentand discrimination. So So I'm
(44:50):
just curious if you had thoughtsabout all of the ways that we
have all the this explosion ofDEI initiatives that are also
articulated a lot throughfeelings.
There's all this sort ofpushback against it, but how
this really came to be this kindof institutional response to,
you know, social movements. Imean, obviously, it's maybe this
the theme of this is low hangingfruit where, like, an
(45:11):
institution can be like, look,we're doing something, and we
don't actually have to thinkabout, sort of more material
changes or shifts we could bemaking.
Brittany Farr (45:19):
I think that some places are thinking of those
programs as more materialinstitutional changes. I don't
think, you know, implementingdifferent policies like that is
necessarily the most superficialthing one could do. It's kind of
an in between in terms of what,you know, what would be an
effective way of, addressingdiversity. In a way, it's a
(45:42):
little bit like a prehistory ofwhat Jennifer Nash talks talks
about in black feminismreimagined, I think, is maybe
the title. Title Mad Libs.
Yeah. Oh, that's what I wasgonna say. When I was doing my
initial, like, training videos,I had never had to watch active
shooter drill videos before andwas stunned. Have you?
Allison Page (46:03):
No. Oh, okay. That makes
Brittany Farr (46:04):
me feel better because I was texting my friend
Felipe, and he was like, what?You've never seen this? Like,
that's a clear media studiespaper right there. It was I was
recording it on my phone. I cansend you the because I was
actors acting out an actorshooter Wow.
Like, thing. And, you know, youhave people fleeing. There's
somebody who plays the shooter.There are, like, different
(46:27):
chapters to it, so you have to,like, answer questions after
each chapter. And, like, there'sthe one chapter that's, like,
bar the door and then pick up aheavy object, and you see
everybody doing it and, like,getting ready to do it.
Allison Page (46:39):
Oh my god. Yeah.
Brittany Farr (46:40):
It's a friend of mine who was at I think when he
was at Northwestern, they gotinto some it it was a bit of a
hot potato. They had they gavetoo much backstory on the active
shooter.
Allison Page (46:53):
And so
Brittany Farr (46:54):
it was, like, too immersive, and people were
really upset and kind of, like,up in trouble. Anyway, I don't
think anyone has actuallywritten about them as media
texts. This is not what you'retalking about in terms of
diversity, but I was justshocked. And, like, someone has
to sit around and think aboutcasting also. Right?
Purslow shooter's a white man,which seems like well, one is I
think accurate, and two, themost, like, politically safe
(47:17):
thing probably. But then therewere interstitials with anyway,
the whole thing was just I wasshocked. Oh. But I can think of
comedies that have fakediversity training videos.
Allison Page (47:30):
Yeah. Right?
Brittany Farr (47:31):
Because they're they're such a common part of
our culture that there's a wholeother discourse that is making
fun of them on what we do in theshadows. I don't know if you're
still watching it. But, like,the vampire council's having a
meeting, and they bring theyroll a television in and say,
like, HR made us make this videoabout harassment policies
(47:53):
policies and whatever for thevampire council meeting.
Allison Page (47:56):
Let's write about that.
Brittany Farr (47:57):
The TV comes on, and it's some, like, grizzled
old man. And he said it justsays, do whatever you want.
There are no rules, and then itends. And then we have it away.
Like, that is just so now I'mgonna, like, go back on what I
said earlier about, like, maybeit is a bit more of a meaningful
change because if there's thatlevel of, like, cultural
(48:18):
critique of them, I think likeeveryone kind of agreed.
Even those of us who are reallycommitted to diversity and
equality, there's these things,like, running in the background
and Hello. Clicking thequestions and aren't super
engaged with it. I think there'san interesting kind of corollary
maybe with professionalresponsibility classes, which
(48:38):
are things that you have to takein law school. And I wonder if
it's something you have to do inmedical school. But the PR
classes, which there's also awhole, like, political economy
thing there in terms of, like,many law schools staff them with
adjuncts and don't hire in PR,and it's a test that you have to
take in order to get barred.
You have to, like, pass aprofessional responsibility
test, and so students are thentaught professional
(49:01):
responsibility and also somehowin some ways to take a test. And
from friends who have, like,taken the class and the test,
they're like, it sort of teachesyou that the answer is the,
like, slightly less ethicalthing than you think it would
be. Yes. But, yes, the way thatbig ideological goals like
diversity or inclusion are thenoperationalized into, like,
(49:24):
legislation and then regulationsand then, like, company
policies, I think, is a reallyinteresting question. And then,
like, all the way down to theactual, like, making of the
video.
Yes. And there's not that eitherof us are, like, media industry
people, but, like, even just,like, who's making these videos?
Yeah. How are they getting made?Like, what are they paying
(49:46):
people?
How are they casting it? Whatpool of actors are they drawing
from?
Allison Page (49:51):
Yes.
Brittany Farr (49:51):
Are they are they real actors? Are but I don't
there's just I mean, there's alot there that I think is really
rich and interesting,particularly in the wake of the
Priyanna Taylor, George Floydsummer where all of these
companies are coming out andcommitting to diversity. Here's
all the things that we're gonnado. And some of them actually
taking time and coming up withreally thoughtful
Allison Page (50:13):
Mhmm.
Brittany Farr (50:13):
Responses. But I think kind of universally,
trainings are one of them.
Allison Page (50:19):
Mhmm.
Brittany Farr (50:20):
There's not really a standard for these
trainings.
Allison Page (50:24):
I really see a connection from some of the
themes of the book to theseideas.
Brittany Farr (50:29):
Yeah. Absolutely. In the way that feelings are
managed because it's it remindsme, especially the clicking
through of the programs comparedto the watching of the video,
does make me think of yourchapter on the video game.
Right? And who are the actorsand sort of where the
culpability is coming from forthe problems that these videos
or programs are seeking toremedy.
Allison Page (50:50):
Yes. Yes. Totally. Britney, I'm so glad we got to
talk today, and I'm so glad thisis in our besties archive.
Brittany Farr (50:57):
Yes. I'm very excited to have this. It feels
very special. Thank you forasking me to be the
Allison Page (51:02):
one to do it. Oh, the best. Thank you for doing it
and for thinking through thesethings with me. And and I will
just say as by way ofconclusion, like, Britney really
read every word of this book,like, multiple times. She was so
central to to its formation, soI'm so grateful and
Brittany Farr (51:19):
Including the acknowledgments. I know. More
than one.
Allison Page (51:23):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She also. So, yes, I just we're
endlessly grateful.
Best thing to come out of aconference.
Brittany Farr (51:30):
Yes. The yeah. Alright.
Allison Page (51:33):
Thank you. Thank you.
All these things that appear quote unquote new,
of course, have these muchlonger histories and aren't new.
Brittany Farr (00:11):
Now it seems like people are talking about white
supremacy in a way that theyweren't five, ten years ago. Hi,
Allison. Hi, Britney. So today,we are going to talk about your
book, Media and the AFFECTIVELife of Slavery, which I'm very
excited about because I've kindof seen it from its earliest
(00:33):
days to now it's in print. Andpart of that is because we have
had such a long intellectualfriendship.
And so I thought we could startby introducing ourselves and
then kind of talk about ourfriendship meet cute, before I
make you give the elevator pitchof the book. So why don't you
tell our listeners or listener abit about yourself?
Allison Page (01:00):
Hi. I'm Allison Page. I am an assistant
professor of media studies atOld Dominion University, both in
the Institute for the Humanitiesand the Department of
Communication and Theater Arts.My work is primarily on race and
contemporary media culture. Ialso do feminist media and
cultural studies, and I, have akind of side interest in labor
(01:25):
in in digital media.
Brittany Farr (01:27):
I'm Britney Farr. I am very recently an assistant
professor of law at NYU LawSchool. So I have a law degree,
but like Allison, have a PhD incommunication, but from USC. I
write about racial violence andthe ways that it intersects and
interacts with doctrines ofcontract law, property law, and
(01:47):
tort law. Happy to talk aboutwhat a tort is if anyone wants
to know.
But in my PhD days, was writingmore about the Moynihan Report
and representations of blackwomen. And so Allison and I have
a lot of overlappingintellectual interests, which is
kind of how we met at theAmerican Studies Association
conference in Los Angeles. I wasliving in Los Angeles at the
(02:09):
time. I don't remember the year.
Allison Page (02:12):
I think ASA was in LA in 2015. I was having a
coffee with Britney's advisor,Sarah Bennie Weiser. And Sarah,
I remember, was like, oh, is itokay if my PhD student Britney
comes along? And at the time, Iwas like, oh, sure. Okay.
You know, I was like, I thinkback at it. I'm sure you were
annoyed too.
Brittany Farr (02:32):
I was just try I needed to ask Sarah something,
and I was like, I don't know whothis woman is. I'm just gonna
crash her meeting. Like, I haveto take up Sarah's time.
Allison Page (02:41):
I just love this so much because then when we I
remember we all had coffee, andthen Sarah had to leave. And you
and I, I have such a clearmemory of this. We were outside.
Brittany Farr (02:49):
Mhmm.
Allison Page (02:50):
Somehow, Saidiya Hartman came up. I think I was
saying something about scenes ofsubjection, and you're like, oh,
I love that book. And I waslike, oh, wow. This is amazing.
Because I I felt someintellectual loneliness, I
think, around the kinds ofconversations I was interested
in.
And so I was so excited that youwere also in a comm program and
really wanting to think throughthese questions. Oh my gosh.
(03:11):
City of Hartman.
Brittany Farr (03:12):
I know. That's we both sort of had that reaction.
And then you said, as oftenhappens at conferences, you're
like, oh, let's do, like, areading group together or
exchange writing. And everyother time I've had that
conversation, nothing has comeup. But we actually this is,
like, well before the pandemic,like, met on Skype and read
books, maybe some of the onlybooks I've read cover to cover.
Allison Page (03:32):
I know. I know.
Brittany Farr (03:36):
Many of them are cited in media and the affective
life of slavery, which alsofeels very special because we
read them together. And then westarted exchanging writing, and
then somehow it went from, youknow, a more professional
friendship to really just beingbesties. We applied to
conferences together to hang outbecause we lived on opposite
sides of the country, went tosaid conferences, skipped most
(03:58):
of the country. But
Allison Page (04:02):
If any grad students are listening, don't do
that. Go to the conference.
Brittany Farr (04:06):
It's fine. But yeah. So why don't you give us a
two to three sentencedescription of the book, an
impossible task. But
Allison Page (04:16):
Yes. Oh my gosh. No. I should have this memorized
by now. But, in media and theaffect of life of slavery, I
look at US media about thehistory of slavery from the
nineteen sixties to the presentto think through how media
instructs viewers, how to actand feel in accordance with new
racial norms created for an eradefined by the supposed end of
(04:37):
legal racism, and I can talkabout this a little bit more
when we get into official antiracism.
I look at a range of texts inthe book. I look at an
educational video game aboutslavery. I look at educational
curricula developed around theminiseries roots to think
through and to argue that visualculture works through emotion,
(04:58):
which shapes and manages,racialized subjectivity.
Brittany Farr (05:02):
So I wanted to start actually with this idea of
official anti racism becausewhen you start the book, you
kind of say that this is thebackdrop that all of these
dynamics that I'm writing aboutare kind of happening against,
and it's different from whatcame before in terms of the ways
that people were thinking andtalking about race. And it
happens toward the end of WorldWar two. And in the book, you
(05:22):
say it's when, quote, it becameless acceptable to be openly
racist, which is reallyinteresting also to read now in
2022. So given that this is sucha foundational backdrop to what
you're talking about in thebook, could you just tell us a
little bit more about the shifttoward official anti racism?
What does that actually mean andencompass?
Because, obviously, it doesn'tmean that people stopped being
(05:43):
racist, and kind of how thissets the stage for the the
relationship between race,media, and feelings that you
described throughout the rest ofthe book.
Allison Page (05:51):
So official anti racism, is an idea developed by
Jodi Melamed in her reallyexcellent book, Represent and
Destroy, which I think is aMinnesota press book, little
plug. And this was reallyfoundational, this idea in her
book, to how I began thinkingabout race during this time
period during the kind of postwar moment where overt white
(06:11):
supremacy becomes residual. Sowe have all of these cold war
anxieties happening in this timeperiod where there's this kind
of glaring paradox, right, wherethere's the huge, obviously,
racial inequality at home whileThe US is also espousing all of
this anti Soviet Union rhetoricthat's positioning The US as
open and free in contrast tothis ostensibly closed and
(06:34):
communist form of governance. Soofficial anti racism with
Mohammed, and she looks at,literature actually. So I felt
like literature is a culturaltechnology, producing racialized
subjectivity.
But one of the things her bookis doing here is really
challenging progress narrativesabout, you know, this racial
break in this postwar era wherethere's just, you know, enormous
(06:57):
amount of change happeningaround race, not just in terms
of the cold war, but alsodecolonialization and sort of
global social movements tocontest racism, white supremacy,
colonialism. Right? In thisbook, she has this idea that we
see the state, The USuniversity, and capital
incorporating anti racistdiscourse as this way to
(07:20):
basically modify white supremacyin a new era where racism
becomes covert rather thanovert. It becomes, you know, as
I as I write, less acceptable tobe openly racist. And certainly,
yeah, we can talk about thisidea in relation to our current
moment.
But I think I was reallycompelled by this in relation to
a lot of the media culture andspecifically television of the
nineteen sixties and the waythat it was thinking through and
(07:45):
talking about race and trying tohave these ideas of, okay, look,
we're anti racism, but it's avery sort of surface y,
obviously, right, kind of antiracism that isn't doing anything
to address material inequalityin any any sense. So I think in
terms of the book, I really amso grateful for her excellent
work and thinking about whatdoes it mean when anti racism is
(08:08):
both sort of defanged from,again, like I said, this
material critique or this ideaof resource redistribution to,
oh, we just wanna appear or feelanti racist. And so that's where
I really started thinking abouthow does emotion come into play
here. I will say when I wasthinking about this podcast, I
looked back one of my very firstI think it was my first
publication was in an onlinejournal. It was a book review of
(08:31):
represent and destroy, and Ijust reread it to be like, oh,
yeah.
Let me kind of just refresh. Andit was really amazing to see. I
think there were so many of theseeds of this book in that
review where I was like, I lovewhat Motlana does here. I wonder
how we might make sense of theseideas in relation to feeling and
to media culture and media textand media as a cultural
technology. And and I look backat that now and I'm like, oh,
(08:53):
there was.
It was like a little road map Iwasn't able to see at the time.
Brittany Farr (08:57):
That'll be very exciting for the grad student a
hundred years from now who'swriting about, pages, writings,
and theories. And they're like,we see the earliest seeds of
this idea in this, like,overview, which we think is
their first her firstpublication. And then they'll
find this recording maybe ifthey can listen to it, with
their antique technology andconfirm. But so I wanna just
(09:20):
return to something you saidabout this moment, this shift
toward official anti racismbeing a moment when overt white
supremacy is becoming residual,especially since now it seems
like people are talking aboutwhite supremacy in a way that
they weren't five, ten years agoand identifying things as white
supremacists in a way that Iactually have found surprising.
(09:42):
At a law school where I was afellow, the dean put in an email
to the entire law school kind ofdenouncing white supremacy,
which is not something that Iwould have expected from, you
know, an institutional actor inthat way, but it has become
more, like, politicallyacceptable and salient to do
that.
And so I'm curious. You startedwriting this book in, what,
(10:03):
twenty fourteen, thirteen,twelve? Yeah. Yeah. A long time
ago?
A long time ago, Obama was stillpresident. People were still
talking about post race and, youknow, we have a black president.
We've solved racism, things likethat. Obviously, Trumpism was
kind of nascent, but I don'tthink any of us had any idea
(10:24):
kind of what was on the horizon.And I experienced this when I
look back at my owndissertation, reading it, and
the way that I write about race.
It's a little bit like watchinga horror movie
Allison Page (10:33):
Yeah. With someone, and you
Brittany Farr (10:34):
don't go in that room.
Allison Page (10:35):
Oh my god. Yes.
Brittany Farr (10:37):
She has no idea what's coming. And so but, you
you know, I get to leave mydissertation on a shelf, and you
had to revise it into a book.And so I would love to hear more
about how this shift in thenational conversation around
race and politics comfort withsort of pushing back on the
incorporation of anti racistdiscourse, people being, like,
(10:58):
more comfortable with notfeeling anti racist. Right.
There are just a couple of thosenegatives in there.
So anything that you could sayabout, you know, how your
thinking has changed, or how didyou have, you know, a relatively
stable text as all of thesethings are kind of swirling
around it?
Allison Page (11:15):
I think there's two parts to that. So first, I
thought about this a lot becauseas I was revising my what had
been the fifth chapter of mydissertation was about the
website and app slaveryfootprint. And when Slavery
Footprint came out, it was inthe Obama era. The Obama
administration had funded it.Right.
It was this partnership with theState Department. And so when I
was writing that chapter as partof the dissertation, so much of
(11:37):
it was really about a lot of thediscourse that anti trafficking
movements use just totallyexpunge race, right? Where it's
this really kind of colorblindpost racial. I mean, really,
slavery footprint makes thatvery explicit when they're like,
Lincoln declared the slavesfree, like this is a quote from
their site. And now this is amyth, right?
We actually have more slaverytoday than we ever did. And in
(12:00):
the book, I talk about how thisis part of continuing anti
blackness where you can seeissues of white supremacy, even
though they're not articulatedlike that over there, never at
home. Right? And and the antitrafficking movement, has all
sorts of issues. But as I wasstarting to revise, it's true.
I had just moved to Virginia.Charlottesville just happened.
(12:20):
Right? Like, this I think all ofthe context of that moment
really did inform the revisionfrom the dissertation to the
book. Like, I was inCharlottesville when that white
supremacist rally happened.
The tiki torches. Yeah. Exactly.Right. That was like my
introduction to Virginia.
I mean, I know you and I havetalked about this a lot, that
all these things that appear,quote, unquote, new, of course,
(12:41):
have these much longer historiesand aren't new, and we can
complicate this a lot. But I dothink in terms of discursive
formations that we are seeingclearly, like, post racialism is
residual. I mean, I talk aboutthis a lot with my students who
are always like, are youkidding? Like, no. Of course, we
don't live in a post race world,and I think that's so so
(13:03):
different.
Right? Yeah. Actually, though, Iwanna so this just made me think
of some
Brittany Farr (13:07):
of the Supreme Court decisions that have come
out recently in the last decadeor so at, you know, the Shelby
County, things that are undoinga lot of important parts of
civil rights act and civilrights movement that happened,
part of how the Supreme Courtjustifies this is by saying that
we don't need these thingsanymore because we're not
Allison Page (13:27):
Yes.
Brittany Farr (13:28):
America's not racist. So there's this weird
tension and kind of hypocrisy ofI don't know, maybe it's only
the Supreme Court that's writingthings that say, like, America's
not racist anymore, and the restof us are kind of like, well, we
don't know. But some verypowerful people are still making
that argument.
Allison Page (13:45):
Yes. Yeah. And I think that it's such a good
point, and it's so breathtakingto see that hand in hand with
both the revision that I thinkTrumpism. I don't wanna say
like, oh my god. This is sosurprising.
It's so new. Like, where did allthese, you know, overt racist
come from? But I was thinkingthis morning about how, at least
in terms of, like, anti racistkind of discourse. I remember
(14:08):
when I was an undergrad and thekind of anti racist activism I
was doing so much of the thelanguage around it was really
about structural critique. And Ithink that was important, of
course, because we wanna getaway from for all sorts of
obvious reasons, but just, youknow, the individual as the site
of racism.
And I think about this a lotwith the book because in my
first chapter, you know, theseTV documentaries were really
(14:29):
about sort of, like, changinghearts and minds of white
people, but just in like a verysurfacey, not too deep of a way,
and that will prevent you fromhaving to, like, open up your
neighborhood, right, to blackpeople living there. One of the
things I I think we see now withTrumpism and its rises is that
there's more room to thinkabout, oh, how does how does it
happen on an interpersonallevel? Right? Like, we need to
(14:53):
kind of hold both when we'retalking about anti racism. And I
think with what you're saying interms of the Supreme Court, it's
just this really fascinating andhorrifying, frankly, moment of
this gutting of the civil rightsprotections in the name of,
okay, we don't need it'sirrelevant now, but also then
this revision in this uptake bythose on the the far right.
(15:14):
Right. Of saying, no, we'rebeing oppressed. So, like, I was
looking at the language of theStop Woke Act in Florida and Ron
DeSantis' team is, like, we'restopping white supremacy. Like,
they frame it so much. Yeah.
Through interesting. Okay. Ifyou're talking and and we can
get into this more too becauseso much of it is also
articulated through feelings.Like, we don't want people to
(15:35):
feel they use the terms guiltand anguish.
Brittany Farr (15:38):
So making white people feel guilty is white
supremacist?
Allison Page (15:42):
Right. Right. Like, it's it's really Okay.
Feel like shit. I mean, that'sat least from as far as I can
understand.
So that's why I think it's sofascinating because we have this
total denial, like, race wedon't need to think about race
anymore by several Supreme Courtjustices that Trump appointed
and also Trumpism saying, no.No. No. No. No.
White people are being sooppressed. Right? Like, we need
to sort of prevent this thisracism against white people.
(16:04):
And, of course, this reverseracism claim has such a much
longer history. Again, I wannabe very, very clear about that,
but I do think in this moment,we're seeing it in in kind of
different ways, I would say.
Brittany Farr (16:16):
I wanna put a pin because we've been trying to
figure out what we wouldcoauthor together.
Allison Page (16:21):
And we
Brittany Farr (16:21):
put a pin in the human trafficking thing because
and so I'm I'm sure I've talkedto you about this, and I've made
you read drafts of this articlethat talks about Westlaw, which
is the main one of the main waysthat lawyers find cases. So not
just in legal academics, butpracticing lawyers. And I didn't
know it existed until I got tolaw school. And part of why I
went to law school was because Icouldn't figure out how to find
cases. And it's behind a massivepaywall.
(16:43):
It's very expensive. Andsometimes state that's the only
way you can find cases. Soeverybody uses Westlaw. It's the
norm. And because I do researchon slavery, they have kind of
organized things into they callthem keynotes, but they're just
like headings and subheadings oftopics of legal topics.
So you would have, like, aproperty heading and then real
estate and, like, water rightsor whatever goes under there,
(17:06):
and you can search things bykeynotes. And so there used to
just be a slavery keynote.Right? A freestanding slavery
keynote, which is intense in itsown way, and I would go there
and click around and find cases.And then, I don't know, a year
or two years ago, itdisappeared.
It's like, where did the slaverykeynote go? Guess where it ended
up? In the human trafficking asa subheading under human
(17:28):
trafficking. And I just keeptelling people because in the
hopes that somebody will writeabout it, but I don't know that
it's happened yet. I I need todouble check and make sure, but
I it's just kind of mindboggling to me because and I'm
sure it wasn't done with illintent.
You know, there are people whowork at Westlaw and are
thinking, okay. Humantrafficking is a big area of
law. You know, let's put thatthere. But for you know, if you
(17:50):
know anything about thatdiscourse, it's kind of
contentious to put US chattelslavery under human trafficking.
I was like, if you put itanywhere, put it under property.
I was like, that's that's thelaws that is relevant to. Right.
That people would notice thatand be up in arms. Anyway, so as
you were revising and, you know,maybe parts of the dissertation
(18:11):
that were relevant about theObama administration's
involvement in the slavery, butmaybe it was less. Were there
kind of texts that you decidedto include that weren't in the
original version, or did youkeep all of the the same texts?
Allison Page (18:25):
No. That's a good question. The dissertation had
five chapters, and the book hasfour plus the intro and the
conclusion.
Brittany Farr (18:32):
Oh, actually, let me interrupt you and ask you to
just describe the ones that arein the book and then tell me
which ones
Allison Page (18:37):
are Yes. Yes. Good. Okay. So in the book, I I
had my introduction to thedissertation had been started in
a very different way.
So the book I get to workthrough Azi Dungey's amazing Ask
a Slave. She's a comedian and anactor and this YouTube web
series that she did. So she hadbeen herself an actor at one of
(18:58):
these, like, living historymuseums. Right? And so she
basically is drawing on herexperience of the racist and
sort of horrific things peopleasked her while she was playing
an enslaved person.
Like, what do you do for fun orwhere do you send your kids to
school? Right? So I start thebook by thinking through because
I really wanted to center notjust have it be all of these
kind of hegemonic uses of thehistory of slavery for
(19:20):
essentially, like, nefariousends, but black feminist
contestation of that. And so Istart with Ezzy Dungy, I
conclude with Kara Walker andher stunning piece and audience,
the, short film that she made orshort video, I should say, piece
in response to a subtlety, thehuge sugar sinks that she
installed at the former Domino,factory in Brooklyn. And I had
(19:43):
really wanted to write aboutthat.
So I was like, okay, great. Ihave these spaces. These are
these texts that sort of cameout as I was wrapping up the
dissertation and, you know, youhave to draw lines somewhere.
Also, when I was in Virginia, Imade this friend, Kanisha, who's
a playwright and she and I weretalking I can't remember how
this came up, but we're talkingabout Lorraine Hansberry and how
she had written a screenplay,for television called The
(20:06):
Drinking Gourd about visorslavery. And this was in 1959,
and it was never aired, becauseit was considered, and this is,
like, the quote is is just kindof amazing, like, too much of a
hot potato for television.
And in part, it was because ofhow it portrayed the
relationship between whitenessand blackness. So it like, we
can think about how rootsobviously represents whiteness
(20:28):
or sort of portrays its whitecharacters, but clearly, like
Lorraine Hansberry has a muchricher, much more complex
understanding of theinextricability of whiteness and
blackness and as racialformations in relation to to
slavery in this era she'swriting about. So I wanted to do
some work on that. So I was ableto do some archival research at
the Schomburg and find out bythe time this all was coming,
the the sort of debates withmedia industry people and the
(20:50):
executor of Hansberry's estate,this was posthumous. There was
just a lot like this trail of,you know, this correspondence
where they're sort of debating,like, why they can't air it.
And so that I knew I was alsolike, this is this really
amazing kind of text given thatif we think about so, like,
roots, for instance, was AlexHaley's. And I say this in the
(21:12):
book, like, his, you know,really sort of masculinist hero
narrative. He in the archivalwork I did at USC, you could see
all of his sort of defense of,you know, what we would call,
like, very sort of liberal oreven, like, moderate positions
in relation to race. And thesepotentially richer and
nonmasculinist, almost, youknow, almost, you know, thinking
(21:32):
about gender in a very differentway, narratives were sort of
pushed aside. Right?
Like Lorraine Hansberry wasliterally her screenplay. Never
it was never developed. It neveraired. So the dissertation was
five chapters. I had a chapteron these two made for TV,
basically, like, after schoolspecials Mhmm.
About I read that. Do you youremember that? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
(21:54):
Yeah. So both of them feature,quote, unquote, like, unruly
young black men. They're, like,listening to rap and, you know,
their clothing. This was I thinkthey were made in the late
eighties, early nineties. Soclearly part of this anxiety
about, you know, blackness andyouth as was revived in in 2016,
like Hillary Clinton callingthem super predators.
(22:14):
Right? So it was really of thisparticular moment where they get
sent back to the antebellum erato learn lessons about how to
better appreciate theircontemporary freedoms. I mean,
it's just like Why?
Brittany Farr (22:24):
Why do we keep making movies where we send
black people back to slavery?
Allison Page (22:28):
Oh my gosh. It's yeah. It's and it wasn't like
you know, obviously, OctaviaButler
Brittany Farr (22:33):
Yes. And Sankofa with everybody writes about. But
Allison Page (22:37):
Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Sankofa. Yeah. Totally. Sowhen I was thinking about the
shift from the dissertation tothe book, it did become very
clear.
As soon as I finished thedissertation, I was defending
it. I was like, wait, this wholething is about feelings. And I,
you know, I kind of gesturedtowards it in the dissertation,
but it really I do think there'sa way in which once you finish
something, then you can see,like, oh, what it's actually
(22:59):
about.
Brittany Farr (23:00):
And Yeah. Well and and just to say, your
dissertation was framed aroundpedagogy.
Allison Page (23:05):
Yeah. And citizenship. Right? And sort of
like cultural citizenship. And Ithink that chapter, although I
liked it and and at some points,I was like, maybe I should turn
that into, like, a freestandingarticle.
It kind of goes along with whatyou and I have talked about
where we're both reallyinterested in texts that are not
so obvious. Like, yes, ofcourse, this is, like, extremely
racist and terrible, and we can,like, yes, situate it in
(23:27):
governmentality in terms of thiskind of emerging
multiculturalism, emergingneoliberalism, like, you need to
behave differently. But I kindof felt like that text didn't
present itself as progressive inthe way that these other texts
that I'm looking at orinterested in did. And I I think
that is most compelling to mebecause I I do want to kind of
(23:49):
unpack the things that we thinkof as, quote, unquote, good.
Brittany Farr (23:53):
I'm curious if your approach to the things that
you choose to write about haschanged from early graduate
school days to now. I mean, minecertainly has a fair amount.
Allison Page (24:05):
I think my approach to what I'm thinking
about now, yeah, is reallydifferent. I I mean, this
probably sounds so trite, but,like, reductive understanding of
things is, like, good or bad or,like, radical or not. And now
I'm much more interested in thecomplexity of things. I mean, I
think a lot about one of mymentors, Rod Ferguson, was
always so great about beinginterested in how power power is
(24:26):
repressive, of course, but also,like, power is seductive. And it
says, you know, yes too.
Right? Not just no. And howwe're part of that, like, how
you can kind of get interpolatedinto that. And I I want to sort
of explore those types of thingsrather than, like, like, against
a politics security method whereyou're, like, I'm just gonna
choose this and I can like, tearit apart. You know, I'm much
more interested in complexity, Ithink, in a different way.
Brittany Farr (24:47):
Totally. I mean, yes. I think I started out
writing things that are like,this is good or this is bad, and
this is racist or this is not.
Allison Page (24:54):
And my
Brittany Farr (24:54):
advisers kind of pushed me to be a bit more
complicated. And I have such aclear memory of, in my qual's
defense, Kara Keeling asking mesomething. I had written a
syllabus on, like, feministsomething or other, and one of
the weeks was divided into,like, real violence versus
represented violence. And Karaasks what's sort of what's the
(25:16):
difference, and why do you havethis distinction? Are you making
this distinction just to troubleit for the students?
And can we understand thesethings that separately? And that
really blew my mind in a waythat I think I'm still making
sense of.
Allison Page (25:31):
I see my students really grapple with that kind of
question too. I think if youcome from a particular, maybe,
like, activist bent or, like,like, a political frame, you
know, where it is reallytempting to be like, well, this
is real and this is not. I seethat with my students now when
things are so harrowing in somany ways for them, and they're
like, what's the point of doingcertain things when we have real
(25:52):
things to be thinking about? Youknow? And I'm like, how can we
make sense of that?
Right?
Brittany Farr (25:57):
So you mentioned that maybe your object choice
has changed over time, andyou're really feeling it in
terms of the next project thatyou're working on. And I'll say
briefly that, you know, the nextproject is more focused on
policing. And I remember whenyou were first telling me about
it, I thought, wow. That seemsreally different from what you
were doing.
Allison Page (26:15):
Mhmm.
Brittany Farr (26:16):
But, in the chapter where you are this is
the slavery footprint chapter,which is a website where you can
go and discover how many slaveswork for you, and they have,
quote, unquote, algorithms thatcalculate that. That is kind of
where I see, the beginnings ofthis next project. So I'm just
gonna read this passage beforeyou start talking about it. And
(26:37):
you're talking about slaveryfootprint here. Through their
reliance on algorithms and datato uncover what they term,
quote, slavery, Made in a FreeWorld, which is the the parent
company, Made in a Free Worldpromulgates the notion of the
digital as not only neutral andseparate from race and
capitalism, but as the idealsolution precisely because the
technology obscures race.
(26:59):
Slavery footprint produces aform of ethical that thinks
about and acts againstracialized labor arrangements,
which are never named as such,through consumption and digital
media rather than emotion. Dataand algorithms are key sites for
the production of race, not justreifying existing racial
formations, but modifying andconstituting them as well.
(27:19):
Critically, the ongoingdatafication of race and
racialized bodies constitutes anew racial formation in the
twenty first century, one thatattempts to transcend emotion.
Allison Page (27:30):
It's so interesting to see this now and
to think about sort ofeverything that we've been
talking about. Right? Like, inthe wake of the social movements
arising out of the policekillings of Breonna Taylor and
George Floyd and all thisexplosion of, like, DEI kind of
discourse, which is anotherproject I really wanna work on
at some point, the kind ofhistory of DEI in relation to
(27:53):
the media and also how weunderstand, like, what quote,
unquote diversity means. But Ithink with this, it's so
interesting to see this as I'mI'm really kind of starting to
think about this next projectbecause I was really interested
in and did some work with areally amazing student of mine,
who's now getting her PhD ingender studies at Rutgers. Yay.
But we were starting to thinkabout policing and emotion and
(28:17):
all this discourse of technologyas as neutral, which I think
really when I was meeting withthe student, we were talking a
lot about ideas arising fromthis chapter, you know, where
race becoming something we canunderstand through data, and
this is so neutral, and this isgonna take us out of this
problem, right, of human biasand human error. And this is
(28:37):
actually really a thread that Ithink kind of appears in some
ways throughout the book. Likein chapter one, I talk about in
these TV documentaries in thenineteen sixties that are
focused on race and slavery,geared towards white audiences,
There's often this tensionbetween, you know, we're trying
to create these feelings of fearand anxiety, right, for white
viewers, but also showing data.Like, I actually just taught one
(29:01):
of the documentaries in one ofmy classes and it ends with, and
I talk about this in the book,Mike Wallace bringing in a
statistician to to talk about,like, how white people are
feeling with respect to this wasin the mid nineteen sixties, the
civil rights movement.
And so there's this tensionbetween data and feelings and
sort of them being separatedfrom one another. And as these,
(29:21):
like, how do we think aboutrace? How do we quote, unquote
solve the problem of race that Itake this up in chapter two with
roots that was very explicitly,like, let's feel our way to the
solution. And so I think one ofthe things that was interesting
to me about slavery footprint isthat it really was like, okay.
We're gonna just turn everythinginto that we can solve
everything with an algorithm orapps or sort of datafication.
(29:42):
Within media studies, there's alot of really excellent work
about the rise of datafication,this kind of larger assemblage
of technological solutions toissues. I mean, there's
certainly, like, amazing workand folks at the intersections
of environmental studies and andthinking about climate and and
media culture. And there's a lotof really great work that is
theorizing predictive policing,the kind of implication of
(30:06):
policing with thesetechnologies. And so I I knew
that I wanted to work onpolicing in some ways after I
had read Simone Brown's reallywonderful book, Dark Matters,
which looks at the relationshipbetween blackness and
surveillance in The US and shesort of talks about in some ways
like technologies, like runawayslave posters as this sort of
(30:26):
tool of policing, reallycommunicative tool of policing.
What I want to do in this nextbook is really historicize this
because so often so much of thework on technology and
technology and race is reallycontemporary, which is critical.
Right? We need to think aboutall the ways that these
technologies that really rely onthis discourse of neutrality are
(30:48):
of course not neutral. Right?And then the ways that they are
reinscribing racism and all ofthis kind of racial
categorization in the name ofneutrality. But I wanna look at
the much kind of longer historyof that, and this gets us back
to some of the kind of quotidianobjects that you and I have
talked about where I'm hopingthat when I get to spend some
time in the archive, I'll beable to see, you know, how media
(31:11):
technologies, in particular,were talked about at this kind
of moment of ascendance in termsof policing.
So actually in the nineteensixties, in 1967, Johnson was
really obsessed with, like,commissions and reports. And so
there was a commission onpolicing that had a whole
chapter devoted to how can weuse information technology. This
(31:34):
is the term they use to, again,and this is their language, to
improve policing. Right? Sothere's this really early
interest that I think is superfascinating, and I also really
wanna focus on how highly policecommunities in this time were
really pushing back against andcontesting this emergence of
technology because we do reallysee this push, right, for more
(31:55):
high-tech policing.
I mean, certainly, this isreally ubiquitous today, like,
more cameras. You know, if weuse algorithms, we're gonna be
able to sort of get around thisissue rather than, of course,
that's not the fruit issue of ofpolicing and racism. But I wanna
kind of spend time thinkingabout how did this discourse
that's now so normalized, wherethis this moment how did it kind
(32:17):
of become common sense and andwhere did that sort of happen? I
had this research assistant thissummer do all this work going
through all of these papers thatthe Schomburg had sent me
through these activist groupsbased in New York. I'm working
on the NYPD because it's thelargest police force in The US
and and huge in the world and areally early kind of proponent
(32:39):
of high-tech policing.
Was it as diverse in
Brittany Farr (32:42):
the sixties as it is now?
Allison Page (32:44):
You know what's so interesting is actually when I
was able to get to the archive,I watched this fascinating
recruitment video for the NYPDthat was, I wanna say, like, mid
seventies, and it featured allsorts of black police officers
and and women like, white womenpolice officers, police officers
of of color. Like, it was sortof multiracial where it was
(33:06):
like, this is what I got fromthe NYPD. You know, being a
police officer has allowed me todo blah blah blah. And they had
a little section on, like, I'velearned computer skills. Right?
Like, it was really trying torecruit people through the the
the tech. It was superinteresting. I watched it, like,
four times. I was just like, ah,this is very rich text. I really
I just need to carve out sometime because she really had gone
through all of this material.
(33:27):
I'm also I had another researchassistant last year look at a
lot of institutional stuff, likeall the these police journals
called law enforcement news inthe way that she looked at every
issue from the seventies. She'samazing. Also named Britney. She
pulled out all of the partswhere they were sort of talking
about technology, where theywere talking about wanting to
have more funding for this, howthis would sort of help policing
(33:49):
in, you know, these ways. Youknow, I have to, again, find
some time to really sit downwith that.
But I do find myself more andmore really wanting to kind of
think through what you and Italk about as, like, the mundane
in relation to how this gets sonormalized and becomes such a
kind of hegemonic idea.
Brittany Farr (34:06):
Yeah. I mean, I love the idea of taking
something boring and making itinteresting. That's
Allison Page (34:12):
Yeah. Because often, I mean, what, like, power
so banal, you know, and it'sit's so important to think
through that. Yeah. Exactly.
Brittany Farr (34:20):
I think that's actually something that I kind
of witnessed when I lived in LAbecause I was writing so much
about representation and thenseeing behind the scenes how
stuff got made and how it wasall those little decisions
mostly born of, like, lack oftime or money that resulted in
these upsetting representations.It's like it's little things.
You know? So you've talked a lotabout archives and loving the
(34:42):
archives and going to archives,needing to go to archives. Do
you consider yourself ahistorian?
Like, what is your relationshipto the discipline of history?
Which is maybe not gonna beinteresting for many people, but
it's particularly interesting tome because I recently had to
answer a lot of questions about,you know, am I a historian or
not?
Allison Page (35:00):
You are a legal historian.
Brittany Farr (35:01):
Thank you. Historian. That's the official
answer. So
Allison Page (35:04):
I'm sure real historians would be like, you
are absolutely not a historianto me. Well, I think my advisor,
Laurelette, does a ton ofhistorical work. She really
instilled in me a kind ofrespect for the archives, right,
and this this chance to kind ofget to dig through. It's almost
like I I think as a on apersonal note, like, I love,
like, thrifting. So it's almostlike thrifting through you know,
(35:27):
you just get to sift through abunch of old stuff.
We've talked a lot aboutinterdisciplinarity with one
another, and I I love how I wasable my training was very
interdisciplinary. I think thatproduces really rich work.
That's partly why I wanted to beon Minnesota because I think
Minnesota publishes so muchtheoretically important and rich
(35:47):
and interdisciplinary work, andit really values that, which
really aligns with how I like tothink about scholarship and and
sort of my methods. Let me sayit this way. I looked at
historians like StephanieSmallwood, who I think is
amazing in, you know, the kindof archival work that she does
really, really detailed, right,beautiful, rich, but then the
reading of it and thetheoretical work that she
(36:10):
produces from the archivalresearch, which I think is
possibly unusual for some inhistory as a discipline.
I think Stephanie Smallwood is awonderful example of and I think
your work is a wonderful exampleof Thank you.
Brittany Farr (36:23):
Thank you. Which you can soon read in the UCLA
law review.
Allison Page (36:27):
Yay. Good plug. I'm gonna separate you out
because you are a historian andwe need to, like, really say,
you know, but That doesn't
Brittany Farr (36:36):
matter now. I have a job.
Allison Page (36:37):
Yeah. Yeah. That great. Great. Yeah.
No. I mean, I think we'repointing to the difficulty of
disciplinarity and sort offitting yourself into these by
or making yourself legible inorder to to get a job or to, you
know, know what conversationsyou're speaking to. And that's
why I think interdisciplinarityis so important to me because I
wanna be able to be in severalconversations, and that kind of
(36:58):
work has been so meaningful tomy own thinking. In terms of
historical stuff, I I do tend tolike, I know you and I have
talked a lot about method. Ihave to teach a lot of methods
courses at ODU, which has reallytransformed my relationship to
thinking about method because Iused to be like, I don't know.
I just read. Like, what do I do?What you know, it's hard for, I
think, people who are nothistorians or who are not
(37:19):
ethnographers or who not, youknow, have these, like, very
clear cut methods.
Brittany Farr (37:23):
I mean, what are historians doing other than
reading?
Allison Page (37:25):
Yeah. They read a lot, but they can really you
know, like, having the sexinessof the archival work. Right?
Like, I don't who other than uswould call that sexy, but, you
know I know. It's it is verylegible, right, when you're
trying to describe, like, mycolleague who's a TV study
scholar, he's like, I'm nevergonna get external funding
because no one's ever gonna belike, yeah.
I need to pay you to watch TV.Right? Like, which is obviously
(37:47):
a gross reduction andoversimplification of what he
does. Having to teach methodsand and really working on it and
thinking about it in relation tothis book, I'm like, oh, yeah.
Okay.
I feel much clearer aboutthinking about the politics of
knowledge and sort of how wecome to articulate what we know
through sort of methodologicalterms.
Brittany Farr (38:06):
Mhmm. Mhmm. I mean, I think our shared
approach to history kind of goesback to our love of Saidiya
Hartman, right, who I think ofas a historian, but
Allison Page (38:16):
Two.
Brittany Farr (38:16):
Is not. I keep being shocked to discover she is
not in the history department.Like, are you sure, though?
Like, I I'm like, I don't know.I think she's in a history
department.
Like, she's she's certainly not.And I think as I was sort of
making the shift fromcommunication to legal
scholarship, and figuring outhow to make my work legible to
legal historians, discoveringthat there's just I considered
(38:39):
myself, like, pretty familiarwith scholarship on the history
of slavery, but there's justthere's a whole different track
of stuff about the history ofslavery that's being produced by
historians compared to what somehistorians are writing, but also
cultural studies and English andfilm studies. There's a whole
separate literature that and thetwo of them are not really in
(39:01):
conversation with one another.Right. I think for some
historians, it's very much thebelief that, you know, you can
only say something about thepast.
Right? Like, you're doing hityou're a historian because you
care about history, whereas,like, you're a historian because
you care about the present.Right? Like, the worst thing you
can say to certain historiansis, like, you're a presentist.
They're Oh my gosh.
(39:21):
How dare you? And I'm like,yeah. Of course. Why wouldn't I
be? And I think there's a littlebit of a generational divide
there too because I, you know, Ihave friends who actually have
history PhDs who have a muchmore similar approach to me.
Allison Page (39:36):
Yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking of who you're thinking
of, I imagine. I think one ofthe worst things you could
probably say to a historian is,like, I'm taking a Foucauldian
approach. Like, I wanna, this isa genealogical, like, history of
the present.
There's also an attention topower in a way that I think
cultural studies can give usthat that's why I like to sort
of combine scholarship because Ithink you're absolutely right.
(39:57):
Like, I think about people,like, the work of, like,
Christina Sharp or, like I said,Stephanie Smallwood probably
less so, but certainly, like,people working on chattel
slavery and and questions ofrepresentation and performance
and cultural techno right? Like,all these conversations that are
happening in cultural studies, Ican imagine some of the history
of of slavery books that you'rethinking of, they're not in
(40:19):
conversation with one another.When one of the early readers of
my book was like, here's someother like, Fabiola Glyph's book
and maybe Jennifer Morgan's worktoo. Right?
Like, there's some really greatwork that I think this is the
problem of siloing because thenyou you miss out on all of this.
Brittany Farr (40:34):
Mhmm. Yeah. I know. I thought, you know, I've
got a PhD. I'm good.
And then discovered just so muchstuff I was unaware of and had
to read if I wanted to considermyself a historian of slavery.
But then on the other hand, youhave someone like Walter
Johnson, who is a dyed in thewool historian, write something,
like, on agency, which I wouldput more in the camp of the,
like, Christina Sharps.
Allison Page (40:54):
Yes. Which was really central to my chapter on
games.
Brittany Farr (40:57):
Especially being in a law school, that article
kind of haunts me. Some of thisis just the way that our legal
system is structured, that youhave an individual plaintiff
bringing individual claims infront of a court, and students
are being trained to be zealousadvocates for their clients. And
so I think there's a tendency towant to look at history and
think about it in terms ofagency, and who has agency and
(41:20):
who doesn't have agency. And sobecause I write about poor black
workers right after the civilwar using the law in ways that
people don't expect. One of theways that many people come to
the project is saying, wow, thisis incredible that you have,
like, rediscovered this agencythat they have.
I don't have a good answer for,like, how
Allison Page (41:40):
to actually talk talk about
Brittany Farr (41:42):
it because also, you know, it's very common in
legal scholarship to want tohave, like, a normative
takeaway, which otherdisciplines, nobody wants to do
that. Like, don't ask me whatwould happen. What are you
talking about? Get out of here.But the other thing is sort of,
you know, is this a positivestory of what's happening?
Is this a negative story? Is thelaw doing good here? What should
(42:02):
the law have been? All of thesequestions that I don't have good
answers for, but am haunted by.
Allison Page (42:08):
Right. No. Totally. Because how can like,
the frames that we're so trainedinto seeing in these like,
especially, I think, in terms oflegal work, obviously, I'm not
I'm law adjacent now, I think,given you and my My case is more
Brittany Farr (42:22):
law adjacent. Yeah.
Allison Page (42:25):
We've been talking about this a little bit. Like,
racial feelings are everywhere,both in terms of all of this
kind of explosion around DEI asa one of the key institutional
responses to social movementpushes around anti black
violence. And so we have thatwith all this anti critical race
(42:45):
theory. It's really it is makingme think of Sarah's work on
popular misogyny and popularfeminism sort of existing
intention at the same time. Andso here, I think we can see this
just intensified anti criticalrace theory, this renewed push
to clamp down on how the historyof slavery in particular is
being taught.
Right? Certainly, this extendsto all sorts of things. I think
(43:07):
I saw something the other daythat one school district got rid
of, like, the girls who code,but, like, some book about
coding and girls, which is justreally amazing. I mean Just
because
Brittany Farr (43:19):
talking about girls is sexist.
Allison Page (43:21):
Right. Totally. So there's just this, like,
twisting of social movementlanguage. One of the things I
keep coming back to so in myfirst chapter, I look at, you
know, these televisiondocumentaries about race and
slavery, and I look at this oneand I I don't get to go into it.
I talk a little bit about it inthe book, but it's really has
kind of been something thatstuck with me where the police
(43:42):
were being asked to this policeforce, and it was just like a
throwaway line in one of thedocumentaries, but we're being
asked to undergo training aroundI think they use the word, like,
prejudice maybe anddiscrimination.
And I have been thinking aboutthat more. I just was reading
something in American quarterlyabout, like, the history a
little bit historicizingdiversity work, quote, unquote,
(44:05):
and in terms of institutions.But I really I want to go back
to and try to find some of thosetraining because they were
mediated. Right. Sort of usingvideos and films to shape
behavior and to kind of shapethe ways that people think about
race in an institutional contextin the service of adhering to
new ideas about workplaces anddiscrimination.
(44:27):
And I just keep thinking aboutthis so much. This is, like, my
next next project. Like, I knowI'm gonna do the policing book,
you know, but then I I do reallywanna think about, like, this
history of diversity discourse,how it gets taken up in terms of
media culture. Like, I think allthe time about the videos that,
you know, like, at my job thatwhen I started, like, you need
to watch about, like, harassmentand discrimination. So So I'm
(44:50):
just curious if you had thoughtsabout all of the ways that we
have all the this explosion ofDEI initiatives that are also
articulated a lot throughfeelings.
There's all this sort ofpushback against it, but how
this really came to be this kindof institutional response to,
you know, social movements. Imean, obviously, it's maybe this
the theme of this is low hangingfruit where, like, an
(45:11):
institution can be like, look,we're doing something, and we
don't actually have to thinkabout, sort of more material
changes or shifts we could bemaking.
Brittany Farr (45:19):
I think that some places are thinking of those
programs as more materialinstitutional changes. I don't
think, you know, implementingdifferent policies like that is
necessarily the most superficialthing one could do. It's kind of
an in between in terms of what,you know, what would be an
effective way of, addressingdiversity. In a way, it's a
(45:42):
little bit like a prehistory ofwhat Jennifer Nash talks talks
about in black feminismreimagined, I think, is maybe
the title. Title Mad Libs.
Yeah. Oh, that's what I wasgonna say. When I was doing my
initial, like, training videos,I had never had to watch active
shooter drill videos before andwas stunned. Have you?
Allison Page (46:03):
No. Oh, okay. That makes
Brittany Farr (46:04):
me feel better because I was texting my friend
Felipe, and he was like, what?You've never seen this? Like,
that's a clear media studiespaper right there. It was I was
recording it on my phone. I cansend you the because I was
actors acting out an actorshooter Wow.
Like, thing. And, you know, youhave people fleeing. There's
somebody who plays the shooter.There are, like, different
(46:27):
chapters to it, so you have to,like, answer questions after
each chapter. And, like, there'sthe one chapter that's, like,
bar the door and then pick up aheavy object, and you see
everybody doing it and, like,getting ready to do it.
Allison Page (46:39):
Oh my god. Yeah.
Brittany Farr (46:40):
It's a friend of mine who was at I think when he
was at Northwestern, they gotinto some it it was a bit of a
hot potato. They had they gavetoo much backstory on the active
shooter.
Allison Page (46:53):
And so
Brittany Farr (46:54):
it was, like, too immersive, and people were
really upset and kind of, like,up in trouble. Anyway, I don't
think anyone has actuallywritten about them as media
texts. This is not what you'retalking about in terms of
diversity, but I was justshocked. And, like, someone has
to sit around and think aboutcasting also. Right?
Purslow shooter's a white man,which seems like well, one is I
think accurate, and two, themost, like, politically safe
(47:17):
thing probably. But then therewere interstitials with anyway,
the whole thing was just I wasshocked. Oh. But I can think of
comedies that have fakediversity training videos.
Allison Page (47:30):
Yeah. Right?
Brittany Farr (47:31):
Because they're they're such a common part of
our culture that there's a wholeother discourse that is making
fun of them on what we do in theshadows. I don't know if you're
still watching it. But, like,the vampire council's having a
meeting, and they bring theyroll a television in and say,
like, HR made us make this videoabout harassment policies
(47:53):
policies and whatever for thevampire council meeting.
Allison Page (47:56):
Let's write about that.
Brittany Farr (47:57):
The TV comes on, and it's some, like, grizzled
old man. And he said it justsays, do whatever you want.
There are no rules, and then itends. And then we have it away.
Like, that is just so now I'mgonna, like, go back on what I
said earlier about, like, maybeit is a bit more of a meaningful
change because if there's thatlevel of, like, cultural
(48:18):
critique of them, I think likeeveryone kind of agreed.
Even those of us who are reallycommitted to diversity and
equality, there's these things,like, running in the background
and Hello. Clicking thequestions and aren't super
engaged with it. I think there'san interesting kind of corollary
maybe with professionalresponsibility classes, which
(48:38):
are things that you have to takein law school. And I wonder if
it's something you have to do inmedical school. But the PR
classes, which there's also awhole, like, political economy
thing there in terms of, like,many law schools staff them with
adjuncts and don't hire in PR,and it's a test that you have to
take in order to get barred.
You have to, like, pass aprofessional responsibility
test, and so students are thentaught professional
(49:01):
responsibility and also somehowin some ways to take a test. And
from friends who have, like,taken the class and the test,
they're like, it sort of teachesyou that the answer is the,
like, slightly less ethicalthing than you think it would
be. Yes. But, yes, the way thatbig ideological goals like
diversity or inclusion are thenoperationalized into, like,
(49:24):
legislation and then regulationsand then, like, company
policies, I think, is a reallyinteresting question. And then,
like, all the way down to theactual, like, making of the
video.
Yes. And there's not that eitherof us are, like, media industry
people, but, like, even just,like, who's making these videos?
Yeah. How are they getting made?Like, what are they paying
(49:46):
people?
How are they casting it? Whatpool of actors are they drawing
from?
Allison Page (49:51):
Yes.
Brittany Farr (49:51):
Are they are they real actors? Are but I don't
there's just I mean, there's alot there that I think is really
rich and interesting,particularly in the wake of the
Priyanna Taylor, George Floydsummer where all of these
companies are coming out andcommitting to diversity. Here's
all the things that we're gonnado. And some of them actually
taking time and coming up withreally thoughtful
Allison Page (50:13):
Mhmm.
Brittany Farr (50:13):
Responses. But I think kind of universally,
trainings are one of them.
Allison Page (50:19):
Mhmm.
Brittany Farr (50:20):
There's not really a standard for these
trainings.
Allison Page (50:24):
I really see a connection from some of the
themes of the book to theseideas.
Brittany Farr (50:29):
Yeah. Absolutely. In the way that feelings are
managed because it's it remindsme, especially the clicking
through of the programs comparedto the watching of the video,
does make me think of yourchapter on the video game.
Right? And who are the actorsand sort of where the
culpability is coming from forthe problems that these videos
or programs are seeking toremedy.
Allison Page (50:50):
Yes. Yes. Totally. Britney, I'm so glad we got to
talk today, and I'm so glad thisis in our besties archive.
Brittany Farr (50:57):
Yes. I'm very excited to have this. It feels
very special. Thank you forasking me to be the
Allison Page (51:02):
one to do it. Oh, the best. Thank you for doing it
and for thinking through thesethings with me. And and I will
just say as by way ofconclusion, like, Britney really
read every word of this book,like, multiple times. She was so
central to to its formation, soI'm so grateful and
Brittany Farr (51:19):
Including the acknowledgments. I know. More
than one.
Allison Page (51:23):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She also. So, yes, I just we're
endlessly grateful.
Best thing to come out of aconference.
Brittany Farr (51:30):
Yes. The yeah. Alright.
Allison Page (51:33):
Thank you. Thank you.
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