Technological Emergence/Emergency: Screen Media and the Contexts of Carcerality

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Talk Format

Abstract

This panel scrutinizes the complex discourses of media technologies that are framed as enabling resistance and protest at the same time that they are implicated in the circulation and monetization of racialized suffering. While this commodification of suffering has its own logic within our contemporary attention economy, the antecedents that have informed this relationship can be found in past technologies embedded into carceral contexts. Therefore, this panel examines the entanglements of media technology in past and present states of emergency and emergence, specifically media technologies’ role in the construction and management of racialized populations deemed criminal, Other, and/or pathological and entered into carceral regimes. Situated in disability studies, carceral studies, women’s studies, visual culture and digital media studies, and history, and unified by critical race studies, this panel offers different avenues of investigation to understand the histories and media logics that have led to our generalized state of (non)crisis. The papers excavate different genealogies of technological emergence, screen media, and state-sanctioned states of emergency. Joshua Mitchell examines how the introduction of televisions into prisons in the 1950s acted as a pedagogical and governance tool, serving to buttress the racial and gendered logics already underpinning carceral contexts. Olivia Banner focuses on the late 1960s integration of computers and videotape into psychiatric institutions and argues that the mobilization of screen media served to both legitimize a discipline in crisis as well as recenter whiteness and pathologize blackness. Wendy Sung scrutinizes the contemporary visuality of anti-Black racial violence through mobile phone technologies, arguing that progress narratives of empathy and technological rescue have delimited the very terms of racial justice. Ruby Tapia highlights the camera and photography as the means by which the state assigns criminality but that also, in the hands of artist-photographer Taryn Simon, are wielded to expose and interrupt these mediated logics by which the state condemns people to the social and physical death of the prison. Together, these papers constellate around carcerality in their concern with media’s role in the engendering and management of states of emergency.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Alexis Lothian, University of Maryland-College Park

Individual Presentations

• Introducing Televisions into the 1950s Prison - Joshua Mitchell, University of Southern California

• Screen Media, Racialization, and Pathologization in the Late 1960s - Olivia Banner, The University of Texas at Dallas

• Black Mirror, Racial Violence, and the Refusal of Empathy as Transformative Justice - Wendy Sung, The University of Texas at Dallas

• Dead Innocents: Photo-Phenomenologies of The Criminal and The Revenant - Ruby C Tapia, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

Comment

• Alexis Lothian, University of Maryland-College Park