Event
Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual (On Seeing)
3401 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA
Since photography's invention, black life has been presented as fraught, short, agonizingly filled with violence, and indifferent to intervention: living death—mortevivum—in a series of still frames that refuse a complex humanity. In Mortevivum, Kimberly Juanita Brown shows us how the visual logic of documentary photography and the cultural legacy of empire have come together to produce the understanding that blackness and suffering—and death—are inextricable. Brown traces this idea from the earliest images of the enslaved to the latest newspaper photographs of black bodies, from the United States and South Africa to Haiti and Rwanda, documenting the enduring, pernicious connection between photography and a global history of anti-blackness.
Featured Speaker
Kimberly Juanita Brown's research and teaching gather at the intersection of African American/African diaspora literature and visual culture studies. In particular, she is interested in the relationship between visuality and black subjectivity. Her first book, The Repeating Body: Slavery's Visual Resonance in the Contemporary (Duke University Press, 2015) examines slavery's profound ocular construction and the presence and absence of seeing in relation to the plantation space. Her latest book project, Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual is published by MIT Press. This project explores the relationship between photography and histories of antiblackness on the cusp of the twenty-first century.