Photography, antiblackness and the politics of the visual
Date/Time
Location
Clark Art Institute (225 South Street, Williamstown, MA 01267, Williamstown MA)
In this Research and Academic Program lecture, Kimberly Juanita Brown, Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing and Director of the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life at Dartmouth College, examines photography’s long history as tethered to global histories of antiblackness that have ritualized ways of seeing for the viewing public.
She unpacks what she calls a “cartography of the ocular” as one of the important ways to measure legibility in images of violated black subjects.
The talk is free and open to all. Accessible seats available; for information, call 413-458-0524
Brown focuses her research and teaching gather at the intersection of African American/African diaspora literature and visual culture studies.
“In particular,” she says, “I am interested in the relationship between visuality and black subjectivity. My 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.
“My current book project, Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual is forthcoming by MIT Press. This project explores the relationship between photography and histories of antiblackness on the cusp of the 21st century.”