Book Talk: Mortevivum

Friday, March 14th on Zoom • 12 Noon EST • 5pm BST

Event held via Zoom • Registration Link

Photography Network membership is required to attend.

Please join us for a book talk with Dr. Kimberly Juanita Brown. In this talk, Brown will discuss her new book Mortevivum, winner of the 2024 Photography Network book prize.

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, 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 antiblackness.

 

About the speaker:

Kimberly Juanita Brown is the inaugural director of the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life at Dartmouth College, where she is also an associate professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing. She is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of contemporary literatures of the Black diaspora and visual culture studies. She is the author of The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary (Duke University Press, 2015), and Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual (MIT Press, 2024). Brown’s third book, Black Elegies, is forthcoming from MIT Press in early 2025. Black Elegies concerns the art of mourning in contemporary art and literature. She is the founder and convener of the Dark Room: Race and Visual Culture Studies Seminar. The Dark Room is a working group of women of color scholars, artists, and curators whose work examines critical race theory and visual culture studies.

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