Keynote 4 : Kimberly Juanita Brown (Room 121)
Title: Grief in the Dark
*Please note that this lecture will be presented on Zoom. Audience members will have the option to watch in the lecture hall or on personal devices.
Abstract: In this talk Brown contemplates recognizable sites of mourning: forced migration and enslavement, bodily violations, imprisonment, and death. And she examines sites that do not register immediately as archives of grief: the landscape of southern U.S. slave plantations, a spontaneous street party, a quilt constructed out of the clothing worn by a loved one, a dance performance to hold the memory of history, and an aeolian harp installed at an institute of European art, among others. In this, the book offers a framework of mourning while black, within the parameters of contemporary artistic production. Brown asks: How do you mourn those you are not supposed to see? And where does the grief go? She shows us that grief is everywhere if we are invested in looking.
Bio:
Kimberly Juanita Brown is Associate Professor at Dartmouth and one of the key organizers of the international IAVC conference on Kinship-Abolition-Freedom. Brown will present work that builds on the just published book, MorteVivum (MIT Press, 2024). Brown’s research and teaching gather at the intersection of African American/African diaspora literature and visual culture studies. In particular, Brown is interested in the relationship between visuality and black subjectivity. Brown’s 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. Brown’s latest book, Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual is just out from MIT Press. This project explores the relationship between photography and histories of anti-blackness on the cusp of the twenty-first century.
Respondent: Matthew H. Brown
Matthew H. Brown is a scholar of media and politics in modern Africa. He is the author of Indirect Subjects: Nollywood’s Local Address (Duke UP, 2021), which explores the relationship between state television and commercial filmmaking in Nigeria. His other publications include research on popular culture, print literature, music, and literary and critical cultural theory. Brown serves on the editorial board of the Journal of African Cinemas. His teaching covers African literature, screen media, popular culture, and theories of African cultural studies.