Join Brown University Library as we host a cross-disciplinary panel discussion centered on Kimberly Juanita Brown’s Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual (Paperback from MIT Press, February 2024). Open access digital edition by Brown University Digital Publications; full digital release June 2024). Speakers include the author, Kimberly Juanita Brown, Associate Professor, Department of English and Creative Writing and Director of the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life at Dartmouth College; Kim Gallon, Brown University Associate Professor of Africana Studies; Juliet Hooker, Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Political Science; Kevin Quashie, Brown University Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in English; and Avery Willis Hoffman, Artistic Director of the Brown Arts Institute and Professor of the Practice of Arts and Classics.

Hybrid event. Free and open to the public. Zoom link: https://brown.zoom.us/j/98925219331

• Date: Wednesday, April 3, 2024
• Location: Willis Reading Room at the John Hay Library, 20 Prospect St, Providence
• Program:
  • 5 – 5:25 p.m.: Book sale and author signing
  • 5:30 p.m.: Welcome remarks
  • 5:45 p.m.: Reading by author Kimberly Juanita Brown
  • 6 p.m.: Panel conversation
  • 6:45 p.m.: Audience Q&A
  • 7 p.m.: Reception

Sponsored by Brown University Library, Africana Studies, Brown Arts Institute, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Comparative Literature, History of Art and Architecture, Modern Culture and Media, and Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

On Seeing

Mortevivum is the inaugural title of On Seeing, a new multimodal book series published by The MIT Press and Brown University Digital Publications. Devoted to visual literacy, publications foreground the political agency, critical insight, and social impact inscribed in visuality and representation. Centering underrepresented perspectives and understudied questions, books in the series articulate complex ideas about how we see, comprehend, and participate in the visual world.

Mortevivum

Mortevivum is a powerful examination of the unsettling history of photography and its fraught relationship to global antiblackness. 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 antiblackness.

Speakers

Kimberly Juanita Brown

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 of English and creative writing. Her research and teaching gather at the intersection of African American/African diaspora literature and visual culture studies. She is particularly 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 current book project, Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual, was released by MIT Press in February 2024, with a full digital edition from Brown University Digital Publications slated for June 2024. Mortevivum explores the relationship between photography and histories of antiblackness on the cusp of the twenty-first century. 

The URL for Mortevivum is https://on-seeing-mortevivum.org/.

Kim Gallon

Kim Gallon is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. Her work investigates the cultural dimensions of the Black Press in the early twentieth century. Her first book, Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press (University of Illinois Press, 2020) argues that African American newspapers fostered Black sexual expression, agency, and identity in the first half of the twentieth century.

Gallon is also the author of the field defining article, “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities.” 

Her more recent work focuses on the spatial relationship between reading and residential segregation in Baltimore in the twentieth century.  She is aso working on a book project on race, digital technology, and health equity. 

Gallon is the founder and director of two black digital humanities projects, The Black Press Research Collective and COVID Black.

Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, Social Science Research Council and Spencer Foundation.

Juliet Hooker

Juliet Hooker is Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Political Science. She is a political theorist specializing in racial justice, Black political thought, Latin American political thought, democratic theory, and contemporary political theory. She has also written on racism and Afro-descendant and indigenous politics in Latin America. Before coming to Brown, she was a faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss (Princeton University Press, 2023), Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos (Oxford, 2017), Race and the Politics of Solidarity (Oxford, 2009), and editor of Black and Indigenous Resistance in the Americas: From Multiculturalism to Racist Backlash (Lexington Books, 2020). Theorizing Race in the Americas was awarded the American Political Science Association’s 2018 Ralph Bunche Book Award for the best work in ethnic and cultural pluralism and the 2018 Best Book Award of the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. Prof. Hooker served as co-Chair of the American Political Science Association’s Presidential Task Force on Racial and Social Class Inequalities in the Americas (2014-2015), and as Associate Director of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin (2009-2014). She has been the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the DuBois Institute for African American Research at Harvard, and the Advanced Research Collaborative at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. 

Kevin Quashie

Kevin E. Quashie is Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in English at Brown University. He teaches black cultural and literary studies and is a professor in the department of English. Primarily, he focuses on black feminism, queer studies, and aesthetics, especially poetics. He is the author or editor of four books, most recently The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (2012) and Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being (2021). Black Aliveness has been awarded two prizes: the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association (2022) and the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism from the Poetry Foundation (2022). Currently, he is thinking about literary criticism as a form of estrangement and consolation or, said another way, he is thinking about the workings and potency of black sentences.

Avery Willis Hoffman

A writer, artistic director, creative producer and curator of public programs, Avery Willis Hoffman joined Brown University in 2020 as the inaugural Artistic Director of the Brown Arts Institute and Professor of the Practice of Arts and Classics.

In her recent role as inaugural Program Director at Park Avenue Armory in New York, Avery curated and produced innovative and diverse public programming initiatives, including numerous large- and intimate-scale cultural events: Artist and Curatorial Talks, a Confrontational Comedy Series (2016-2019), the annual Culture in a Changing America Symposium (2017-2020), Carrie Mae Weems: Shape of Things Salon (2017), the United Lenape Nations’s first Manhattan-based Pow Wow (2018), Theaster Gates’s Black Artist Retreat 2019, the multi-partner digital initiative 100 Years | 100 Women, marking the centennial of the 19^th Amendment (2020), the 12 episode podcast project, Helga: The Armory Conversations (2021), and Carrie Mae Weems: The Land of Broken Dreams Convening (2021). 

Prior to the Armory, Avery was a senior Project Developer at Ralph Appelbaum Associates, a museum planning and design firm, where she conducted research and developed content for a number of special projects. Between 2010-2015, her primary project was the development of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C. Avery has also held positions at Focus Features, Clinton Global Initiative, and TED.

For nearly two decades, her professional career has included multiple projects with acclaimed director Peter Sellars, including on his international productions of Shakespeare’s Othello, Mozart’s opera Zaide, New Crowned Hope Festival, and Toni Morrison’s Desdemona. From 2016-2020, she produced the international tour of FLEXN, Sellars’s collaboration with choreographer Reggie Gray and the Brooklyn flex community, which premiered at the Armory in March 2015 and has since been presented at the Marseille Festival, Napoli Teatro Festival, Holland Festival, New Zealand Festival, Sao Paolo Brasil Sesc, La Villette Paris, Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival, with residencies at Dartmouth College and Princeton University, and The Kennedy Center.

Brown University Digital Publications — a collaboration between the University Library and the Dean of the Faculty, generously launched with support from the Mellon Foundation with additional support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services — creates exciting new conditions for the production and sharing of knowledge. Widely recognized as accessible, intentional, and inclusive, Brown’s novel, university-based approach to digital content development is helping to set the standards for the future of scholarship in the digital age. 

Established in 1962, the MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design. MIT Press books and journals are known for their intellectual daring, scholarly standards, interdisciplinary focus, and distinctive design.