Sight and Site: Bounded Geographies in Contemporary Representations of Slavery

Kimberley Brown
Tuesday, September 26, 2017 - 7:30pm

Kimberly Juanita Brown’s research engages the site of the visual as a way to negotiate the parameters of race, gender, and belonging.  Her book, The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary (Duke University Press) examines slavery’s profound ocular construction, the presence and absence of seeing in relation to the plantation space and the women who existed there. She is currently at work on her second book, tentatively titled “Mortevivum: Photography, Melancholy, and the Politics of the Visual.”  This project examines images of the dead in the New York Times in 1994 from four geographies: South Africa, Rwanda, Sudan, and Haiti. Brown argues that a cartography of the ocular exists in documentary images to normalize global violence, particularly if the victims are black. Brown is the founder and convener of the Dark Room: Race and Visual Culture Studies Seminar.  The Dark Room is a working group of scholars who are invested in the intersection of critical race theory and visual culture studies.

Co-sponsored by the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, OCAD University, and the Cultural and Artistic Practices for Social Environmental Studies, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University.

Venue & Address: 
room 187, 100 McCaul Street