Mortevivum

“Across three chapters and the time and space of Kimberly Juanita Brown's 'cartographies of the ocular,' we encounter her painstaking forensic attention to the join of photography and antiblackness, to these devastating photographs, to how black people in our fungibility become the dead we see and simultaneously unsee—constrained by the medium of our dis/appearance. Cogent, beautifully conceived and written, and utterly convincing, Mortevivum is an instruction, like the poetry of Clifton and Trethewey, in how one might stay with and make present the black living and the dead. Mortevivum is a profoundly necessary work, one that enacts regard. This is the book I have been waiting for.”

Christina Sharpe, Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities, York University, Toronto; author of Ordinary Notes

“'This is how you make a gelatin silver print.' So begins Kimberly Juanita Brown's insistent instructive poetic demanding book, as if to say this is how you can read, look, behold. Brown's thinking about photography collates the apparatus, its ideological limits, its enactments—a forceful study through an archive of images, texts, and poems. Shuttling across black diasporic contexts—South Africa, Rwanda, Haiti, the United States—Brown unearths 'cartographies of the ocular,' asserting that 'when photography and antiblackness are conjoined, black people become the dead that we see.' The intelligence here sears into heart what is impossible and terrible about visualizing blackness. And still, Mortevivum charts a path for us to read, see, feel, think, and look more intelligently—from the slurred violences of the visuality commonly fit to print, to the possibility of blurs that 'reflect our interior lives while leaving room for the exigencies of movement, stillness, and time.' It is daunting and necessary, this seeing the living death all around us; it is astonishing, this visual and critical and literary archive Brown mobilizes for our better seeing.”

Kevin Quashie, Professor of English, Brown University; author of Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being

“Kimberly Juanita Brown's book brilliantly demonstrates how, since its inception, photography's white users and operators have turned it into a site where racialized bodies are left unshielded, captives, of viewers who are trained to see as white how gratuitous black death is reaffirmed in a multitude of photographic frames. What unfolds is an inspiring potential history—a call to recognize what Brown calls “the living thing” that is photography, which is delineable from “the dead offering,” the outcome of white supremacy. An important achievement.”

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Professor of Modern Culture & Media and Comparative Literature at Brown University, author of Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism