Mortevivum

Included in Publishers Weekly’s Spring 2024 Announcements
included in Choice’s list of forthcoming titles in art and architecture
Included in Aspire Design and Home Magazine’s roundup of new and noteworthy titles celebrating Black art and design
Included in Print’s Design and Culture Reads for Black History Month

“Mortevivum is a shock to the system delivered with incendiary grace. Brown makes visible the latency—or veiling—of the Black experience of photography and the disseminated image through media. Her critical perspective moves across the shared history of postcolonial Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. She writes about these moments and their reverberations in a way that conjures today’s realities. The book feels present, even when the photographs and histories tell us of well-trod pasts.”
—Aperture

“Kimberly Juanita Brown’s monograph Mortevivum, the first title from the On Seeing book series launched by the MIT Press in 2022, unpacks the proximity of death and Blackness opera­tionalized by the scopic regimes of documentary photography…Mortevivum is memorable for its multi-striated argumentative flow and incisive critical study driven by a proclamation that, in the author’s words: ‘We will continue to exceed the frame of the photograph.’”
—Philosophy of Photography

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. She is the author of The Repeating Body- Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary.

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