Titus Kaphar, Behind the Myth of Benevolence, 2014. © Titus Kaphar. Photo: Jeremy Lawson. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
How does visual culture reinforce and disrupt racial hierarchies?
| This project will investigate how visual practices fostered during the slaveholding era in the circum-Atlantic world have underwritten or organized contemporary modes of seeing black bodies. |
This project gathers an interdisciplinary group of scholars who, in the context of closed seminars, public events, and digital exhibits, will investigate how visual practices fostered during the slaveholding era in the circum-Atlantic world have underwritten modes of seeing Black bodies beyond their moment of production, be this in art or in other social expressions. While the concept of “afterlife” has been mostly activated in meditations about the long-term effects of the cultures of enslavement in our contemporary world, this project will also consider its possibilities with regard to the inner temporalities of the transatlantic slaveholding era, recognizing that from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries the relationships between enslavement and visuality underwent significant transformations. In this sense, the aims of this project are twofold: 1) to map out the historical and cultural particularities of those visual regimes (their epistemological, aesthetic, and social configurations) in a variety of geopolitical settings; and 2) to study both the extent and the specific means by which these have been foundational for the inscription of Blackness as human/non-human or “differently human,” as hypervisible and/or invisible, as well as a signifier of the criminal, the non-citizen, and the disposable in many post-slavery societies. The project will also explore and bring to the fore the role played by contemporary publicly engaged Black visual cultures and technologies in the memorialization and preservation of histories of slavery and in the contestation of their visual logics.
Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature
University of Chicago
Larissa Brewer-García specializes in colonial Latin American studies, with a focus on cultural productions of the Caribbean, the Andes, and the African diaspora. Within these areas, her interests include gender studies, literature and law, genealogies of race and racism, humanism and...
Associate Professor, Department of Cinema and Media Studies and the College
University of Chicago
Allyson Nadia Field’s scholarship contributes to evolving areas of study that investigate the functioning of race and representation in interdisciplinary contexts surrounding cinema. Her primary research interest is in African American film, both silent era cinema and more contemporary...
Associate Professor of Latin American Literature, Romance Languages and Literatures
University of Chicago
Agnes Lugo-Ortiz is a specialist in nineteenth-century Latin American literature, and in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Caribbean cultural history. Her work focuses on questions concerning the relationships between cultural production and the formation of modern socio-political identities....
Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in Latin American Literature
University of Chicago
Danielle Roper specializes in contemporary racial and queer performance, racial formation, feminist activism, and visual culture in the Hemispheric Americas. Her work on Caribbean feminism, mestizaje, queer art, and racial impersonation has appeared in Latin American Research Review,...
Associate Professor, English Language and Literature
University of Chicago
Christopher Taylor's research and teaching focus on the hemispheric Americas in the nineteenth century. While the British West Indies is his primary area of focus, he is interested in how these islands were linked to worlds beyond the boundaries of the British Empire. Working at the edges of...
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The second digital exhibit unearthed various modes in which 19th century visual idioms of enslavement endure today.
This symposium brought a distinguished group of Black women filmmakers together to discuss curation, programming, and archival preservation.
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
The second digital exhibit unearthed various modes in which 19th century visual idioms of enslavement endure today.
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
This symposium brought a distinguished group of Black women filmmakers together to discuss curation, programming, and archival preservation.
