Black Elegies

A poignant, unflinching study of black grief as a form of elegy found in visual art, music, literature--everywhere, if you know how to see it. In Brown;contemplates recognizable sites of mourning: forced migration and enslavement, bodily violations, imprisonment and death. And she examines sites that do not register immediately as archives of grief: the landscape of southern U.S. slave plantations, a spontaneous street party, a quilt constructed out of the clothing worn by a loved one, a dance performance to hold the memory of history, an aeolian harp installed at an institute of European art, among others. In this, the book offers a framework of mourning while black, within the parameters of contemporary artistic production. Brown asks: How do you mourn those you are not supposed to see? And where does the grief go? She shows us that grief is everywhere: "It spills out of photographs and modulates music. It hovers in the tenor and tone of cinematic performances. It resides in the body like an inspired concept, waiting for its articulation." <Black Elegies< is the second volume in the On Seeing series, following Kimberly Juanita Brown's <Mortevivum:;Photography and the Politics of the Visual<, the inaugural title;of the series.

Auteur

Kimberly Juanita Brown

Texte du rabat

"A extremely memorable and affecting study of elegy - in the form of an elegy itself - delivered in three parts: sight, sound, and touch with powerful analyses of the work of major figures like Toni Morrison, Carrie Mae Weems, Audre Lorde, and even Marvin Gaye, among others"--