Imperial Arrangements: South African Apartheid and the Force of Photography

MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing

This talk by Kimberly Juanita Brown considers the prominence of graphic photographic images during the decades of apartheid in South Africa. Specifically, she is interested in an archive of indifference that permeates the era and orchestrates the viewer’s relationship to black subjectivity. For the talk she focuses on US news media coverage of apartheid in the last year of its existence, and the images that anchored viewers’ interpretation of the event. Kimberly Juanita Brown is Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Assistant Professor for 2017-2018, hosted by MIT Literature and MIT Women’s & Gender Studies. She is an Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies at Mount Holyoke College and author of The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary.