Please join us for a “What I Am Thinking About Now” presentation by Dixa Ramírez, Assistant Professor of American Studies and English at Brown University.

“Moving Photographs: An Aesthetics of an Anagrammatical Blackness”
How do we discern how ordinary, often anonymous, black subjects in non-productive rural spaces (the so-called “hills”) of the Dominican Republic and the eastern U.S. refuse or frustrate the primordial dictates of photography and early film. From its infancy, photography has been used to undergird raced and gendered tropes central to colonial subjugation. How have black subjects manipulated and distorted the racist grammar of what blackness and whiteness (and indigeneity) signified through these pictures to create other grammars, or anagrams? Focusing on black “hills” subjectivity in the early twentieth century, I consider several archival photographs as well as Julie Dash’s film Daughters of the Dust and Nelly Rosario’s novel Song of the Water Saints.

RSVP: [email protected]. Snacks and caffeine will be provided.

“What I Am Thinking About Now” is an on-going informal workshop/seminar series to which faculty and graduate students are invited to present and discuss recently published work and work in progress. All are invited to attend and participate.