Kimberly J. Brown is a 2017-2018 MLK Visiting Assistant Professor in the Women’s & Gender Studies and Literature.

This talk considers the elegy as the doubling mechanism of African American cultural engagement. At once firmly situated within and excluded from a visible poetics of loss, black writers and artists pursue alternate structures of memory-making and mourning rituals. These include music, photography, and performance. Ultimately, these multivalent productions of mourning allow for the possibility of consolation, but resolution is always in flux. The talk will examine the fissures and fixations of black suffering.