"Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle"
A Lecture By Professor Leigh Raiford
Location: Stanhope Hall 201
Date/Time: 04/23/12 at 12:00 pm - 04/23/12 at 1:20 pm
***PLEASE NOTE - THIS EVENT WAS BY REGISTRATION ONLY. THE LECTURE IS NOW FULL***
In Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare, Leigh Raiford argues that over the past one hundred years activists in the black freedom struggle have used photographic imagery both to gain political recognition and to develop a different visual vocabulary about black lives. Raiford analyzes why activists chose photography over other media, explores the doubts some individuals had about the strategies, and shows how photography became an increasingly effective, if complex, tool in representing black political interests.
Offering readings of the use of photography in the antilynching movement, the civil rights movement, and the black power movement, Raiford focuses on key transformations in technology, society, and politics to understand the evolution of photography's deployment in capturing white oppression, black resistance, and African American life. By putting photography at the center of the long African American freedom struggle, Raiford also explores how the recirculation of these indelible images in political campaigns and art exhibits both adds to and complicates our memory of the events.
Leigh Raiford, Ph.D, is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the Univeristy of California at Berkeley. She earned a BA in African American Studies and Women's Studies from Wesleyan University and received her doctorate in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale University in 2003. Before coming to UC-Berkeley in 2004, she was the Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellow at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University. Her teaching and research interests include race, gender and visual culture with an emphasis on film and photography; race and racial formations of the United States; black feminism; memory studies; and black popular culture.
Category: Event
Department: Center for African American Studies