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 Black Elegies, Kimberly Juanita Brown examines the form of the elegy and its unique capacity to convey the elongated grief borne of sustained racial violence. Structured around the sensorial, the book moves through sight, sound, and touch to reveal what Okwui Enwezor calls the “national emergency of black grief.” With her characteristic literary skill, Brown analyzes the work of major figures including Toni Morrison, Carrie Mae Weems, Audre Lorde, and Marvin Gaye, among others.

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, and 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 title of On Seeing, a new publication series devoted to visual literacy. Publications foreground the political agency, critical insight, and social impact inscribed in visuality and representation. The MIT Press will publish each On Seeing volume as a print book, ebook, and open access digital edition created by Brown University Digital Publications.

The URL for this publication is https://on-seeing-black-elegies.org.Series Foreword
Introduction: Grief in the Atmosphere
1 Sight
2 Sound
3 Touch
Coda: Grief in the Dark
Acknowledgments
Notes
IndexIncluded in Ms. Magazine's February 2025 "Reads for the Rest of Us"

“Black Elegies has something to offer anyone who approaches with an honest heart. Writers and artists will find inspiration for their work. Photographers and filmmakers may find new ways to occupy a medium. Pastors and community leaders might draw upon Brown’s insights to reimagine lament for the communities they empower. Ultimately, Black Elegies is more than a meditation on mourning; it invites readers to see, hear and touch what hides in the shadow of loss that is the Black life.”
—Jordan Burton, The Presbyterian Outlook
“Black Elegies dares to stay with the ghostly hauntings that animate black cultural production in the present. Brown’s elegant meditations on film, poetry, and literature confront the abyssal limits of sight, returning us to the question: How can there be an elegy without clearly discernible loss?”
—Rizvana Bradley, Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley; author of Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of FormKimberly Juanita Brown is the inaugural director of the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life at Dartmouth College where she is also Associate Professor of English and creative writing. She is the author of The Repeating Body: Slavery's Visual Resonance in the Contemporary.