The World Before Us: Blackness, Narration, and PhotographyMorgan, ColecreatorMurray, RollandAdvisorGould, PhilipReaderBurrows, StuartReaderBrown University. Department of Englishsponsor20208, 126 p.born digitalThesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2020theses“The World Before Us” demonstrates that black writers’ explorations of how textuality and visuality mutually mediate racialized identity began in the mid-nineteenth century, during photography’s earliest days. Despite perennial interests in perception, memory, and aesthetic form, literary studies have been slow to consider African American literature as a locus for thinking critically about the problems and possibilities of photographic representation. Recent efforts in black visual studies to redress this oversight by historicizing black photographic legacies have themselves left questions about the nature of photography, as a medium, largely unexamined. Indeed, the same questions that inform the invention of photography—agency, disclosure, truth—also characterize critiques of slavery and visions of freedom by African Americans. I find that African American literature has long theorized the interdependence of subjectivity, embodiment, and mediation precisely where these gaps in methodological inquiries coincide. As black writers transform familiar techniques of narrating individual experience, I argue that our most elusive intuitions about photography—its immediacy, ephemerality, and transparency—are also brought into sharper focus.PhotographySlaveryafrican american literatureCritical Race StudiesNarrative TheorySubjectivityMedia studiesvisualityEnglishRPB2020072010.26300/mp2w-tg28In CopyrightAll rights reserved. Collection is open to the Brown community for research.dissertations