Please join us for our Faculty Lecture Series with Professor Sue Shon, the inaugural Intercultural and Diversity Advisory Council Postdoctoral Fellow at USM, on April 11 at 4:30 in 211 Wishcamper, 34 Bedford Street, Portland.

Thousands of runaway slave advertisements, like the one above, circulated every day in colonial and antebellum America. While these “portraits” were created to reclaim human property, they also contained rare information about self-emancipated people. This archive of early American black portraiture raises questions about the visual surveillance of black people and visual experience in general. This talk explores these questions as a fundamentally aesthetic problem regarding modern human sensation—that is, as violence that lives on today to justify racial profiling and the policing of people who appear black, Latino, or Muslim.