Jovonna Jones

Harvard University, African and African American Studies, Graduate Student

Emory University, African American Studies, Undergraduate

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Jovonna Jones is a PhD candidate in African & African American Studies at Harvard University, with certification in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her research interests include Black aesthetics, African American cultural history, visual studies, and issues of space & place in the United States. In her dissertation, “Shadow Planning: Black Women and the Urban Household in Mid-Century Art and Literature,” Jovonna examines how black women in the 1940s and 50s troubled the politics of housing through cultural production, situating themselves as both critics and architects of the modern American city from the inside out. Jovonna has served as an ArtTable graduate fellow at the Morgan Library & Museum, a DAMLI graduate fellow at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and a curatorial intern at the Harvard Art Museums. Jovonna coordinates The Black Studies Reading Room, a monthly public study group on black literature, art, and ideas, held at at Trident Booksellers & Cafe and the Tufts University Art Galleries.

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Papers by Jovonna Jones

Troubling Dignity, Seeking Truth: Black Feminist Vision and the Thought-World of Black Photography in the Nineteenth Century

Souls

In this paper, I revisit the thought-world of nineteenth century black photography between two of... more In this paper, I revisit the thought-world of nineteenth century black photography between two of its most important practitioners: Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass. In the history of black photography, and increasingly in Black Studies writ large, these two figures drive discourses on visuality and freedom. Typically leading with Douglass’ own lectures on pictures, we study both Douglass and Truth as figures who understood the stakes of representation, its utility for abolitionist movement, and its possibilities for black self-image. While its critical to hold Douglass and Truth together, I aim, in this paper, to linger in the differences between their approaches to photography as a realm of thought and practice. I argue that Douglass pursued a comportment of dignity reliant on a gendered presentation of dominance and revolutionary leadership, while Truth, in a different vein, enacted an image-body politic that was intentionally entangled with the visual logics of property and objectification particular to black women’s bodies within slavery. By foregrounding Truth rather than Douglass in this intellectual genealogy of the visual, I want to gesture toward a black feminist vision that can open up the work of photography in Black Studies as we continue to think about what kinds of subjects and subjectivities photographs produce, complicate, and unravel.

The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart

The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography

Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death by Courtney R. Baker (review)

Humane Insight collapses the temporalities of race and violence in American memory: to see a bloa... more Humane Insight collapses the temporalities of race and violence in American memory: to see a bloated black body in a fl ooded New Orleans street in 2005 is akin to the act of gazing at the strange dangle of a charred body in 1909. Such visceral scenes mold into each other, mediated through newspapers, screens, postcards, and oral retellings. Humane Insight investigates not only images of black suff ering and death, but also the responses, tensions, actions, and humanistic impulses these images produce. In order to attend to the lived dynamics of images, Baker makes various theoretical moves, from discourses on representation and trauma, to humanity and the nature of evidence. Baker astutely intervenes on Susan Sontag’s notion of the gaze as the mechanics of optic Othering. For Sontag, the subject who looksat is always already enacting the power of determination over that which is being lookedupon. Our repeated looking at images of suff ering only qualifi es as invasive and/or voyeur...

Being as Seeing: Douglass’ Phenomenology of Vision, Self, and Progress

Originally published in the 2014 Mellon Mays Undergraduate Journal; article begins on p.8 As a w... more Originally published in the 2014 Mellon Mays Undergraduate Journal; article begins on p.8

As a working section of my undergraduate thesis, “Being as Seeing: Douglass’ Phenomenology of Vision, Self, and Progress” is a close reading of Frederick Douglass’ visual theory and photographical inquiry in his 1861 lecture, "Pictures and Progress." I examine his concept of "thought-pictures," his treatment of the subject/object dialectic, and his politic of representation and humanity.

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