Our heartfelt congratulations to Carolina Sá Carvalho, an Assistant Professor in our Portuguese program, for the publication of her latest book Traces of the Unseen: Photography, Violence, and Modernization in Early Twentieth-Century Latin America (Northwestern UP, 2023).
The book examines the role of photography as visual evidence of the destructive processes of infrastructure development and extractive capitalist expansion in the Amazon and outside the Brazilian metropole. Combining formal analysis of individual photographs with their inclusion in larger multi-media assemblages, Traces of the Unseen explores how photographs of violence were framed, captioned, cropped, and circulated to develop singular pedagogies of the gaze and teach increasingly interconnected urban publics how to interpret them within the larger context of capitalist modernization. Traces of the Unseen draws on works by Flavio de Barros, Euclides da Cunha, Roger Casement, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Mario de Andrade to situate an unruly photographic body at the center of modernity, in all its disputed meanings.
Join us for the book launch in a remote virtual event through Zoom on Tuesday, April 25, 2023 at 5:00 PM hosted by Prof. Carolyn Fornoff at Cornell University. Other participants include Natalia Brizuela (UC Berkeley), Jens Andermann (NYU) and Gisela Heffes (Rice University). RSVP to attend the launch at https://bit.ly/tracesoftheunseen