CFP – “Suspension”
liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 7, no. 2, Fall 2023
In 2017, the liquid blackness research group published its last issue entirely produced at Georgia State University, liquid blackness vol. 4, no. 7, titled “Holding Blackness: Aesthetics of Suspension.” The issue’s theme was a response to our research onto Kahlil Joseph’s practice conducted the previous year. Partly inspired by Lauren McLeod Cramer’s reading of “icons of catastrophe” in his work—that is, the way in which the architecture of his filmmaking activates the joints between blackness and anti-blackness— “suspension” offered a way to reflect on what, in the same issue, Daren Fowler writing on Moonlight (Jenkins, 2016) described as a “praxis for the ethics of black liquidity.” As a whole, the issue engaged with artistic practices and aesthetic modes of:
For instance: Are black socialities modes of suspension? Is black study its practice? Can the contemporary moment of profound imbrications between black popular culture and high art be characterized as hinging on, or envisioning, strategies of suspension? To what extent does suspension invoke the stakes of what Andrè Lepecki has called the political ontology of movement? Is the suspension or illegibility of movement/motion/emotion always also a practice of fugitivity? Or is it still tethered to dreams of sovereignty and their delusions? What spatial and temporal configurations, what architectures and modes of engagement are needed to suspend relentless encroachments, predetermined scripts, and unending demands?
Additionally, suspension can help identify sites, moments, and modes where the tension between the extractive and jurisgenerative poles of liquidity are placed at a distance or held in some form of temporary, if precarious, balance. Indeed, while “flow” is one of the promises of liquidity it is also one of its primary delusions. And while for R.A. Judy (Sentient Flesh and “The Unfungible Flow of Liquid Blackness”) flow is a mark of invention and improvisation within what he calls “poiesis in black,” for Harney and Moten uninterrupted flow is one of the central demands of capital, the white science of logistics. As they write in All Incomplete, “Capital only wants to run things smoothly, which is to say universally” (115). Thus, while suspension might suggest stasis, inaction, slowness, and refusal—that is, it might offer “loopholes of retreat” (Harriet Jacobs, Simone Leigh et al.)—it might also open up to a poetics of “queer times and black futures” (Kara Keeling).
We invite submissions from a variety of disciplinary formations that engage with, creatively respond to, as well as add to the following:
Submissions Due: September 1, 2022 (send to [log in to unmask])
Author Guidelines & Submission Information
---
About liquid blackness
The liquid blackness journal seeks to carve out a place for aesthetic theory and the most radical agenda of Black Studies to come together in productive ways, with a double goal: to fully attend to the aesthetic work of blackness and to the political work of form. In this way, the journal strives to develop innovative approaches and analytic tools to address points of convergence between the exigencies of black life and the many slippery ways in which blackness is encountered in contemporary sonic and visual culture.
liquid blackness aims to establish a point of exchange at the intersection of multiple fields. The history of this intentionally undisciplined space is best understood through a series of questions pivoting around (1) the relationship between aesthetics and the ontology of blackness and (2) the generative potential of blackness as an aesthetic. If blackness is, as we argue after Fred Moten, an unregulated generative force, then the liquid blackness journal seeks to offer a dedicated space where it can be consistently unleashed. As we extend and confront lines of inquiry from a number of research fields, our approach is equally concerned with theoretical content, analytical methods, and scholarly praxis.