ATLANTA – liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies has recently been added to the Duke University Press publishing program. The inaugural issue launched this week with the journal’s founder Dr. Alessandra Raengo, Professor of Moving Image Studies here at Georgia State University’s School of Film, Media and Theatre and Dr. Lauren McLeod Cramer, Assistant Professor of the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto as editors.
liquid blackness as a publication, is unique as there has never been a journal entirely devoted to black liquidity, says Dr. Raengo.
The journal will run on three of its foundational concepts of liquidity, blackness, and aesthetics with contributions from leading voices in the field of Black Studies and beyond who will reflect on the conceptual and practical possibilities and shortcomings of black liquidity. The issue highlights both the anti-blackness of liquidity’s entanglement with capital and the jurisgenerative possibilities of liquid aesthetic practices and their unruly archives.
Conceived as a musical ensemble and framed by a creative rendering of the history of the liquid blackness research group’s method, practice and praxis, the issue gathers the work of theorists and practitioners spanning different modes of intellectual inquiry, and champions experimentalism as a theoretical and artistic practice. In doing so, the issue unflinchingly addresses both the entanglement between race, capital, and the constitution of the modern subject as well as the jurisgenerativity of liquid aesthetic practices and their unruly archives—all within the context of what Toni Morrison described as the liquidity of the black arts.
This issue has multiple connections to the Duke University Press booklist including writings by authors RA Judy and Rinaldo Walcott. You can access the inaugural issue at https://read.dukeupress.edu/liquid-blackness
– Karin Smoot