Alessandra Raengo
Distinguished University Professor- Education
Ph.D in Cinema Studies, NYU, 2006
- Biography
Alessandra Raengo is Georgia State University Distinguished Professor of Moving Image Studies, the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the award-wining liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies (at Duke University Press) and founder of the liquid blackness research group that initiated the journal in 2013. She is the author of On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value (Dartmouth College Press, 2013) and of Critical Race Theory and Bamboozled (Bloomsbury Press, 2016). She has published widely on the visual arts and filmmaking of the Black diaspora, racial capitalism, and modes of black “liquidity” in the contemporary arts. Her work has appeared in Camera Obscura, Discourse, Adaptation, The World Picture Journal, Black Camera, The Black Scholar, Flash Art, Refract, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and several anthologies, including the award-wining collections LA Rebellion: Creating a New Black American Cinema (2015) and Deep Mediations: Thinking Space in Cinema and Digital Cultures (2021). She is the recipient of the 2021 Georgia State University Outstanding Faculty Achievement Award, a Fall 2022 Paul Mellon Senior Fellowship at CASVA (Centre for Advanced Study in the Visual Art, National Gallery of Art), a Terra Foundation of American Art Convening Grant for the liquid blackness Symposium: “Music Video as Black Art: Claiming the B-Side,” Sept. 21-23, 2023 at Georgia State University and a Phoenix Award for Significant Editorial or Design Achievement from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals for editorial and design excellence for the liquid blackness journal she co-edits with Lauren McLeod Cramer (University of Toronto).
- Publications
single-authored books
2016 Critical Race Theory and Bamboozled. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016, 203pp. Series “Film theory in Practice,” edited by Todd McGowan
2013 On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2013, 232pp
edited collections
2005 with Robert Stam, Literature and Film. A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Blackwell Publishing, 2005, 359pp
2004 with Robert Stam, A Companion to Literature and Film. Blackwell Publishing, 2004, 463pp
2000 with Leonardo Quaresima and Laura Vichi, eds., I limiti della rappresentazione. The Bounds of Representation. Udine: Forum, 2000, 472pp
1999 with Leonardo Quaresima and Laura Vichi, eds., La nascita dei generi cinematografici. The Birth of Film Genres. Udine: Forum, 1999, 456pp
Selected Essays and Book Chapters
2024 “Condition Report,” liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 8.1 on “informalisms,” April 2024
2023 “Free Medicine. An Introduction,” liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 7, no. 2 on “suspension.” October 2023 “Inside Job Meets Immanent Critique,” Flash Art International, March 14, 2023 “Inside: La critica immanente di un complice interno,” Flash Art International, March 2023 – print version
2022 “A View of a Landscape and Other Church Problems. An Introduction,” liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 6, no. 1 on “aesthetics,”
2022 Reprint of “Blackness and the Image of Motility: A Suspenseful Critique.” In Cassandra Press Reader on “Black Journalism”. Featured at the 2022 Whitney Biennial, “Quiet as it’s Kept,” curated by David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards
2021 “Introduction: Blackness as Process,” liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 5, no. 2 on “blackness,” October 2021: 5-18.
with Lauren McLeod Cramer, “’There is No Form in the Middle’: Kevin Jerome Everson’s Massive Abstractions,” liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 5, no. 2 on “blackness,” October 2021: 121-151
“Black Study @ GSU: The Album,” liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 5, no. 1 on “liquidity,” April 2021: 5-25.
“The Jurisgenerativity of a Liquid Praxis: A Conversation with John Akomfrah. Introduced and Interviewed by Alessandra Raengo,” liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 5, no. 1 on “liquidity,” April 2021: 127-148.
“A Conversation with Erin Christovale about You are mine. I see now, I’m a have to let you go.” Introduced and Interviewed by Alessandra Raengo and Lauren McLeod Cramer. liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 5, no. 1 on “liquidity,” April 2021: 91-95.
“Transmissions: A Roundtable Conversation,” with Greg DeCuir, Jr., Chrissie Iles, Michael Gillespie, in Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation, edited by Erin Christovale and Meg Onli, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania/Hammer Museum, 2021
with Laurel Ahnert, “Blackness at the Heart: Extruding Sovereignty in Nancy’s and Denis’s The Intruder,” in Deep Mediations, ed. Karen Redrobe and Jeff Scheibel. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. Winner of Society for Cinema and Media Studies Best Edited Collection award, 2022
“Cosmopolitanism, Contemplation, and the Ontopolitics of Movement in John Akomfrah’s Gallery Practice,” in Black Film, British Cinema, ed. Clive James Nwonka and Anamik Saha. Goldsmiths Publishing/MIT Press/ICA London, 2021
2020 “Conversation with Alessandra Raengo,” Visual Studies, Vol. 35(2/3), 2020: 99-104
“Black America Again” In Black One Shot 9.4, edited by Lisa Uddin and Michael Boyce Gillespie, June 18, 2020. ASAP/J
with Lauren McLeod Cramer, “The Unruly Archives of Black Music Video,” in IN FOCUS Dossier: “Modes of Black Liquidity: Music Video as Black Art,” ed. Alessandra Raengo and Lauren McLeod Cramer, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 59, no. 2 (Winter 2020): 138-144
2019 “The Heat is On: Preliminary Reflections on Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS,” Refract: An Open Access Journal of Visual Studies, 2, no. 1 (Fall 2019): 31-44
with Michael Boyce Gillespie, Jon Goff, and Samantha N. Sheppard, “Art and the Idea of Black Film: A Conversation,” Flash Art #324 (March 2019)
2017 with Lauren McLeod Cramer, “Freeing Black Codes: liquid blackness Plays the Jazz Ensemble,” in “Black Code Studies,” ed. Jessica Marie Johnson and Mark Anthony Neal, special issue, The Black Scholar 47, no. 3 (2017): 8-21
“Dreams are colder than Death and the Gathering of Black Sociality,” Black Camera, 8, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 120-140
2016 “Black Matters,” Discourse, vol. 38, no. 2 (2016): 246-264
“Blackness and the Image of Motility: A Suspenseful Critique,” Black Camera, 8, no. 1 (2016): 191-206
“Life in Those Shadows! Kara Walker’s Post-Cinematic Silhouettes,” in Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, ed. Julia Leyda and Shane Denson. REFRAME Books, 2016. Reprint.
2015 “Encountering the Rebellion: liquid blackness reflects on the expansive possibilities of the L.A. Rebellion films,” in L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema, ed. Allyson Nadia Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, Jacqueline Stewart, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015.
Winner of the 2016 Kraszna Krausz Book Award, UK and of the 2017 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Best Edited Collection award
2013 “In the Shadow,” Camera Obscura 83, vol. 28, no. 2 (2013): 1-43
2012 “Reification, Reanimation, and the Money of the Real,” The World Picture Journal 7, “Distance,” Summer 2012
“Shadowboxing: Lee Daniels’s Non-Representational Cinema,” in Mia Mask, ed., Contemporary Black American Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2012
2010 “Optic Black: Blackness as Phantasmagoria,” in Beyond Blackface. Africana Images in the US Media, ed. Akil Houston. Kendall Hunt Publishing, 3rd edition, 2010.
2008 “A Necessary Signifier: The Body as Author and Text in The Jackie Robinson Story.” Adaptation. A Journal of Literature on Screen Studies 1 (2) 2008: 79-105