Alessandra Raengo
Georgia State University, School of Film, Media & Theater, Faculty Member
- Georgia State University, Communication, Faculty Memberadd
- Visual Studies, Photography, Visual Culture, Visualization, Phenomenology of the body, Literature and Visual Arts, and 31 moreFilm Theory and Practice, Photographs, African-American Literature, Black Popular Culture, Thing Theory, 20th century Afro-American expressive culture and cultural politics, Media Studies, Critical Theory, Contemporary Art, Critical Race Theory, Photography (Visual Studies), Film Studies, Political Theory, Critical Race Studies, Media and Embodiment, Indexicality, Integration/assimilation theory, African-American Cinema, Commodity Fetishism, Marxism, Cinema, Queer Theory, Film Theory, Digital Culture, Photography Theory, African American Studies, Post-Colonialism, Black Studies, Black Women's Studies, Film Aesthetics, and Aesthetics and Theory of Artsedit
- I am a theorist of black aesthetics and visual culture, working at the intersection of Visual Culture Studies, Film S... moreI am a theorist of black aesthetics and visual culture, working at the intersection of Visual Culture Studies, Film Studies, Black Studies, Art History, and Critical Theory. I am the founder of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies (Duke University Press) and of the liquid blackness research group at Georgia State University which carries out an organic interweaving of theory, practice and praxis. In 2019, the liquid blackness research group became a nonprofit. Through research projects, public events, and online publication, it seeks to mentor the next generation of scholars of color and other scholars fully committed to the agenda of black studies, while creating a vibrant, extended, and sustainable community.Liquid blackness which builds on the study of arts and artists from the Black Diaspora to explore the intersection of aesthetic theory and the most radical agenda of Black Studies. My first book, entitled On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value (Dartmouth College Press, 2013) approaches racial blackness as a theory of the ontology of the photographic image. It shows how the black body has historically both fostered and expressed a photochemical imagination, i.e., a specific way to think of images as a direct fold from the real and therefore as wearing their truth, value, and meaning “on their sleeve.” The book describes as “face value” the double slippage that posits the black body so: a conflation of phenomenology with ontology, and a conflation of hermeneutic with ontology, that is, a type of reading of the surface as always securing a path toward its inside, its meaning, its truth. Finally “face value” expresses also the political economy of the racial sign, i.e. the way in which, through the mediation of photographic technologies—photography understood as the “money of the real,” as a form of appearance of capital—blackness too functions as the money of the real, as a general equivalent in the realm of visual representation. My second book, "Critical Race Theory and Bamboozled" for the series "Film Theory in Practice" edited by Todd McGowan returns to the legal roots of the CRT movement and spins tools of aesthetic analysis: by focusing on the homology between legal, commodity, and film form, it approaches blackness as a problem for film form. Additionally, it reads the Lee film for its contributions to visual culture and material culture studies, thing theory, the digital turn, theories of capital and a critique of the metaphysics of presence. My 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. Previously I have co-edited two volumes (with Robert Stam) on film adaptation from literary sources (Literature and Film, A Companion to Literature and Film) published by Blackwelledit
Introduction to a forthcoming book for Todd McGowan's Bloomsbury series "Film Theory into Practice"
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Multi-lingual conference proceedings of the VI International Udine Film Studies Conference on "I limiti della rappresentazione/The Bounds of Representation". Udine University, Udine, Italy, March 17-20, 1999.
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Multilingual Conference Proceedings of the V Udine International Film Studies Conference, "La nascita dei generi cinematografici/The Birth of Film Genres". Udine University, Italy, March 26-28, 1998
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Building on Renée Green 2014 MIT Symposium on John Akomfrah's "cinematic migrations", this chapter addresses the ontopolitics of movement in Akomfrah's gallery practice since. I contend that the ontopolitics of movement in Akomfrah’s... more
Building on Renée Green 2014 MIT Symposium on John Akomfrah's "cinematic migrations", this chapter addresses the ontopolitics of movement in Akomfrah's gallery practice since. I contend that the ontopolitics of movement in Akomfrah’s gallery practice affects the meanings of cosmopolitanism in the context of the Anthropocene; it impacts the ethics and function of both diegetic and spectatorial contemplation in an increasingly fluid (albeit not attrition-free) world; and it recasts the role of cinematic archives in the context of the anaoriginary relation between blackness and movement. Capaciously understood, the ontopolitics of movement offers a new way of thinking about Akomfrah’s much discussed relationship to the archive(s), his early investment in digital imaging, as well as about the relationship between fluidity and stasis in his work.
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In Focus Dossier for Journal of Cinema and Media Studies on contemporary black filmmaking that straddles the line between music video, essay film, and experimental cinema, as well as between commercial and/or online venues and art... more
In Focus Dossier for Journal of Cinema and Media Studies on contemporary black filmmaking that straddles the line between music video, essay film, and experimental cinema, as well as between commercial and/or online venues and art galleries. The dossier, co-edited with Lauren McLeod Cramer, argues that this recent output's close relationship with forms of high art and its deliberate modeling after the processes and achievements of black music-making, has recast the black music video genre, broadly conceived, as in itself a form of black (high) art.
The dossier gather contributions from:
Charles "Chip" Linscott
James Tobias
Michele Prettyman
Jenny Gunn
The dossier gather contributions from:
Charles "Chip" Linscott
James Tobias
Michele Prettyman
Jenny Gunn
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Initial reflections on Kahlil Joseph's BLKNWS (2018-ongoing) as a work that both flaunts and features the work of the black ensemble as aesthetic gathering and, I argue, a gathering of the aesthetic. The installation moves by... more
Initial reflections on Kahlil Joseph's BLKNWS (2018-ongoing) as a work that both flaunts and features the work of the black ensemble as aesthetic gathering and, I argue, a gathering of the aesthetic. The installation moves by accumulating momentum, density and mass, showing how blackness gathers as it acquires form out of informality
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organized by Michael Boyce Gillespie with Samantha N. Sheppard and Jon S. Goff in response to "The Black Image Corporation" conceived by Theaster Gates, presented at Fondazione Prada in Milan, Italy September 20, 2018-January 14, 2019 and... more
organized by Michael Boyce Gillespie with Samantha N. Sheppard and Jon S. Goff in response to "The Black Image Corporation" conceived by Theaster Gates, presented at Fondazione Prada in Milan, Italy September 20, 2018-January 14, 2019 and the companion marathon screening program of black film.
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While " Afro-Pessimist " scholars understand blackness under the rubric of " social death, " the ascendance of the #BlackLivesMatter movement vindicates instead the opposing " Afro-Optimist " position, which affirms the generative... more
While " Afro-Pessimist " scholars understand blackness under the rubric of " social death, " the ascendance of the #BlackLivesMatter movement vindicates instead the opposing " Afro-Optimist " position, which affirms the generative capacity of black social life. Arthur Jafa's essay film Dreams are colder than Death (2013), a meditation on the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. 's " I Have a Dream " speech, conducted through interviews with African-American intellectuals and artists, examines this tension. Woven together with lyrical, slow-motion images of unnamed black people, of water, and of cosmological images of deep space, these voices reflect on the ontology of blackness and its relationship to life, death, and the concept of the human. Eventually, through the words of Fred Moten, the film questions the possibility to love black people once blackness is solely understood within the " afterlife of slavery. " This essay reads the film's edits as " passages " that effectively perform the very networks of solidarity, grief, and grievance sought by #BlackLivesMatter as the evidence of such love. Through its aesthetic liquidity, i.e., the film's facility to move across scale, from the minute to the cosmolog-ical, from the familial to the collective, and the way it disjoins some of the very conditions for black surveillance—voices strategically recorded independently from the image; faces hardly visible because shot against intense light sources—the film claims for blackness the expansiveness that institutes radical networks of black love.
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My particular path into the question posed in this special section—is a moving image an object?—begins with the observation that blackness poses a major problem for the ontological mapping of the object offered by what is increasingly... more
My particular path into the question posed in this special section—is a moving image an object?—begins with the observation that blackness poses a major problem for the ontological mapping of the object offered by what is increasingly (and capaciously) described as Object Oriented Philosophy; in particular, its assumptions of a flat ontology equally occupied by subject and object, the assertion of object “speech,” and the idea of the vibrancy of matter.
Asking whether a moving image is an object is a way to inquire about whether recent philosophical orientations toward the object can be put in dialog with the “object” of film studies here understood as the moving image. That said, I am compelled to immediately underline that I come to this question--and every term within it, i.e. “object,” “image,” and “movement”--from an already somewhat different angle: my concern is with blackness and the way “black” describes the most perversely sophisticated historical elaboration of the ontology of an object as it occurs in the open and deliberate disavowal of this object’s subjecthood. I am going to immediately put my cards on the table, especially since I have realized that the claims that I would normally leave for the conclusion have instead to be made at the outset: there is no ontology of the image that can consider itself complete until it has dealt with blackness. There is no ontology of the object that can consider itself complete until it has dealt with black. That is, if ontology cannot account for either one, then it is not flat at all.
Read the rest here: http://muse.jhu.edu/article/651047
Asking whether a moving image is an object is a way to inquire about whether recent philosophical orientations toward the object can be put in dialog with the “object” of film studies here understood as the moving image. That said, I am compelled to immediately underline that I come to this question--and every term within it, i.e. “object,” “image,” and “movement”--from an already somewhat different angle: my concern is with blackness and the way “black” describes the most perversely sophisticated historical elaboration of the ontology of an object as it occurs in the open and deliberate disavowal of this object’s subjecthood. I am going to immediately put my cards on the table, especially since I have realized that the claims that I would normally leave for the conclusion have instead to be made at the outset: there is no ontology of the image that can consider itself complete until it has dealt with blackness. There is no ontology of the object that can consider itself complete until it has dealt with black. That is, if ontology cannot account for either one, then it is not flat at all.
Read the rest here: http://muse.jhu.edu/article/651047
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This is the table of content and introduction for a Dossier I co-edited with Brian Price (University of Toronto) for the journal DISCOURSE on "Is the Moving Image an Object?". It includes my essay "Black Matters" which is a critique of... more
This is the table of content and introduction for a Dossier I co-edited with Brian Price (University of Toronto) for the journal DISCOURSE on "Is the Moving Image an Object?".
It includes my essay "Black Matters" which is a critique of OOO from the point of view of Black Studies and Contemporary African American Art
It includes my essay "Black Matters" which is a critique of OOO from the point of view of Black Studies and Contemporary African American Art
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This essay mobilizes the idea of " motility " to interrogate the integrative function blackness is expected to perform in both still and moving photographic images, i.e. the way in which it functions to foster a sense of coincidence... more
This essay mobilizes the idea of " motility " to interrogate the integrative function blackness is expected to perform in both still and moving photographic images, i.e. the way in which it functions to foster a sense of coincidence between the profilmic space and the photographic image, thus bestowing a sense of wholeness to the image. Leveraging the fact that the notion of motility poses, but cannot conclusively resolve, the onto-political dimension of movement, and particularly the question of whether movement is an expression agency, compulsion or injunction, this essay examines the critical act of stillness and suspension Steve McQueen performs in his 1997 work Deadpan where he reproduces, but with an important variation, a famous Buster Keaton's stunt from Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). By departing from the original on the basis of his chosen upright stillness, McQueen pursue a productive wedge between the visible and the visual, against the integration carried out by the image of black motility and the compulsive association of black bodies with surplus affectability and movement.
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Reprint of my essay original published in Jane Gaines, Francesco Casetti, Valentina Re, eds. The Very Beginning/ At the Very End. Udine: Forum, 2010: 211-220 for a new anthology of essays on Post-Cinema
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liquid blackness 'about' page, reprinted in exhibition catalog for 'Mark Bradford: Scorched Earth'
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This chapter expands on previous writing on Hank Willis Thomas to include a discussion of more recent works
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how the research group 'liquid blackness' formed in response to the co-hosting of the L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema Tour, Atlanta: October-November 2013
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This essay discusses the pedagogical challenges of teaching adaptation when its process is most invisible. This is the case when the black body on screen at the end of the adaptation process appears to overdetermine its course from the... more
This essay discusses the pedagogical challenges of teaching adaptation when its process is most invisible. This is the case when the black body on screen at the end of the adaptation process appears to overdetermine its course from the beginning, functioning as both its source and faithful destination. Moving from a study of the popular reception of The Jackie Robinson Story and Precious. Based on the novel “Push” by Sapphire, the essay proposes to leverage an emerging “biocultural” paradigm in adaptation studies in order to place the body at the center of the adaptation process itself. Because it underlines the biological and physiological connotations of the concept of adaptation, as well as the affective economies that it mobilizes in a feedback loop, the biocultural paradigm illuminates the adaptation process that occurs through and in the body itself. It thus offers the possibility to understand what adaptation might be might elaborating vis-à-vi its larger cultural and social context: in this case, the process of racial assimilation.
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The essay singles out the film The Jackie Robinson Story as an iconophiliac adaptation driven by the authorizing and authenticating presence of Robinson’s body on screen, which functions as both the ‘ source material ’ and its ‘... more
The essay singles out the film The Jackie Robinson Story as an iconophiliac adaptation driven by the authorizing and authenticating presence of Robinson’s body on screen, which functions as both the ‘ source material ’ and its ‘ adaptation.' It argues that the film needs to be appreciated within a larger nexus of texts indicated as ‘ The Jackie Robinson Story, ’ revealing a larger process of embodiment of the integration drama grafted onto Robinson’ s body-image in the years preceding and following the release of the film. Read in the context of Robinson’ s presence in post World War II visual culture as emblem of the successful realization of its color blind utopias, ‘ The Jackie Robinson Story’ appears to participate in the process of visual accommodation that
brought the assimilationist imagination to elect Robinson’ s body as the signifier of yet another adaptation process: the incarnated visuality of the integration drama itself.
brought the assimilationist imagination to elect Robinson’ s body as the signifier of yet another adaptation process: the incarnated visuality of the integration drama itself.
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Introduction to issue no. 7 of the Liquid Blackness journal, devoted to aesthetic modes of "suspension." The issue was inspired by the work of video and installation artist Kahlil Joseph, who was the subject of a symposium held at Georgia... more
Introduction to issue no. 7 of the Liquid Blackness journal, devoted to aesthetic modes of "suspension." The issue was inspired by the work of video and installation artist Kahlil Joseph, who was the subject of a symposium held at Georgia State University, in Atlanta, in 2016.
The issue features essays by
Daren Fowler and Arzu Karaduman on Moonlight
Steven Spence on La Haine
Sara Smith on Mary Sibande and Torwkase Dyson
Lauren Cramer on Kahlil Joseph's Until the Quiet Comes
and a visual essay by Nettrice Gaskins
See table of content here: http://liquidblackness.com/lb7-holding-blackness-aesthetics-of-suspension/
The issue features essays by
Daren Fowler and Arzu Karaduman on Moonlight
Steven Spence on La Haine
Sara Smith on Mary Sibande and Torwkase Dyson
Lauren Cramer on Kahlil Joseph's Until the Quiet Comes
and a visual essay by Nettrice Gaskins
See table of content here: http://liquidblackness.com/lb7-holding-blackness-aesthetics-of-suspension/
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Issue inspired by Arthur Jafa's Dreams are Colder than Death (2013).
Editorial Board:
Lauren Cramer
Daren Fowler
Jenny Gunn
Shady Patterson
Brooke Sonenreich
Charleen Wilcox
Editorial Board:
Lauren Cramer
Daren Fowler
Jenny Gunn
Shady Patterson
Brooke Sonenreich
Charleen Wilcox
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Introduction to liquid blackness issue no. 5 on the Arts and Politics of the Jazz Ensemble pivoting around Larry Clark's 1977 film Passing Through.
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Following the L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema series, liquid blackness members reflect on the films we have seen
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Compiled in preparation for the first liquid blackness Symposium on blackness, aesthetics, and liquidity. With essays on Nettrice Gaskin, Yanique Norman, Nikita Gale, Consuela Boyer, Carla Aaron-Lopez and Kevin Jerome Everson by Michele... more
Compiled in preparation for the first liquid blackness Symposium on blackness, aesthetics, and liquidity. With essays on Nettrice Gaskin, Yanique Norman, Nikita Gale, Consuela Boyer, Carla Aaron-Lopez and Kevin Jerome Everson by Michele Prettyman-Beverly, Kristin Juarez, Christina Price Washington, Cameron Kunzelman, Lauren M. Cramer, Joey Molina, and Michael B. Gillespie. With an introduction on the concept of "liquid blackness" by Alessandra Raengo
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Publication reflecting on the first liquid blackness Symposium on blackness, aesthetics, and liquidity with interviews of Hamza Walker, Derek Conrad Murray, and essays on Gathering Wild Dance Company, bubba carr, T.Lang, Fahamu Pecou, and... more
Publication reflecting on the first liquid blackness Symposium on blackness, aesthetics, and liquidity with interviews of Hamza Walker, Derek Conrad Murray, and essays on Gathering Wild Dance Company, bubba carr, T.Lang, Fahamu Pecou, and more by Katharine Zakos, Kristin Juarez, Lauren M. Cramer, Dorothy Hendricks, Adam Cottrel, Jasmine Tillman, Shady Patterson, Christina Romo, and Michele Prettyman Beverly
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publication compiled in conjunction with the Black Audio Film Collective film and speakers series. With essays by Charles P. "Chip" Linscott, Kristin Juarez, Clinton Fluker, Cameron Kunzelman, Abbas Barzegar and introduction by Alessandra... more
publication compiled in conjunction with the Black Audio Film Collective film and speakers series. With essays by Charles P. "Chip" Linscott, Kristin Juarez, Clinton Fluker, Cameron Kunzelman, Abbas Barzegar and introduction by Alessandra Raengo
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The first African-American cinematographer nominated for an Oscar, Young has repeatedly located himself within a lineage of black image-makers—Ernest Dickerson, Arthur Jafa, and Malik Sayeed—trained by Haile Gerima at Howard University,... more
The first African-American cinematographer nominated for an Oscar, Young has repeatedly located himself within a lineage of black image-makers—Ernest Dickerson, Arthur Jafa, and Malik Sayeed—trained by Haile Gerima at Howard University, as a way to activate an implicit theory of political art (i.e. the avant-garde praxis elaborated in the context of the LA Rebellion at UCLA) and as evidence of a consistent “black intentionality,” i.e. image-making that is explicit about coming from, expressing, and leading back to, blackness. This event celebrates Young’s work as seeking a visual aesthetics of black care. He is very conscious of working in a medium that has not been historically amicable to black subjects both in theory and in practice, and is committed to breaking this careless cycle.
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Figuring Suspension: A Study of Visual Recording Artist Storyboard P is a research project on movement, affect, synchronization, black performance, and animation centered on the work of “filmdancer” Storyboard P. It was presented on... more
Figuring Suspension: A Study of Visual Recording Artist Storyboard P is a research project on movement, affect, synchronization, black performance, and animation centered on the work of “filmdancer” Storyboard P. It was presented on February 9 2018 as part of Rendering (the) Visible III: Liquidity, a Conference organized by by Jennifer Barker, Alessandra Raengo, Angelo Restivo, and Ethan Tussey for the School of Film, Media & Theatre, with Professor Grant Farred, Professor Thomas F. DeFrantz, Marc Downie and Paul Kaiser (OpenEndedGroup), exploring the concept of liquidity as an innovative critical approach to the image’s relation to space, sensoriality, and digitality, as well as an aesthetic sensibility attuned to the political ontology of motion, form, matter, and noise.
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Black Audio Film Collective at PAMM presents a selection of films characterized by an interest in the diasporic African experience, memory, and new modes of representation. Between 1982 and 1998, the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC)—a... more
Black Audio Film Collective at PAMM presents a selection of films characterized by an interest in the diasporic African experience, memory, and new modes of representation. Between 1982 and 1998, the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC)—a seven-person group of British artists and filmmakers—produced groundbreaking documentaries and nonlinear films addressing social, political, and racial crises from a particular moment in Britain. While exploring and examining black British identity through film and media, BAFC's body of work developed new ways to reflect on the past, the present, and the future of black culture.
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8:15 – 9:45 Can Blackness be Loved? A screening of Dreams are Colder than Death (Arthur Jafa, 2013, 52 min) a lyrical mediation on the legacy of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, which gives way to a philosophical reflection... more
8:15 – 9:45 Can Blackness be Loved?
A screening of Dreams are Colder than Death (Arthur Jafa, 2013, 52 min) a lyrical mediation on the legacy of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, which gives way to a philosophical reflection on the ontology of blackness and its relationship to life, death, and the possibility of love in the context of the “afterlife of slavery.”
The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with Arthur Jafa, Kara Keeling (University of Southern California), and George Yancy (Emory University).
An event organized by liquid blackness and the Department of Film and Media Studies, Emory University (Matthew Bernstein)
A screening of Dreams are Colder than Death (Arthur Jafa, 2013, 52 min) a lyrical mediation on the legacy of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, which gives way to a philosophical reflection on the ontology of blackness and its relationship to life, death, and the possibility of love in the context of the “afterlife of slavery.”
The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with Arthur Jafa, Kara Keeling (University of Southern California), and George Yancy (Emory University).
An event organized by liquid blackness and the Department of Film and Media Studies, Emory University (Matthew Bernstein)
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This Symposium continues the experimental research that Liquid Blackness has undertaken on Larry Clark's 1977 film PASSING THROUGH and it includes a screening of the film, a series of panels, and a spin-off project called Drawing Through... more
This Symposium continues the experimental research that Liquid Blackness has undertaken on Larry Clark's 1977 film PASSING THROUGH and it includes a screening of the film, a series of panels, and a spin-off project called Drawing Through which includes an art show, a free jazz concert and an album release party. More information available here: http://liquidblackness.com/passing-through/
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liquid blackness presents in cooperation with CENCIA (Center for Collaborative and International Arts) and the Moving Image Studies program in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University a film series showing the work of... more
liquid blackness presents in cooperation with CENCIA (Center for Collaborative and International Arts) and the Moving Image Studies program in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University a film series showing the work of the Black Audio Film Collective.
Also in cooperation with:
Africa Atlanta 2014; the National Center for Civil and Human Rights; Emory's Department of Film and Media Studies; the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; the Digital Moving Image Salon at Spelman; Peripheral Visions; Film Love; Contraband Cinema.
Image by Chris Hunt
Also in cooperation with:
Africa Atlanta 2014; the National Center for Civil and Human Rights; Emory's Department of Film and Media Studies; the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; the Digital Moving Image Salon at Spelman; Peripheral Visions; Film Love; Contraband Cinema.
Image by Chris Hunt
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Film series presented by liquid blackness in conjunction with Emory's Department of Film and Media Studies, the Atlanta Film Festival, and with the support of Georgia State University's Moving Image Studies program in the Department of... more
Film series presented by liquid blackness in conjunction with Emory's Department of Film and Media Studies, the Atlanta Film Festival, and with the support of Georgia State University's Moving Image Studies program in the Department of Communication
image by Chris Hunt
image by Chris Hunt
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Film series presented by liquid blackness in conjunction with Emory's Department of Film and Media Studies, the Atlanta Film Festival, and with the support of Georgia State University's Moving Image Studies program in the Department of... more
Film series presented by liquid blackness in conjunction with Emory's Department of Film and Media Studies, the Atlanta Film Festival, and with the support of Georgia State University's Moving Image Studies program in the Department of Communication
Image by Chris Hunt
Image by Chris Hunt
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Film series presented by liquid blackness in conjunction with Emory's Department of Film and Media Studies, the Atlanta Film Festival, and with the support of Georgia State University's Moving Image Studies program in the Department of... more
Film series presented by liquid blackness in conjunction with Emory's Department of Film and Media Studies, the Atlanta Film Festival, and with the support of Georgia State University's Moving Image Studies program in the Department of Communication
conversation with filmmaker Zeinabu irene Davis at the Arnika Dawkins Gallery, Cascade, Atlanta
image by Chris Hunt
conversation with filmmaker Zeinabu irene Davis at the Arnika Dawkins Gallery, Cascade, Atlanta
image by Chris Hunt
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Symposium organized by liquid blackness with the support of the Department of Communication at Georgia State University and with the participation of Hamza Walker (Associate Curator, The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago),... more
Symposium organized by liquid blackness with the support of the Department of Communication at Georgia State University and with the participation of Hamza Walker (Associate Curator, The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago), Derek Conrad Murray (Assistant Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at UC Santa Cruz), and a panel of multimedia artists.
Carried out also in conjunction with DAEL's Window Project, in response to the idea of "liquid blackness". Please see liquidblackness.com
Carried out also in conjunction with DAEL's Window Project, in response to the idea of "liquid blackness". Please see liquidblackness.com
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Symposium on blackness and aesthetics presented by "liquid blackness" and supported by the Department of Communication at Georgia State University with the participation of Hamza Walker (Associate Curator, The Renaissance Society at the... more
Symposium on blackness and aesthetics presented by "liquid blackness" and supported by the Department of Communication at Georgia State University with the participation of Hamza Walker (Associate Curator, The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago), Derek Conrad Murray (Assistant Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at UC Santa Cruz), and a panel of multimedia artists.
Presented also in conjunction with DAEL's Window Project
image by Chris Hunt
Presented also in conjunction with DAEL's Window Project
image by Chris Hunt
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This is the issue of liquid blackness that was released in occasion of the April 2014 Symposium on blackness, aesthetics, and liquidity. It discusses most of the artists who exhibited and discussed their works at the Symposium and has a... more
This is the issue of liquid blackness that was released in occasion of the April 2014 Symposium on blackness, aesthetics, and liquidity. It discusses most of the artists who exhibited and discussed their works at the Symposium and has a framing essay on the idea of "liquid blackness"
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This is the issue of liquid blackness that reflects on April 2014 Symposium and further discusses some of the Symposium artists.
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CFP for third foundational issue of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies, now with Duke University Press, on "aesthetics".
It will follow issue 5.1 on "liquidity" (Spring 2021) and 5.2 on "blackness" (Fall 2021
It will follow issue 5.1 on "liquidity" (Spring 2021) and 5.2 on "blackness" (Fall 2021
Research Interests: Black Studies Or African American Studies, Aesthetics, Black/African Diaspora, Sound studies, Film-Philosophy, and 8 moreAfrican American Visual Culture, African American Studies, Black Arts Movement, Black Feminist Theory/Thought, Film Aesthetics, Black cinema studies, African American Art History, and Black Queer Studies and Queer of Color Critique
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call for papers for liquid blackness vol 2, issue 6 (LB6) on Black Ontology and the Love of Blackness to expand upon the screening of Arthur Jafa's Dreams are Colder than Death at the Center for Civil and Human Rights, Atlanta, GA for the... more
call for papers for liquid blackness vol 2, issue 6 (LB6) on Black Ontology and the Love of Blackness to expand upon the screening of Arthur Jafa's Dreams are Colder than Death at the Center for Civil and Human Rights, Atlanta, GA for the 2016 Conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies
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Kobena Mercer’s Travel and See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s gathers eighteen essays written in the span of twenty years, from 1992 to 2012, which offer an extraordinarily rich journey into the intellectual process of one... more
Kobena Mercer’s Travel and See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s gathers eighteen essays written in the span of twenty years, from 1992 to 2012, which offer an extraordinarily rich journey into the intellectual process of one of the most significant critics to emerge from the British cultural studies tradition in the 1980s. This is a journey of discovery and exploration of the work of artists of the black diaspora working under the sign of the “postcolonial modern,” as indexed by the collection’s very title, i.e., Travel & See, which is an inscription Mercer found on a sea vessel in Ghana. The essays are divided in five thematic and periodical sections (“Art’s Critique of Representation,” “Differential Proliferations,” “Global Modernities,” “Detours and Returns” and “Journeying”) and overall reflect a series of institutional, discursive, stylistic, and art-market shifts on both sides of the black Atlantic. These are changes that Mercer registered and sometimes anticipated while responding to an impressive number of exhibitions and artists over these twenty years.
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Thinking along Ariel Brown's 2021 video history | alchemy | evolution, this introduction approaches “suspension” as a concept, hermeneutic, aesthetic practice, and ethics of intellectual praxis by focusing on the way it dovetails with... more
Thinking along Ariel Brown's 2021 video history | alchemy | evolution, this introduction approaches “suspension” as a concept, hermeneutic, aesthetic practice, and ethics of intellectual praxis by focusing on the way it dovetails with the radical work the prefix ana- performs in Black studies and the way black aesthetic practices often hinge on anaoriginarity and anachronism as they seek to effect anarchitectural interventions in the languages and institution of artmaking.
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“Black Codes” intentionally evoke multiple, conflicting meanings. The term “code” conjures up fantasies of the digital, including systemization, speed, and futurity. In opposition, “black” and “blackness” refer to the meanings and bodies... more
“Black Codes” intentionally evoke multiple, conflicting meanings. The term “code” conjures up fantasies of the digital, including systemization, speed, and futurity. In opposition, “black” and “blackness” refer to the meanings and bodies that are continually excluded from the forward motion of technological development. As this special issue indicates, the combination of these terms only creates more complexity as black codes refer to the history of de facto and de jure systems that have restricted the movement of black bodies in space and the possibility of reprogramming the racial order. There has been considerable attention paid to the structures that give shape to racial divisions and, increasingly, to the ways they intersect with technology; yet we argue that, within this conversation, blackness itself often remains undertheorized. More specifically, we are interested in the way blackness, on its own, can be conceptualized as always in excess of the codes that might constrict its movements. Thus, in the same way that humanities research cannot successfully be done apart from concerns with blackness and race (because of the way racial subjects are excluded from the concept of the human that underlies the very idea of humanistic inquiry), the discourse of the digital must address the ways in which blackness operates as a node that connects bodies and objects. Indeed, the complexity of the notion of “black codes” may in fact be a function of the redundancy of the phrase, or the ways in which blackness already poses its own logic of digitality and connectivity. To parse the issue of “black codes,” it may be worth distinguishing between the black codes understood as the antiblack assemblages that have already been written and continue to define encounters with blackness, and the careful iterative work of blackness writing its own commands within its existing constraints, which we will call “black coding.” For liquid blackness, a research group at Georgia State University comprising faculty, graduate students, and alumni that collectively researches blackness and aesthetics, the purpose of this distinction is emphasizing the possibility for blackness to remain in-progress, and thus defy rigid classificatory systems. Like the concept of black codes, “liquid blackness” is strategically ambiguous. On one hand, it is meant to work as a diagnostic tool to understand the tremendous amount of desire and affect attached to the circulation of blackness in contemporary visual and sonic culture. On the other hand, “liquid blackness” expresses aesthetic and political possibilities available when blackness is understood as an expansive force—the latter point is clear not just in the research and scholarship produced by the group but also through its praxis, which aims to create collaborative opportunities between scholars, artists, and their communities. In this essay, we describe the deeply intertwined approach to research adopted by the liquid blackness group as
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While "Afro-Pessimist" scholars understand blackness under the rubric of "social death," the ascendance of the #BlackLivesMatter movement vindicates instead the opposing "Afro-Optimist" position, which... more
While "Afro-Pessimist" scholars understand blackness under the rubric of "social death," the ascendance of the #BlackLivesMatter movement vindicates instead the opposing "Afro-Optimist" position, which affirms the generative capacity of black social life. Arthur Jafa's essay film Dreams are colder than Death (2013), a meditation on the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, conducted through interviews with African-American intellectuals and artists, examines this tension. Woven together with lyrical, slow-motion images of unnamed black people, of water, and of cosmological images of deep space, these voices reflect on the ontology of blackness and its relationship to life, death, and the concept of the human. Eventually, through the words of Fred Moten, the film questions the possibility to love black people once blackness is solely understood within the "afterlife of slavery." This essay reads the film's edits as "passages" that effectively perform the very networks of solidarity, grief, and grievance sought by #BlackLivesMatter as the evidence of such love. Through its aesthetic liquidity, i.e., the film's facility to move across scale, from the minute to the cosmological, from the familial to the collective, and the way it disjoins some of the very conditions for black surveillance—voices strategically recorded independently from the image; faces hardly visible because shot against intense light sources—the film claims for blackness the expansiveness that institutes radical networks of black love.
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Abstract: This essay mobilizes the idea of “motility” to interrogate the integrative function blackness is expected to perform in both still and moving photographic images, i.e. the way in which it functions to foster a sense of... more
Abstract: This essay mobilizes the idea of “motility” to interrogate the integrative function blackness is expected to perform in both still and moving photographic images, i.e. the way in which it functions to foster a sense of coincidence between the profilmic space and the photographic image, thus bestowing a sense of wholeness to the image. Leveraging the fact that the notion of motility poses, but cannot conclusively resolve, the onto-political dimension of movement, and particularly the question of whether movement is an expression of agency, compulsion, or injunction, this essay examines the critical act of stillness and suspension Steve McQueen performs in his 1997 work Deadpan where he reproduces, but with an important variation, a famous Buster Keaton’s stunt from Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). By departing from the original on the basis of his chosen upright stillness, McQueen pursues a productive wedge between the visible and the visual, against the integration carried out by the image of black motility and the compulsive association of black bodies with surplus affectability and movement.
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Research Interests: Psychology, Communication, Visual Studies, Art, Visual Culture, and 3 moreRace, Blackness, and Whiteness
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Thinking with Fred Moten's approach to aesthetics in the trilogy consent not to be a single being and Kevin Beasley's A view of a landscape: A cotton gin motor, 2012–18, this introduction reflects on the way the philosophical... more
Thinking with Fred Moten's approach to aesthetics in the trilogy consent not to be a single being and Kevin Beasley's A view of a landscape: A cotton gin motor, 2012–18, this introduction reflects on the way the philosophical project of aesthetics is entangled in the relationships between the legal and the paralegal, law and lawlessness, sensibility and sensoriality, form and informality, nonsense and common sense, exclusion and invagination, objecthood and thingness, motion and stillness, as well as the previousness, prematurity, and postexpectancy of black generativity. Inspired by the issue's contributions’ option for incompleteness and canted temporality and by Moten's description of a “church problem” as the problem of the togetherness of things, it then approaches the issue's content thinking, practicing, or witnessing “undercommonsense” in the making, whereby the aesthetic can be understood not only as a processing site but also as a space of congregation.
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Tasked with the mandate to “set the record straight” about the beginning of the liquid blackness research group and journal and to explicate the theoretical and conceptual parameters of the idea of black liquidity, this introduction... more
Tasked with the mandate to “set the record straight” about the beginning of the liquid blackness research group and journal and to explicate the theoretical and conceptual parameters of the idea of black liquidity, this introduction negotiates the irreconcilable tension between keeping record and record keeping as a way to maintain the anaoriginarity of black study as an ensemblic and jurisgenerative practice. To do so, it draws inspiration from one of its objects of study, Larry Clark's 1977 cult film Passing Through, and specifically from the way the film's formal structure and historical existence as a withdrawing object mirror the elusiveness of the album that the musicians it depicts were never able to record. This introduction is divided into “tracks” to reproduce the same withdrawing effect, trigger a similar ensemblic gathering, and in the process, honor the object-oriented and immanent methodology developed by the liquid blackness project.
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Across his vast body of multimedia art, Kevin Jerome Everson pursues sophisticated formal exercises that deploy representational devices with the aim of achieving “massive abstractions.” Focusing on the sculptural potential of film as a... more
Across his vast body of multimedia art, Kevin Jerome Everson pursues sophisticated formal exercises that deploy representational devices with the aim of achieving “massive abstractions.” Focusing on the sculptural potential of film as a time-based medium, Everson crafts his films as sculptural objects. It is a process that works toward a point of critical density in which time's material effects on a space, a body, or the screen are rendered visible. In order to reach this point, Everson has developed a rigorous practice that includes casting his own solid rubber props, carefully choreographing films that repeat formal and bodily gestures, and making oblique references to cinematic history and its foundational relationship to factory labor. In this interview the liquid blackness editors speak with Everson about his “massive” creative project; its pursuit of layered self- referentiality; the work's sheer size (measured in labor hours, custom props molded, and film titles); hi...
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The essay singles out The Jackie Robinson Story, as an iconophiliac adaptation driven by the authorizing and authenticating presence of Robinson\u27s body on screen, which functions as both the ‘source material’ and its ‘adaptation’. It... more
The essay singles out The Jackie Robinson Story, as an iconophiliac adaptation driven by the authorizing and authenticating presence of Robinson\u27s body on screen, which functions as both the ‘source material’ and its ‘adaptation’. It argues that the film needs to be appreciated within a larger nexus of texts indicated as ‘The Jackie Robinson Story,’ revealing a larger process of embodiment of the integration drama grafted onto Robinson’s body-image in the years preceding and following the release of the film. Read in the context of Robinson’s presence in post World War II visual culture as emblem of the successful realization of its color blind utopias, ‘The Jackie Robinson Story’ appears to participate in the process of visual accommodation that brought the assimilationist imagination to elect Robinson’s body as the signifier of yet another adaptation process: the incarnated visuality of the integration drama itself
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Actes du VI Colloque International d’études sur le cinéma (Udine : Forum, 2000)
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Abstract: This essay mobilizes the idea of “motility” to interrogate the integrative function blackness is expected to perform in both still and moving photographic images, i.e. the way in which it functions to foster a sense of... more
Abstract: This essay mobilizes the idea of “motility” to interrogate the integrative function blackness is expected to perform in both still and moving photographic images, i.e. the way in which it functions to foster a sense of coincidence between the profilmic space and the photographic image, thus bestowing a sense of wholeness to the image. Leveraging the fact that the notion of motility poses, but cannot conclusively resolve, the onto-political dimension of movement, and particularly the question of whether movement is an expression of agency, compulsion, or injunction, this essay examines the critical act of stillness and suspension Steve McQueen performs in his 1997 work Deadpan where he reproduces, but with an important variation, a famous Buster Keaton’s stunt from Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). By departing from the original on the basis of his chosen upright stillness, McQueen pursues a productive wedge between the visible and the visual, against the integration carried out by the image of black motility and the compulsive association of black bodies with surplus affectability and movement.
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Spike Lee's Bamboozled argues that contemporary material culture is still determined by the commodity relation of slavery. It presents multiple transitions between two stages of the commodity form of blackness: blackness as an object... more
Spike Lee's Bamboozled argues that contemporary material culture is still determined by the commodity relation of slavery. It presents multiple transitions between two stages of the commodity form of blackness: blackness as an object and blackness as aesthetics. In the former as ...
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“Black Codes” intentionally evoke multiple, conflicting meanings. The term “code” conjures up fantasies of the digital, including systemization, speed, and futurity. In opposition, “black” and “blackness” refer to the meanings and bodies... more
“Black Codes” intentionally evoke multiple, conflicting meanings. The term “code” conjures up fantasies of the digital, including systemization, speed, and futurity. In opposition, “black” and “blackness” refer to the meanings and bodies that are continually excluded from the forward motion of technological development. As this special issue indicates, the combination of these terms only creates more complexity as black codes refer to the history of de facto and de jure systems that have restricted the movement of black bodies in space and the possibility of reprogramming the racial order. There has been considerable attention paid to the structures that give shape to racial divisions and, increasingly, to the ways they intersect with technology; yet we argue that, within this conversation, blackness itself often remains undertheorized. More specifically, we are interested in the way blackness, on its own, can be conceptualized as always in excess of the codes that might constrict its movements. Thus, in the same way that humanities research cannot successfully be done apart from concerns with blackness and race (because of the way racial subjects are excluded from the concept of the human that underlies the very idea of humanistic inquiry), the discourse of the digital must address the ways in which blackness operates as a node that connects bodies and objects. Indeed, the complexity of the notion of “black codes” may in fact be a function of the redundancy of the phrase, or the ways in which blackness already poses its own logic of digitality and connectivity. To parse the issue of “black codes,” it may be worth distinguishing between the black codes understood as the antiblack assemblages that have already been written and continue to define encounters with blackness, and the careful iterative work of blackness writing its own commands within its existing constraints, which we will call “black coding.” For liquid blackness, a research group at Georgia State University comprising faculty, graduate students, and alumni that collectively researches blackness and aesthetics, the purpose of this distinction is emphasizing the possibility for blackness to remain in-progress, and thus defy rigid classificatory systems. Like the concept of black codes, “liquid blackness” is strategically ambiguous. On one hand, it is meant to work as a diagnostic tool to understand the tremendous amount of desire and affect attached to the circulation of blackness in contemporary visual and sonic culture. On the other hand, “liquid blackness” expresses aesthetic and political possibilities available when blackness is understood as an expansive force—the latter point is clear not just in the research and scholarship produced by the group but also through its praxis, which aims to create collaborative opportunities between scholars, artists, and their communities. In this essay, we describe the deeply intertwined approach to research adopted by the liquid blackness group as
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In this landmark work of critical theory, black studies, and visual culture studies, Alessandra Raengo boldly reads race as a theory of the image. By placing emphasis on the surface of the visual as the repository of its meaning, race... more
In this landmark work of critical theory, black studies, and visual culture studies, Alessandra Raengo boldly reads race as a theory of the image. By placing emphasis on the surface of the visual as the repository of its meaning, race presents the most enduring ontological approach to what images are, how they feel, and what they mean. Having established her theoretical concerns, the author's eclectic readings of various artifacts of visual culture, fine arts, cinema, and rhetorical tropes provoke and destabilize readers' visual comfort zone, forcing them to recognize the unstated racial aspects of viewing and the foundational role of race in informing the visual.
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Critical Art Encounters offer sustained and at times meditative engagements with contemporary artworks. This Critical Art Encounter is a kind of reprise, a return to a joint performance by visual artist Suné Woods, poet and theorist Fred... more
Critical Art Encounters offer sustained and at times meditative engagements with contemporary artworks. This Critical Art Encounter is a kind of reprise, a return to a joint performance by visual artist Suné Woods, poet and theorist Fred Moten, and musician and theorist James Gordon Williams. Titled You are mine. I see now, I'm a have to let you go, the piece was performed live at the Hammer Museum during their 2018 biennial event “Made in L.A.” This special section of liquid blackness aims to sample the fully realized collaboration and audiovisual experimentation that took place in the largely improvised art event. This Critical Art Encounter includes the intimate ecological exploration that takes place in Woods's video work; Moten's poem “the general balm,” which was written in part for the performance and later published in his book of poetry and criticism all that beauty (2019); and finally, a conversation with Erin Christovale, an associate curator at the Hammer who...
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liquid blackness founder Alessandra Raengo talks with filmmaker and installation artist John Akomfrah about the emergence of the trope of liquidity in his work, in the context of the reversibility between aesthetics, practice, and praxis... more
liquid blackness founder Alessandra Raengo talks with filmmaker and installation artist John Akomfrah about the emergence of the trope of liquidity in his work, in the context of the reversibility between aesthetics, practice, and praxis exhibited since his output with the Black Audio Film Collective, and about the intellectual errantry of his practice ever since. Together they explore liquidity as a feature of double consciousness, a way to comprehend the dispersion of the polyrhythmic, and a key to approach the aesthetic philosophy of collective praxis.
ed and yet still spectrally present in each and every commodity. Keenan argues that the exchangeability of the commodity is fundamentally a catachrestic process because it ultimately entails that the sphere of the human exchanges for... more
ed and yet still spectrally present in each and every commodity. Keenan argues that the exchangeability of the commodity is fundamentally a catachrestic process because it ultimately entails that the sphere of the human exchanges for nothing in return. Keenan, “Reading Capital, Rhetorically,” 181. 19. It is this pivotal function of form that enables Marx to begin Capital from the analysis of the commodity form; that is, with the confidence that the entire structure