[ecrea] CFA: Black Matters - Diffractions | Issue 7

Call for Articles

Diffractions - Graduate Journal for the Study of Culture | Issue 7

*Black Matters*

**

Deadline for articles: May 30, 2016

**

“I’m a blackstar”, the statement by David Bowie (1947-2016) in his
latest and ultimate album, which bids farewell to one of the greatest
performers of our time, lends itself as a pretext to pay tribute to his
legacy and to herald this issue’s aim to address the productivity of
*black* - as colour, word and idea - within the cultural. In
/Blackstar/, Bowie couples the dark imagery of a burial with a
celebratory resonance which suggests the ambiguous significance of
*black* across cultures, times and languages. Reestablished by artists
in the exhibition /Black is a color/, held in Paris in 1946, after its
exclusion from the realm of colors following Newton’s scientific
analysis of the visible spectrum, *black* has been continuously
acknowledged as a central category in cultural discourse. Within the
complex relationship between colours, black has always spawned a wide
range of social meanings. This singularity within the chromatic spectrum
calls for a reflection that crosses different concerns, from race to
aesthetics, the politics of visibility and the manifold dimensions of
cultural production.From black books to black clothes and black
paintings, from black flags to black days, from black holes to black
carbon and black boxes, *black* reflects the plurality of cultural
artefacts, events and issues, social codes and political subjectivities,
thus conveying the complexity of contemporary culture this issue aims to
engage with.

For instance, its currency within debates about race is in many ways
tied with the emergence of post-colonial discourses and their revision
of modernity’s legacies. Nicholas Mirzoeff (2016) has recently referred
to the “geological color line” to address the implications of
racialization within the context of the Anthropocene, of that which
comes to matter as human life. Black also informs the notion of
“necropolitics” (Mbembe, 2003), a form of biopolitical governmentality
in which the technologies of control through which life is managed
increasingly coexist with technologies of destruction. Black also
saturates the imagination of petrocapitalism and “oil cultures”,
informing visions of both abundance and environmental disaster (Barrett,
Worden, and Stoekl, 2014). Furthermore, its instantiations in popular
and visual culture, such as thephenomena around /black cool/ (Walker,
2012) or “the trouble with post-blackness” (Baker and Simons, 2015),
articulate the theoretical, artistic and mediatic perspectives that
bothstruggle and deal with the symbolic meaning(s) of blackness. As
Michelle M. Wright argues, “the myriad ways in which blackness is sold
is dizzying”, insofar as it works as a social, cultural and political
currency that “helps to sell jazz, pop, hip hop, a variety of
professional sports, Barack Obama […]” (Wright, 2015: 1). Black is also
a signifier of invisibility, of erasure from the visual field (as in
“black ops”), but also of hyper-visibility, of that which is othered,
queered, and made visible through negative lenses. On the other hand,
black can emerge as a provocative difference, a productive irritation to
(white) normativity, and as a driver of critical approaches to knowledge
production, as the creolization of theory advocated by Lionnet and Shih
(2011). The idea of black has also been recurrent in artistic
production, serving as label to distinguish genres and categories, such
as Black Metal and noir aesthetics. The very proliferation of genres
such as neo-noir seems to suggest the persistence and renewal of black
aesthetic codes across time, proving the continued relevance of black to
address the present.

**

At a global moment shaped by a wide array of exchanges across cultures,
how does *black* sustain its singularity among colours? Has *black* (and
blackness) gained (or lost) ground in theoretical discourse and cultural
production? Does *black* (still) matter?

This issue aims to reflect on the cultural meaning of black and
blackness through topics that may include but are not restricted to the
following:

-Black across languages and cultures

-Black in visual arts, music and literature

-Black and blackness in popular culture

-(post-)Blackness, race and the politics of representation

-Race, necropolitics and the Anthropocene

-Black lives, (social) media and cultural mourning

-Oil cultures, extraction and capitalism

-Noir and neo-noir aesthetics

-Gender and intersectionality

-Dark mythologies and narratives across times

-The cultural imaginary of string theory

-Black flags, black books and black days

-Black in ritual cultures and social codes (mourning, dress codes, etc.)

-Black boxing, visibility and surveillance

We look forward to receiving full articles of no more than 7000 words
(not including bibliography) by *May 30, 2016* at the following address:
(info.diffractions /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(info.diffractions /at/ gmail.com)>. 



Diffractions welcomes articles written in English, Portuguese and Spanish.

Please follow the journal’s house style and submission guidelines at
http://www.diffractions.net/submission-guidelines.

Diffractions also accepts book reviews that may not be related to the
issue’s topic. If you wish to write a book review, please contact us at
(info.diffractions /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(info.diffractions /at/ gmail.com)>.

Diffractions is the online, peer-reviewed and open-access journal of the
doctoral program in Culture Studies at the Lisbon Consortium. Find us at
www.diffractions.net <http://www.diffractions.net>.

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