[ecrea] liquid blackness 2, no. 6 (LB6) – Call for Papers Black Ontology and Love for Blackness

liquid blackness 2, no. 6 (LB6) – Call for Papers Black Ontology and
Love for Blackness


In conjunction with the 2016 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual
Conference, hosted here in Atlanta (Wednesday, March 30 – Sunday, April
3), liquid blackness co-organized an event meant to resonate with
Atlanta’s rich Civil Rights history while considering the urgencies of
American race relations today. The event, which was part of the SCMS
Host Committee Special Event, titled “Civic Encounters with Black Media
and Black Lives,” on April 2 at the Center for Civil and Human Rights
(100 Ivan Allen Jr. Blvd. NW, Atlanta, GA 30313), featured a screening
of Arthur Jafa’s Dreams are Colder than Death (2013, 52 min) followed by
panel discussion between Jafa, film scholar Kara Keeling (University of
Southern California) and African American philosopher George Yancy
(Emory University).


The film, by the acclaimed cinematographer of Julie Dash’s Daughters of
the Dust (1991), John Akomfrah’s Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1995), and
Spike Lee’s Crooklyn begins as a reflection on the legacy of Martin
Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, conducted through 
interviews with
African-American intellectuals and artists. The film, however, quickly
detours toward more fundamental and open-ended questions including:
“What is the concept of blackness? Where did it come from? And what does
it mean for people of color living in America today?”


Woven together with lyrical slow motion images of ordinary black people
mostly in outdoor spaces, images of water and cosmological images of
deep space, the voices of some of the most powerful contemporary
thinkers and artists in black studies and black arts engage in a
meditation on the ontology of blackness and its relationship to life,
death, and the concept of the human in the context of the “afterlife of
slavery.”


Included in the film are: author/professor Hortense Spillers, poet and
philosopher Fred Moten, filmmaker Charles Burnett, professor Saidiya
Hartman, ex-Black Panther and professor Kathleen Cleaver, music producer
Flying Lotus, musician and producer Melvin Gibbs, visual artists Kara
Walker and Wangechi Mutu, and visual culture scholar Nicole Fleetwood,
among others.


The location of the event is central to the conversation liquid
blackness is invested in initiating. The Center for Civil and Human
Rights offers an immersive, multi-mediatic and interactive environment
and a rich archive documenting the Civil Rights Movement within its
historic media landscape. Through its layout and architectural design,
the Center promotes a view of Martin Luther King as a leader who
continuously expanded his commitment, ultimately shifting from an
investment in domestic civil rights to global human rights. This
narrative bolsters the Center’s mission to foster personal investment in
the rights of every human being. By putting Dreams are Colder than Death
in conversation with the Civil Rights and Human Rights Galleries, the
screening, panel discussion, and a visit to the Center might invite a
retroactive reflection on MLK’s dream of black love and equality as
sustaining a specific vision of what blackness is. In broader historical
terms, it might also invite us to pause and wonder: under what
circumstances has the question of the ontology of blackness become
available as a way to reassess the legacy of Martin Luther King’s famous
speech?


Through the words of Fred Moten, the film offers a possible answer by
reflecting on the possibility to love black people—“Can black people be
loved?” he asks, “not desired, not wanted, not acquired, not lusted
after...Can blackness be loved?”—as well as what it might mean to commit
to blackness against fantasies of flight. It is for this reason that the
event is called, “Can Blackness be Loved?”


As a multi-racial research group that has focused on issues of blackness
and aesthetics with particular attention to modes of artistic, creative,
and affective liquidity in the visual arts of the black diaspora, liquid
blackness is strongly invested in the implications of this question.
Through a close engagement with Dreams are Colder than Death, we have
identified a network of concepts with the intention to deepen the
conversation around this question so that it continues to resonate. We
welcome proposals for our next issue of liquid blackness—LB6—titled
Black Ontology and the Love of Blackness on any work of art or topic
that falls into the following theoretical, analytical, or meditative
clusters articulated in Jafa’s film:


Epistemology:

  *

    “I know it”: blackness and knowledge; blackness and belief

  *

    Flesh memory and phantom limbs: role of embodiment in re-membering,

    mourning, and empathizing; embodiment as both conduit and limit to
    empathy

    and grief

  *

    The aim, object, and practice of black studies

  * ​Types of knowledge that blackness affords and for whom?

​Ontology:

  *

    Flesh and fungibility: availability “in the flesh” (Hortense 
Spillers)

  *

    Heavy presence/heavy nonpresence (Kara Walker)

  *

    Blackness and thingness

  *

    Blackness and personhood

  * ​The personal and the cosmic

​Necropolitics:

  * Fragility of black freedom
  * Finality of death
  * Intimacy with death
  * Self-possession, self-determination, and the critique of ownership
  * Ethics:
  * Loving blackness/loving black people
  * Black love
  * Grief and grievability: shareability of black death/shareability of
    black mourning
  * ​Commitment to blackness against fantasies of flight

Form and Affect:

  *

    Chiasm and schism: figures of reversibility, reciprocity, and
    dividedness

  *

    Between the cosmic and the minute; the metaphysical and the everyday

  *

    Suspended motion: aesthetics of floating, slowness, and dis-alignment

  *

    Making space: the void, the empty, the still

  *

    Rendering flesh: aural puncta and sonic textures

  *

    Liquidity and flow

  *

    Blackness and the generation of energy

  * ​Blackness as jurisgenerative process: law making and law breaking;
    invention and deconstruction; form and freedom


​Please send an abstract (maximum 500 words), 5 bibliographical sources,
and a short bio to (liquidblackness /at/ gsu.edu) no later than April 29, 2016.
Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by May 10, and complete
essays (2,500–3,000 words) will be due on August 19. For more
information, contact liquid blackness at the above email address.

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