[ecrea] Reminder CFP Black Matters | Diffractions journal

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 the phenomena around /black cool/ (Walker, 
2012) or “the trouble with post-blackness” (Baker and Simons, 2015), 
articulate the theoretical, artistic and mediatic perspectives that both 
struggle 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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