[Commlist] CFP - Black and Queer, Music on Screen

CFP – “Black and Queer, Music on Screen”
liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 7, no. 1, 
Spring 2023

Co-edited by Ïxkári Estelle, James Tobias (Sync: Stylistics of 
Hieroglyphic Time), Stefan Torralba, and Calvin Warren (Ontological 
Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, Emancipation)

This special issue of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black 
studies proposes to work on Black Queer expression in audiovisual musics 
cutting across histories of the avant-garde, popular audiovisuality, and 
frameworks both transnational and critically transhistorical. The goal 
of the issue is to set up the framework for a survey of Black and Queer 
musicality in audiovisual media so as to suggest “non-contemporaneous” 
dialogues between and across historical registers and media platforms, 
so that the critical expressive power of non-conforming persons of color 
become a given rather than an alibi, an absence, or a projection.

 From early sound cinema to the present, queer or gender non-conforming 
black artists have voiced a complex series of claims, propositions, 
demands, and desires, from the introduction of sound to the cinematic 
screen to the introduction of social media video in networked digital 
cultures. Black feminist and queer scholarship has often engaged with 
the meanings and powers expressed in these works, or in musical artists 
indebted to them or referencing them, from Angela Davis’ reading of 
transformations of historical memory in Smith’s St. Louis Blues (Blues 
Legacies and Black Feminisms), to Lindon Barrett’s study of Billie 
Holiday (Blackness and Value), to Saidiya Hartman’s discussion of 
errancy in relation to woman-identified women singers in the early years 
of recording (Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments), and Daphne
Brooks’ recent reading of black women’s use of arrangement, sonic 
curation, and blackness as technology (Liner Notes for the Revolution) 
in articulating a politics of being and becoming. Working through 
postcolonial, decolonial, diasporic, and critical ethnic studies’ 
critical innovations, we may productively identify discontinuities in 
terms of technical medium and mode of distribution, from film short, to 
soundie, to Hollywood musical set piece, to film promotional clips, 
music television clips, and music video made for social media. At the 
same time, we will also observe the ways in which concepts like Sharpe’s 
“wake work,” “fugitivity” in Moten’s critical aesthetics, “opacity” in 
Fleetwood, Browne, or Musser, “boiz” or non-normative sex-gender 
identities in Harris, the expressive technics of “queer OS” in Keeling, 
or “ontological terror” in Warren – only a few of potentially generative 
formulations appearing in recent Black Study - may help gloss the 
gestures, meanings, and forces at work in black queer voice in technical 
mediation. How may we read the histories and futures of audiovisual 
musicality in these terms, given the dynamic work of artists over the 
last decade ranging from, say, Zebra Katz to Janelle Monae, Odd Future 
et. al., Mykki Blanco, Moses Sumney - and many more, too numerous to 
list here?

Black and Queer, Music on Screen seeks to redress a grave limitation in 
current scholarship. Typically, attention to medium and historical 
specificities in studies of onscreen musicality have so prioritized the 
form/medium problem in cinema, video, or digital media studies, such 
that attention to “film,” “video,” or “digital” formats pre-empts the 
observation of continuities or
conversations across historical periods or transitioning media. One 
result is that even as black and sex-gender non-confirming subjects are 
“rediscovered” in “early sound film,” black and sex- gender 
non-confirming innovations in later moments and in the contemporary 
moment are cordoned off from one another, safely consigned to some 
futural fate of what will be a belated rediscovery, or held apart as 
“alternatives” to the dominant rather than continuing a long- standing 
historical critique.

While the disciplinary preoccupations of cinema and media studies with 
regard to medium specificity and period have made it unlikely that 
concerns and problems expressed in the technical mediation of Black 
Queer voice as musical expression to surface as primary problems in 
cinema and media studies, nevertheless, some of the most affecting and 
influential works of artist cinema – Julien’s Looking for Langston, for 
example – have clearly problematized and made substance of these 
aesthetic and political histories, as well as their deferral in the 
culture industries and in the academy alike. This special issue calls 
for critical work centering both historical and recent upsurges in the 
aesthetic and critical powers of Black and Queer musical expression on 
screen. What happens when we understand, as Bey (2020) has argued, “the 
history of blackness as a history of disruption,” so that disrupting 
racializations along with sex-gender non-conformance become productive 
of the labor animating audiovisual music’s meaning and effects?

Finally, we ask, what does the sound, voice, or gesture of radical 
ethical demand feel like when it hits the poetics and aesthetics of the 
musical screen? What revolutions, in other words, in retrospect and in 
theory, can we understand to have in fact been sung, danced, and thus 
enjoined once we align the relevant critical frameworks and exemplars, 
so that the limits and obstacles to a larger historical and theoretical 
understanding of expressive queer black gesture are removed?

Topics List

• Black queer practices of exceeding and disabling technology in the 
form of musical, audiovisual technics
• Archival recovery, fictive archiving, and critical fabulation of the 
archive through voice, sound, music, and musical audiovisuality
• Hemispheric and triangular kinships of Black queer media as musical 
counter-positions within the Americas
• Productivities and problematics of Black queer practices enabling 
“queer of color” expression
• The politics of citation, reference, and allusion in Black queer 
musical media practices
• Transmedia musical imaginaries, ethics, and aesthetics
• Surprising transnational circuits of visual imageries and performance 
practices, that is, audiovisual treatments of the Black Atlantic or the 
Black Pacific
• Musicality, voice, and sound informing counterintuitive or 
counterhegemonic readings of popular Back queer media
• Digitality, diaspora, musicality
• Soul as reason: re-thinking the place of affect as paralinguistic 
rhetoric of critique, community, or desire
• “Dirty” computing, musical freakdom, and the gestural paragrammatics 
of collective self- fashioning
• Musicality and remembrance as transformation of collective memory, in 
Black musical film more generally, in addition to Blues women’s recordings.
• Afro-Historicisms, Afro-Futurisms, or Afro-Pessimisms on the musical 
screen
• Shouts and whispers on screen: historical claims and rhetorics in 
Black audiovision
• Cool, hot, noise: style on the musical screen
• Analytics of track, mix, and edit on screen as homologies of 
self-fashioning and collective movement
• Ad hoc surrealisms, absurdisms, anti-realisms: musicality as fugitivity
• Generational non-contemporaneity: Black voice carrying over and beyond 
period and across medium
Submission Due: January 15, 2022 (send to 
(journalsubmissions /at/ liquidblackness.com))

Author Guidelines & Submission Information
• Submission Types:
• Traditional essays: approx. 3-5,000 words (including footnotes)—all 
essays should be accompanied by at least one image
• We welcome submissions of interviews, visual and textual art, video, 
and other artistic work
• Questions about the length, style, format of experimental submissions 
can be directed to (journalsubmissions /at/ liquidblackness.com)
• liquid blackness follows the formatting and reference guidelines 
stipulated by The Chicago Manual of Style
• All submissions, solicited and unsolicited, will be peer-reviewed
• Media Specifications
• We welcome the submission of media files such as video or sound clips, 
which will be published as supplementary data. The following audio and 
video file types are acceptable as supplementary data files and 
supported by our online platform:
.mp3, .mp4, .wav, .wma, .au, .m4a, .mpg, .mpeg, .mov, .avi, .wmv., html.
• Executable files (.exe) are not acceptable.
• There is no restriction on the number of files per article or on the 
size of files; however, please keep in mind that very large files may be 
problematic for readers with slow connection speeds.
• Please ensure that each video or audio clip is called out in the text 
of the article, much like how a figure or table is called out: e.g., 
“see supplementary audio file 1.”
---
About liquid blackness

• liquid blackness is an open-access journal, which means that all 
content is freely available without charge to readers or their institutions.
• Our Editorial and Advisory Boards
Mission Statement

The liquid blackness journal seeks to carve out a place for aesthetic 
theory and the most radical agenda of Black Studies to come together in 
productive ways, with a double goal: to fully attend to the aesthetic 
work of blackness and to the political work of form. In this way, the 
journal strives to develop innovative approaches and analytic tools to 
address points of
convergence between the exigencies of black life and the many slippery 
ways in which blackness is encountered in contemporary sonic and visual 
culture.

liquid blackness aims to establish a point of exchange at the 
intersection of multiple fields. The history of this intentionally 
undisciplined space is best understood through a series of questions 
pivoting around (1) the relationship between aesthetics and the ontology 
of blackness and (2) the generative potential of blackness as an 
aesthetic. If blackness is, as we argue after Fred Moten, an unregulated 
generative force, then the liquid blackness journal seeks to offer a 
dedicated space where it can be consistently unleashed. As we extend and 
confront lines of inquiry from a number of research fields, our approach 
is equally concerned with theoretical content, analytical methods, and 
scholarly praxis.

---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------