liquid blackness invites abstracts for its no. 4 issue titled “fluid radicalisms”

Planned in conjunction with the presentation of the Black Audio Film Collective film series hosted by liquid blackness at Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA on September 26-28 and October 3-4, this issue will address a range of topics prompted by, but not limited to, BAFC’s filmmaking practice in the context of Black Atlantic artistic and intellectual flows.

One of several collectives formed in response to the conservative politics and racial uprising of the Thatcher era, the Black Audio Film Collective (comprising John Akomfrah, director of the critically acclaimed The Stuart Hall Project, Reece Auguiste, Edward George, Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, David Lawson and Trevor Mathison) produced experimental films that critically engaged existing archives, visualized a variety of forms of counter-history and diasporic subjectivities, while “eschew[ing] the notion of the singular authentic, homogeneous black voice” (Eddie Chambers). Employing techniques of remixing, sampling, looping, and repetition and partly inspired by the US black radical tradition (Malcolm X, Black Power, the Black Panthers, and the Black Arts Movement), the collective’s work offers an opportunity to engage in conversations about political visibility, identity, aesthetics, in the cultural, social, and artistic milieu of the black diaspora.

This film series and publication comes one year after liquid blackness hosted the “L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema” film series (see our February 2014 special issue: “liquid blackness on the LA Rebellion”) in order to continue an investigation of the relationship between artistic experimentation and black radicalism. We have chosen, once again, to privilege ideas of fluidity to emphasize the fashioning and mobilizing of diasporic identities that put pressure on the idea of “black” (as in “black” art, identity, culture, etc.), just like the output of the Black Audio Film Collective demanded that official 1980s and 1990s British culture reckon with its diasporic communities. Fluidity further provides a way to take inspiration from BAFC’s use of sound as descriptive of a versatile, mobile, and immersive “logic” of plunging available historical and artistic archives. Finally, fluidity emphasizes a productive permeability between theoretical innovations and artistic practices in pursuit of unfixabilities of both identity and representation.

We welcome submissions that engage in a variety of disciplinary traditions including Film/Media Studies, New Media, Visual Culture Studies, Art Criticism, and Critical Theory. Possible topics may include:

• Collaborative filmmaking and art-making practices and collective modes of artistic and intellectual production
• Hybrid exhibition practices, straddling the line between art, commercial, and public spaces
• Critical investigation of official archives
• Aesthetics of sampling, remixing, and “digitopias” (John Akomfrah)
• Disjunctive and hauntological uses of sound
• Reflections on modes of transience, migration, and diaspora identities
• Theories and practices of the black radical tradition
• Afrofuturist visions and sounds

Please send a (maximum 500 word) abstract, 5 bibliographical sources and a short bio to liquidblackness@gsu.edu no later than August 15, 2014. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by August 25 and complete essays (2,500-3,000 words) will be due on October 1^st. For more information contact liquid blackness at the above address.

liquid blackness has released the call for proposals for a small curated document of art and writing based around the themes of its Spring 2014 symposium.

You can find the call for proposals in a PDF document here.