Atonal Symphonies: Conversations on Blackness and Liquidity at the Threshold of Thinking and Making
Filmmakers gathered for the 1985 FESPACO film festival in Ouagadougou lay out railroad tracks at the urging of President Sankara.
Source: Larry Clark’s personal papers
The first three issues of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies address the journal’s foundational concerns: liquidity, blackness, and aesthetics. You are invited to a two-day virtual event to celebrate the publication of the first two issues, on “liquidity” (5.1) and “blackness” (5.2, forthcoming October 2021). This informal conversation will bring together the artists and scholars that contributed to these two issues, who will collectively reflect on the process of writing and editing experimental and un-disciplined work.
Each issue of liquid blackness is conceived as a musical ensemble, an “atonal symphony,” in the words of John Akomfrah, gathering contributions that ranges in style, genre, mode, and length and is organized by tone and pace. Thus, issues are organized into sections that create pathways to collaborative and audacious work and a rich exchange that occurs across the journal pages: “Studies in Black” assembles various modes of black study; “Critical Art Encounters” offers sustained engagements with contemporary artworks; the “Accent Marks” section indicates shifts that emphasize possible lines of flight; “In Conversation” features a dialogue with practitioners or theorists. To make this work and its connections available to audiences inside and outside of academic and art institutions—and keeping with the journal’s commitment to open access—the “Atonal Symphonies” event will stream on the liquid blackness YouTube and FaceBook beginning on the evening of September 16 and continuing all day on September 17.
Schedule
Thursday, Sept 16 @ 6:30pm-8pm
Thomas F. DeFrantz
RA Judy
Sampada Aranke
Friday, Sept 17 @ 11:00 am - 12:30pm
Kristin Juarez
Kevin Jerome Everson
Ekow Eshun
Marina Peterson
Friday, Sept 17 @ 2pm - 3:30pm
Michael Boyce Gillespie and Lisa Uddin
Rinaldo Walcott
Grant Farred
Mark Anthony Neal
Friday, Sept 17 @ 5pm - 6:30pm
James Gordon Williams
Suné Woods
Fred Moten
Walton Muyumba
Moderated by the liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies Editorial Board
Alessandra Raengo
Lauren McLeod Cramer
Charles “Chip” Linscott
James Tobias
Calvin Warren
Conversations
Participant Bios
Thomas DeFrantz - Thomas F. DeFrantz directs SLIPPAGE:Performance|Culture|Technology, a group that explores emerging technology in live performance applications. He believes in our shared capacity to do better and engage creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, anti-homophobic, proto-feminist, and queer affirming. He is Professor at Duke University, specializes in African diaspora aesthetics, dance historiography, and intersections of dance and technology. He has published, the Routledge Companion to African American Theater and Performance (with Kathy Perkins, Sandra Richards, and Renee Alexander Craft, 2018), Choreography and Corporeality: Relay in Motion (with Philipa Rothfield, 2016), Black Performance Theory: An Anthology of Critical Readings (with Anita Gonzalez, 2014), Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (2002), and Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey's Embodiment of African American Culture (2004). Among recent creative works there are: fastDANCEpast, created for the Detroit Institute for the Arts; reVERSE-gesture-reVIEW commissioned by the Nasher Museum in response to the work of Kara Walker.
R. A. Judy - RA Judy is Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Sentient Flesh (Thinking in Disorder/Poiēsis in Black), and (Dis)forming the American Canon: The Vernacular of African Arabic American Slave Narrative.
Sampada Aranke - Sampada Aranke, is an assistant professor in the Art History, Theory, Criticism Department at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago. Her research interests include performance theories of embodiment, visual culture, and Black cultural and aesthetic theory. Her work has been published in e-flux, Artforum, Art Journal, ASAP/J, October, and Trans-Scripts: An Interdisciplinary Online Journal in the Humanities and Social Sciences at UC Irvine. She has written catalogue essays for Sadie Barnette, Rashid Johnson, Faith Ringgold, Kambui Olujimi, Sable Elyse Smith, and Zachary Fabri. She is currently working on her book manuscript entitled Death's Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power.
Kristin Juarez - Kristin Juarez is the research specialist for the African American Art History Initiative at the Getty Research Institute. She received her Ph.D. in moving image studies from Georgia State University specializing in artists’ cinema. Her dissertation “Artistic Gestures: Choreography of the Artist’s Portrait Film” offers a sustained look at the ways visual artists engage choreography and blackness in moving image experiments. Her current collaborative research project focuses on the choreographer Blondell Cummings and will result in the first museum exhibition and book dedicated to the artist.
Kevin Jerome Everson - Artist/Filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson has made over one-hundred and seventy films including Tonsler Park, The Island of Saint Matthews, Erie, Ears, Nose and Throat, Sound That, Sugarcoated Arsenic, with Claudrena Harold, and Park Lanes. He also has three DVD box sets of his films; How You Live Your Story: Selected Works by Kevin Jerome Everson, Broad Daylight and Other Times and I Really Hear Something: Quality Control and Other Films.
Everson’s films and artwork have been widely shown at venues including Sundance Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Oberhausen Film Festival, Venice International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Museum of African-American History, The Tate Modern in London, Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York and Centre Pompidou in Paris. The films have streamed on multiple platform sites including Criterion Channel and MUBI. The work has also been recognized through awards and fellowships such as Guggenheim Fellowship, an Alpert Award, a Heinz Award, a Creative Capital Fellowship, an American Academy in Rome Prize, and an American Academy in Berlin Prize. Everson is represented by Picture Palace Pictures, New York and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.
Ekow Eshun - Ekow Eshun is Chairman of the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group and the former Director of the ICA, London. He is the author of Africa State of Mind: Contemporary Photography Reimagines a Continent (Thames & Hudson) and Black Gold of the Sun (Penguin), which was nominated for the Orwell prize. He has contributed to several books including Masculinities: Liberation Through Photography (Barbican); Seen: Black Style UK (Booth Clibborn), Between Worlds (National Portrait Gallery) as well as to catalogues on the work of Chris Ofili, Kehinde Wiley, John Akomfrah and Duro Olowu among others. Eshun’s writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Financial Times, Esquire, GQ Style, The Guardian, Aperture, Wired and L’uomo Vogue. He is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from London Metropolitan University.
Marina Peterson - Marina Peterson is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work traces modalities of matter, sensory attunements, and emergent socialities, exploring diverse and innovative ways of encountering and presenting the ethnographic. She is the author of Sound, Space, and the City: Civic Performance in Downtown Los Angeles (UPenn Press) and co-editor of Global Downtowns, Anthropology of the Arts: A Reader, and Between Matter and Method: Encounters in Anthropology and Art. Her work has appeared in Anthropological Quarterly, Popular Music Studies, Postmodern Culture, Space and Culture, Social Text, and South Atlantic Quarterly. Her forthcoming book, Atmospheric Noise: The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles (Duke UP), engages mobilizations around airport noise to address ways in which noise amplifies modes of sensing and making sense of the atmospheric.
Michael Gillespie and Lisa Uddin - Lisa Uddin is associate professor of art history and visual culture studies at Whitman College. She is author of Zoo Renewal: White Flight and the Animal Ghetto (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) and co-editor of Black One Shot. She has recently written on Black aesthetic practices and California’s built environment for the Archives of American Art Journal; the forthcoming volume, Design Radicals: Spaces of Bay Area Counterculture (University of Minnesota Press); and Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020).
Michael Boyce Gillespie is author of Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (Duke University Press, 2016); co-editor of Black One Shot; and editor of Crisis Harmonies, a music criticism series on ASAP/J. His research and writing focuses on black visual and expressive culture, film theory, visual historiography, popular music, and contemporary art. His recent work has appeared in Black Light: A Retrospective of International Black Cinema, Flash Art, Unwatchable, Ends of Cinema, ASAP/J, and Film Quarterly. He is associate professor of film at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Rinaldo Walcott - Rinaldo Walcott is a professor in the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. He is the co-author with Idil Abdillahi of BlackLife: Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom (ARP Books) and The Long Emancipation: Moving toward Black Freedom (Duke University Press, 2021).
Grant Farred - Grant Farred is the author of “The Terror of Trump: An Essay for Ezra” (forthcoming, University of Minnesota Press). His other works include, Entre Nous: Between the World Cup and Me (Duke University Press, 2019), The Burden of Over-representation: Race, Sport and Philosophy. He is at work on “Singularly Opaque: The Philosophy of Ornette Coleman and Martin Heidegger.”
Mark Anthony Neal - Mark Anthony Neal is James B. Duke Professor of African & African American Studies at Duke University and the author of several books including Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities and the forthcoming Black Ephemera: The Crisis and the Challenge of the Black Musical Archive.
Fred Moten - Fred Moten is Professor in the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts where he teaches courses and conducts research in black studies, performance studies, poetics and critical theory. He is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works, 2009); B. Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2010); The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions, 2014), The Little Edges (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), The Service Porch (Letter Machine Editions, 2016), a three-volume collection of essays whose general title is consent not to be a single being (Duke University Press, 2017, 2018) and All that Beauty (Letter Machine Editions, 2019). Moten is also co-author, with Stefano Harney, of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2013) and A Poetics of the Undercommons (Sputnik and Fizzle, 2016) and, with Wu Tsang, of Who touched me? (If I Can’t Dance, I Don't Want to be Part of Your Revolution, 2016).
Suné Woods is an artist living in Los Angeles. Her work takes the form of video installations, photographs, and collage. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Light Work, Syracuse, New York (2017); Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York (2017); Urban Video Project, Syracuse, New York (2017); Papillion Art, Los Angeles (2015, 2014); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2015); 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, California (2012); Center for the Arts Eagle Rock, Los Angeles (2012); Performance Art Institute, San Francisco (2011); and Arts Commission Gallery, San Francisco (2009), among others. She has had residencies at Light Work (2016), Center for Photography at Woodstock (2015), Vermont Studio Center (2014), and Headlands Center for the Arts (2012). She is a recipient of the Los Angeles Artadia Award (2020), the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship Award from the San Francisco Foundation (2015), the Visions from the New California Award from the James Irvine Foundation (2012), and the Murphy and Cadagon Fellowship (2009).
James Gordon Williams is a pianist, composer, improviser, and critical musicologist who collaborates with poets, dancers, and experimental film artists. He collaborated with video artist Suné Woods and poet Fred Moten in Woods’s You are mine. I see now, I’m a have to let you go (2018); improvised a piano score for filmmaker Cauleen Smith’s world premiere of Crow Requiem (2015) and recorded a piano arrangement of Paul Robeson’s version of “Ol’ Man River” for Crystal Z. Campbell’s exhibition Model Citizen, Here I Stand (2019). He has performed at the Village Vanguard, Birdland and several jazz festivals in the United States, Malta, Switzerland, France, and Italy. He is the author of Crossing Bar Lines: The Politics and Practices of Black Musical Space (2021 University Press Mississippi) and several peer-reviewed articles on improvisation. Under the umbrella of critical improvisation studies, his research explores Black intellectual thought and spatializing practices in creative improvisation using the framework of Black Geographies and Black feminism. He is an assistant professor of music in the Department of African American Studies at Syracuse University.
Walton Muyumba - Walton Muyumba is an Associate Professor and the Associate Director of Creative Writing in the Department of English at Indiana University-Bloomington. He’s the author of The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism (University of Chicago Press, 2009).
Moderators
Lauren McLeod Cramer is an assistant professor in the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Her work focuses on the spatial aesthetics of blackness and popular culture. Lauren is a founding member of liquid blackness, a research project on Blackness and aesthetics, and is the co-Editor of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies. Her writing has appeared in The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, The Black Scholar, Black Camera, Film Criticism, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and the edited collection Writing for Screen Media (Routledge, 2019).
Dr. Charles P. ("Chip") Linscott is the head of audio at the GRID Lab at Ohio University where he teaches virtual reality theory, history, criticism, and production. His book project, Sonic Overlook: Blackness between Sound and Image, examines the ways in which sonicity intervenes in black visuality. Chip's writing has appeared in Black Camera, In Media Res, liquid blackness, ASAP/J, The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and the anthologies At the Crossroads and Now Media (Routledge, 2021). He is a member of the Editorial Board of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies.
Alessandra Raengo is professor of Moving Image Studies at Georgia State University, the Founding Editor-in-Chief of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies and the founder of the research group on blackness and aesthetics that initiated the journal in 2013. She is the author of On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value (Dartmouth College Press, 2013) and of Critical Race Theory and Bamboozled (Bloomsbury Press, 2016).
James Tobias is associate professor in the English Department at UC Riverside; author of Sync: Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time (2010); guest editor of Music, Sound, and the Moving Image’s special volume “Musical Screens” (2015); liquid blackness project contributor and now Editorial Board member, and author of many essays on audiovisual music, digital cultures, queer media, and experimental film.
Calvin Warren is associate professor of African American Studies at Emory University. Warren’s research interests are in Continental Philosophy (particularly post-Heideggerian and nihilistic philosophy), Lacanian psychoanalysis, queer theory, Afro-pessimism, and theology. He is the author of Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (2018) and working on a second project, Onticide: Essays on Black Nihilism and Sexuality, a rethinking of sexuality without the human, sexual difference, or coherent bodies. He is a member of the Editorial Board of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies.
Sponsorship
This event is organized with the support of Department of Film and Media Studies at Emory University. Atonal Symphonies is also supported by the Black Research Network at the University of Toronto and the Cinema Studies Institute; both stand in solidarity with the CAUT censure (see censureuoft.ca) and recognize that the protection of academic freedom and the fights against bias, chauvinism, anti-black racism are often incumbent upon the extraordinary labor and energy of those in the most precarious positions. The event is hosted by the liquid blackness project (Liquid Blackness, Limited) based in Atlanta, GA.
An Important Note About Academic Freedom
All of those in attendance are advised that, as of April 22, the University of Toronto has been under censure by the Canadian Association of University Teachers for its failure to resolve concerns regarding academic freedom stemming from a hiring scandal in the Faculty of Law. CAUT Executive Director David Robinson has said that, ‘When reviewing all the evidence, CAUT Council delegates concluded that the decision to cancel Dr. Valentina Azarova’s hiring was politically motivated, and as such constitutes a serious breach of widely recognized principles of academic freedom. In a close examination of the facts of the case, CAUT Council found it implausible to conclude that the donor’s call did not trigger the subsequent actions resulting in the sudden termination of the hiring process. CAUT has only imposed censure on a member institution twice in the last several decades – in 1979 and in 2008.
Censure is a sanction in which academic staff are asked to not accept appointments or speaking engagements at the institution until satisfactory changes are made. In support of the CAUT censures, this event—a practice of solidarity, conceived to explore the widest possible expression of black creative and scholarly life in community—will no longer be co-hosted by the University of Toronto. In solidarity with CAUT censure, the Atonal Symphonies event is entirely hosted by Liquid Blackness, Limited, the Atlanta-based non-profit that runs the liquid blackness project in coordination with Georgia State University’s doctoral program in Moving Image Studies.
