liquid blackness ISSUE 9.2 CFP - “FAIR USE”
CFP - “FAIR USE”
liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies issue 9, no. 2, Fall 2025
Fair use is a legal doctrine that promotes freedom of expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances.
(US Copyright Office)
Fair use is an affirmative defense that can be raised in response to claims by a copyright owner that a person is infringing a copyright.
(Copyright Alliance)
a [fair use] code provides guidance to rights holders as to when it may not make sense for them to claim infringement in light of an appropriate invocation of fair use.
(Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts, CAA)
In turn freeing, affirmative, defensive, risqué, or foreboding, “fair use” traffics equally in enclosures and trespassing, property and impropriety, self-possession and sharing, disbursement and accumulation.
Both a pillar of Humanism and an undercommon praxis of upending its very premises, both future-oriented and retroactive, speculative and retrograde, “fair use” knows how primitive accumulation works and can speak to the duplicity of care that affects all creative industries and institutions: who’s the subject and object of care, who/what benefits from it, and how?
This issue of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies welcomes critical engagements with the fair use doctrine—its premises, objects, and practices—and is particularly interested in its praxis as it extends beyond its strict legal meaning. In other words, this issue seeks to stage a conversation between best practices and better praxes as they navigate what’s one’s and what’s another’s as well as the difficulty of giving over the adjudication of these distinctions to the law, custom, tradition, common sense, or, perhaps more scandalously, the subjectivity of aesthetic judgement. If, even in its largesse, the claim to fair use cannot not tussle with issues of property, we want to know, can fair use be put to use that’s fair?
We are also interested in taking these terms apart and thinking about “fairness” and “use” both literally and evocatively as social relations that might imply an engagement between supposed equals, or perhaps might be harbingers of a mutual indebtedness to come, a series of “credits” that cannot/will not be given and debts that cannot/will not be repaid.
Hence, we ask, what are the assumptions and the delusions of claims to “fairness”? What does it mean to defend a claim that seeks to enforce either sharing or the policing of property? But also, what are the possibilities and the brutalities of use? And what are the generative promises of re-use?
We invite submissions to think expansively about “fair use” from a variety of disciplinary formations, theoretical or practical inclinations, and modes of praxis that engage with, creatively respond to, as well as add to the following:
Fair Use/Fair Play/Fair Game
Fairness/Rules of engagement/Rules of disengagement
Property/Propriety/Impropriety
Use/Usufruct
Giving Credit/Being in Debt
Use value/Misuse value/Reuse value
Whose rights to use/Whose rights to refuse?
Enclosure/the commons/the undercommons/the surround
Sharing/Caring/Homage
Accumulation/Valorization/Self-valorization
Influence/Derivation/Derivatives
Duplication/Repetition/Reenactment
Riffing/Sampling/Redacting
Intentionality/Intention/Potension
Putting to use/Putting to work
Laying Claims/Laying law/Laying low
Permission/Transgression/Transformation
Submissions Due: September 1, 2024
Please submit at: https://mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/dup-lbk
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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. (Please consider “fair use” of visual materials included, as you draft your piece and please consult previous journal issues for inspiration on how to be in dialog with visual materials)• We welcome submissions of interviews framed through an introduction to the artist/theorist that engages relevant scholarly literature and/or creative practice. Before submitting, please send your inquiries/proposals to journalsubmissions@liquidblackness.com
• Questions about the length, style, format of experimental submissions can be directed to journalsubmissions@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
Media files such as video or sound clips, might 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.”
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About liquid blackness
liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies is an open-access journal, which means that all content is freely available without charge to readers or their institutions.
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