liquid blackness ISSUE 12.1 CFP – “BLACK ESSAYISM: FORMAL EXPERIMENTATIONS IN BLACK CREATIVE/CRITICAL PRACTICES”
liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 12, no. 1, Spring 2028
Guest editor: Walton Muymba
Submissions due: January 30, 2027
This issue of liquid blackness explores Black essayism and the essay’s formal and attitudinal centrality in Black creative/critical practices. Antithetical to market and institutional forces that obsess over the finished product, Black essayism is the practice of attempting dynamic, novel representations or examinations of experience, thought, and art that are unencumbered by demands of completion, perfection, finality. Whether sampling, collaging, dancing, building, or map-making, the essayist works adventurously with the photo array or the playlist, on the page or the screen. Whether co-authored or not, the essay is a quest never undertaken alone and inspires lyrical antiphony, creative and critical.
In literature, the essay might take a dialogic form that, striving “to produce the effect of the spontaneous, the tentative, and the open-ended, lends itself to exploring complex and contentious issues” and, in this way, allowed Black artists entry into the public sphere by affording a way “to document but also debate progress, setbacks, and possibilities from both inter- and intragroup perspectives” (Shawn Christian, “The Essay in the Harlem Renaissance”). For Edward Said, as “a comparatively short, investigative, radically skeptical form,” the essay offers space for crafting a sophisticated, secular, democratic brand of criticism that “deals with local and worldly situations” and “is constitutively opposed to the production of massive, hermetic systems” (The World, the Text, and the Critic).
The visual essay—in film, video, photography, etc.—affords formal interventions that may address “the gaps, the spaces in the shadows that facts don’t allow us to see, the mystery,” as bell hooks wrote of Carrie Mae Weems’s Went Looking for Africa (Art on My Mind). Indeed, the essay film might be a mystery to itself, as it is in recent essaystic cinema of Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Diop, Mati Diop, Kahlil Joseph, or Raoul Peck, where film history is citationally engaged in order to remember it differently (James Tobias, “The Music Film as Essay”). Citing Bambara, Nora M. Alter argues that the essay film is “a space of contestation, a liberated zone in which to build a cinema for social change.” Not only does the essay film announce “a revisioning of cinematic history that draws attention to its omissions and blind spots,” but it can also “respond immediately to a crisis, reveal a problem, and bring attention to events that might otherwise be buried for decades” (“The American Essay Film: A Neglected Genre”). Far from self-indulgent formalism, perhaps, as Ekow Eshun put it, “the essayistic is not about a particular generic fascination for voiceover or montage; the essayistic is dissatisfaction, it’s discontent with the duties of an image and the obligations of a sound” (voice-over sampled in Kevin B. Lee, The Essay Film—Some Thoughts of Discontent, 2014)
Thus, what if, as Brian Dillon insists, essaysm is “an attitude to the form—to its spirit of adventure, and its unfinished nature?” A tentative, hypothetical practice that is also “a habit of thinking, writing and living that has definite boundaries”? (Essaysm) What if, expanding on Kevin Adonis Brown, form is a “free determination” of what might follow (an image, a word, a sound) at any point in time? (“The Photograph as Essay”). In practice, the essayist hovers in the nodal zone created by overlapping the definitive and the tentative, the liminal space between “[essayism’s] desire for ‘aesthetic integrity’” and its “impulses to hazard or adventure” (Alter, “The Essay Film”).
Collectively, perhaps, these critics offer a generative approach to Black Essayism: an always anagrammatical expression of Black thought in motion that doesn’t hesitate to make new declarations about Black creative futures while cautiously rehearsing what has come before. Upward and backward, it is a practice always incomplete and always ongoing.
Hence, we might recognize essayism as quintessential to Black study or, better yet, that Blackness itself is an essayistic praxis, when we recall Fred Moten’s argument that the “much else” of Blackness is both “the air of the thing that escapes enframing” and the sound of “husky theoretical lyricism” (“The Case of Blackness”). As an epistemological or hermeneutic practice, regardless of its artform, the essay may also allow us to explore different ways of knowing by making.
“Black Essayism: Formal Experimentation in Black Creative/Critical Practices” considers the delights of Black Study and Black Essayism, the liberatory creative/critical practices that they engender, and the infinitely various formal arrangements that they invite. This issue invites explorations of Black essayism and quotidian acts of high-concept epistemological experimentation, especially those ingenious attempts at, and elliptical processes of, Black creative/critical expression that invite us to craft spaces for first thoughts, improvisations, and revisions that engage with, respond to, and add to the following prompts through fair, honest inquiry:
● Process/product
● Habits and styles of thinking
● The work and purpose of form
● The “workaround”
● Attempt and effort
● Freedom and perils of experimentation
● The ethics and politics of the hypothetical
● Composition and/or improvisation
● Weighing (in, down, up)
● Voice and style
● Pace, rhythm, and texture of thought in the making
● Concision/Precision/Speculation
● Revision/Retraction
● Citation and memory
● Essaying and collaboration
● Knowing by making
● Mastery/curiosity/humility
Submissions Due: January 30, 2027
Please submit at: https://mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/dup-lbk
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Author Guidelines & Submission Information
● Submission Types:
○ We encourage submissions of experimental essays, photo, video, and illustrated essays, and inventive forms of criticism that are clear about the ethics and purpose of their undertaking. Before submitting, please send your inquiries/proposals to journalsubmissions@liquidblackness.com
○ Traditional essays: approx. 3-5,000 words (including footnotes)—all essays should be accompanied by at least one image. No submission will be considered without it. (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 also welcome submissions of interviews, visual and textual art, and other artistic work. 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
○ 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.”
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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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