CFP – Black and Queer, Music on Screen by 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 to Lindon Barrett’s study of Billie Holiday to Saidiya Hartman’s discussion of errancy in relation to woman-identified women singers in the early years of recording and Daphne Brooks’ recent reading of black women’s use of arrangement, sonic curation, and blackness as technology 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.
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.
Field: 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
Submission Types: Traditional essays: approx. 3-5,000 words (including footnotes)—all essays should be accompanied by at least one image
Welcome are submissions of interviews, visual and textual art, video, and other artistic work
