liquid blackness ISSUE 9.1 CFP - “Exercises in Joyful Improvisational Practice”
CFP – “Exercises in Joyful Improvisational Practice”
Special Issue Editors: John Brooks and Jonathan Leal
liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies issue 9, no. 1, Spring 2025
In Blues People, Amiri Baraka locates the source of western black musicality in the echoing, bodily sounds of traumatized Africans in the Americas. With daring specificity, Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten have argued that black study emanates, corporeally and sonically, from the body of Frederick Douglass’s Aunt Hester: the spectacular scene of Hester’s subjugation becomes one source for our various, shared practices of attending to black life critically. This primal scene grounds divergent listening practices in which one hears a commingling of terror and resistance, knowledge of enslavement but also of freedom. As Ralph Ellison crystalized so beautifully, singing, playing, dancing, or expounding on black sounds—from moans and screams to the blues and jazz—demands transcendent, near-tragic, near-comic lyrical expression. In this compound expressivity, tragi-comedy yokes brutal, spectacular violence with absurd, ironic, and joyful expression. How do we account for the unnamed, unmediated, unencumbered joyousness that arises from the same resonant depths of Aunt Hester’s scream? What joyful thresholds can black sound carry audiences over? What affects and residues outlast its transience? How does black sound, joy, or improvisation withhold itself from being known?
“Exercises in Joyful Improvisational Practice” considers the delights of black study and black sound, the liberating operations that they perform, and the moods, desires, and possibilities that they enliven. As our proposed title suggests, sound touches us. Its resonances vibrate through our bodies to arouse feelings of pleasure and yearning, new senses of social belonging and familiar states of estrangement: knowing looks exchanged across the club floor amidst basslines and bodies in jubilant motion; minds exuberantly ignited by a soloist soaring over the rhythm section’s chord changes and taut, poly-percussive support; the quotidian triumph of a rigorously-fashioned playlist fueling a party, road trip, or joyride. In these senses and others, black sound is a vehicle for both uncontainable joys and expressive practices that surpass all frames of reference. In other words, black sound touches and evades us. Our object of inquiry is thus sensual and affective even as it is formless and unbound—black sound is, in a word, liquid.
The editors of “Exercises in Joyful Improvisational Practice” invite critical and scholarly submissions from a variety of disciplinary approaches that engage with, respond to, and add to the following prompts:
In what ways is improvisational listening required when encountering black sound? How does black joy hear itself?
What (improvisational) forms of scholarship does black sound’s slipperiness demand?
What is the (not-yet) audience of Joyful Improvisational Practice and how does black sound assemble it?
As a temporal object—an event or trace of an event—what pasts, presents, and futures does black sound attune audiences to?
How does black sound invest in joy—and what is joy’s investment in black sound?
How does black sound imagine and enable new ways of being with one another?
KEY TERMS
Transform / Transport
Incite / Incitement
Scene / Space
Sitedness / Installation
Recognition / Relation
Unfamiliar / Deformation
Aurality / Aural Uncertainty
Sense-making / The unnamed
Sample / Sampling
Remix / Playlist / Soundtrack
Choreography / Dance / Movement
Orchestration / Improvisation / Practice
Virtuosity / Accompaniment / Collective
Trained / Untrained
Magic
Freedom
Submissions Due: January 15, 2024
Please submit manuscripts for consideration to 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 and visual and textual art, that has been framed through an artist statement 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
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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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