liquid blackness presents Kahlil Joseph
In 2016, liquid blackness invited Khalil Joseph for an artist talk. liquid blackness presents: Holding Blackness in Suspension: The Films of Kahlil Joseph. This talk was a panel between Khalil Joseph, Dr. Lauren Cramer (Pace University), and Dr. Alessandra Ranego (Georgia State University).
But what is liquid blackness?
“liquid blackness” is a term that describes several things at once:
It is the name of a research group, founded in Fall 2013 by Alessandra Raengo, now Distinguished University Professor at Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, to collaboratively study of radical aesthetics in the visual arts and filmmaking of the Black diaspora, from the 1970s to the present;
the name of an online scholarly journal, published at GSU from 2014 to 2017 and acquired by Duke University Press as liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies in 2020, which offers a forum for the exploration of experimental methodologies for the formal analysis of blackness in contemporary visual and sonic arts and popular culture at the intersection between the politics and ethics of aesthetics;
a theoretical concept that probes the intersection of Black Studies and aesthetic theory and practice;[1]
an immanent and object-oriented methodology that prioritizes the experience and ethics of the creative practices under consideration, whereby it is the object that each time dictates the terms of its engagement;
an inclusive experimental pedagogy that exposes BIPOC students to the history of their expressive cultures and encourages them to write themselves into these same archives;
a digital archive of primary and secondary materials included in the Library of Congress’s collection of Historic Internet Materials for its “cultural and historical significance”;
a curatorial practice that generates original interpretive frameworks;
a praxis of community-building that gathers like-minded scholars, creatives, institutions, and community partners through its research projects and events.
The same term is deployed the same term in all of these cases because, “liquidity” describes also a praxis, i.e., a way of doing things, a mode of practicing “black study” and experimenting with improvisational forms of sociality.
Early on liquid blackness developed a process whereby, as part of its research projects, the group organizes critical encounters around art that simultaneously addresses scholars, artists, curators, and local communities, which are then developed into open-access publications, where the same research questions are opened up to contributions from the larger academic community.
