Alessandra Raengo
I am a theorist of black aesthetics and visual culture, working at the intersection of Visual Culture Studies, Film Studies, Black Studies, Art History, and Critical Theory. I am the founder of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies (Duke University Press) and of the liquid blackness research group at Georgia State University which carries out an organic interweaving of theory, practice and praxis. In 2019, the liquid blackness research group became a nonprofit. Through research projects, public events, and online publication, it seeks to mentor the next generation of scholars of color and other scholars fully committed to the agenda of black studies, while creating a vibrant, extended, and sustainable community.Liquid blackness which builds on the study of arts and artists from the Black Diaspora to explore the intersection of aesthetic theory and the most radical agenda of Black Studies. My first book, entitled On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value (Dartmouth College Press, 2013) approaches racial blackness as a theory of the ontology of the photographic image. It shows how the black body has historically both fostered and expressed a photochemical imagination, i.e., a specific way to think of images as a direct fold from the real and therefore as wearing their truth, value, and meaning “on their sleeve.” The book describes as “face value” the double slippage that posits the black body so: a conflation of phenomenology with ontology, and a conflation of hermeneutic with ontology, that is, a type of reading of the surface as always securing a path toward its inside, its meaning, its truth. Finally “face value” expresses also the political economy of the racial sign, i.e. the way in which, through the mediation of photographic technologies—photography understood as the “money of the real,” as a form of appearance of capital—blackness too functions as the money of the real, as a general equivalent in the realm of visual representation. My second book, "Critical Race Theory and Bamboozled" for the series "Film Theory in Practice" edited by Todd McGowan returns to the legal roots of the CRT movement and spins tools of aesthetic analysis: by focusing on the homology between legal, commodity, and film form, it approaches blackness as a problem for film form. Additionally, it reads the Lee film for its contributions to visual culture and material culture studies, thing theory, the digital turn, theories of capital and a critique of the metaphysics of presence. My work has appeared in Camera Obscura, Discourse, Adaptation, The World Picture Journal, Black Camera, The Black Scholar, Flash Art, Refract, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and several anthologies. Previously I have co-edited two volumes (with Robert Stam) on film adaptation from literary sources (Literature and Film, A Companion to Literature and Film) published by Blackwell
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Books by Alessandra Raengo
Chapters and Essays by Alessandra Raengo
The dossier gather contributions from:
Charles "Chip" Linscott
James Tobias
Michele Prettyman
Jenny Gunn
Temporary Full Access Link: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/N22ec2GtWeg3qSt9zEjs/full
Asking whether a moving image is an object is a way to inquire about whether recent philosophical orientations toward the object can be put in dialog with the “object” of film studies here understood as the moving image. That said, I am compelled to immediately underline that I come to this question--and every term within it, i.e. “object,” “image,” and “movement”--from an already somewhat different angle: my concern is with blackness and the way “black” describes the most perversely sophisticated historical elaboration of the ontology of an object as it occurs in the open and deliberate disavowal of this object’s subjecthood. I am going to immediately put my cards on the table, especially since I have realized that the claims that I would normally leave for the conclusion have instead to be made at the outset: there is no ontology of the image that can consider itself complete until it has dealt with blackness. There is no ontology of the object that can consider itself complete until it has dealt with black. That is, if ontology cannot account for either one, then it is not flat at all.
Read the rest here: http://muse.jhu.edu/article/651047
It includes my essay "Black Matters" which is a critique of OOO from the point of view of Black Studies and Contemporary African American Art
The dossier gather contributions from:
Charles "Chip" Linscott
James Tobias
Michele Prettyman
Jenny Gunn
Temporary Full Access Link: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/N22ec2GtWeg3qSt9zEjs/full
Asking whether a moving image is an object is a way to inquire about whether recent philosophical orientations toward the object can be put in dialog with the “object” of film studies here understood as the moving image. That said, I am compelled to immediately underline that I come to this question--and every term within it, i.e. “object,” “image,” and “movement”--from an already somewhat different angle: my concern is with blackness and the way “black” describes the most perversely sophisticated historical elaboration of the ontology of an object as it occurs in the open and deliberate disavowal of this object’s subjecthood. I am going to immediately put my cards on the table, especially since I have realized that the claims that I would normally leave for the conclusion have instead to be made at the outset: there is no ontology of the image that can consider itself complete until it has dealt with blackness. There is no ontology of the object that can consider itself complete until it has dealt with black. That is, if ontology cannot account for either one, then it is not flat at all.
Read the rest here: http://muse.jhu.edu/article/651047
It includes my essay "Black Matters" which is a critique of OOO from the point of view of Black Studies and Contemporary African American Art
brought the assimilationist imagination to elect Robinson’ s body as the signifier of yet another adaptation process: the incarnated visuality of the integration drama itself.
The issue features essays by
Daren Fowler and Arzu Karaduman on Moonlight
Steven Spence on La Haine
Sara Smith on Mary Sibande and Torwkase Dyson
Lauren Cramer on Kahlil Joseph's Until the Quiet Comes
and a visual essay by Nettrice Gaskins
See table of content here: http://liquidblackness.com/lb7-holding-blackness-aesthetics-of-suspension/
Editorial Board:
Lauren Cramer
Daren Fowler
Jenny Gunn
Shady Patterson
Brooke Sonenreich
Charleen Wilcox
A screening of Dreams are Colder than Death (Arthur Jafa, 2013, 52 min) a lyrical mediation on the legacy of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, which gives way to a philosophical reflection on the ontology of blackness and its relationship to life, death, and the possibility of love in the context of the “afterlife of slavery.”
The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with Arthur Jafa, Kara Keeling (University of Southern California), and George Yancy (Emory University).
An event organized by liquid blackness and the Department of Film and Media Studies, Emory University (Matthew Bernstein)
Also in cooperation with:
Africa Atlanta 2014; the National Center for Civil and Human Rights; Emory's Department of Film and Media Studies; the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; the Digital Moving Image Salon at Spelman; Peripheral Visions; Film Love; Contraband Cinema.
Image by Chris Hunt
image by Chris Hunt
Image by Chris Hunt
conversation with filmmaker Zeinabu irene Davis at the Arnika Dawkins Gallery, Cascade, Atlanta
image by Chris Hunt
Carried out also in conjunction with DAEL's Window Project, in response to the idea of "liquid blackness". Please see liquidblackness.com
Presented also in conjunction with DAEL's Window Project
image by Chris Hunt
It will follow issue 5.1 on "liquidity" (Spring 2021) and 5.2 on "blackness" (Fall 2021