Black Scholar

The paucity of literature on the black woman is outrageous on its face. But we must also contend with the fact that too many of these rare studies must claim as their signal achievement the reinforcement of fictitious cliches. They have given credence to grossly ...

Beginning in the 1990s, the discipline of African-American Studies underwent a second renaissance in higher education. This renaissance is an extension of the struggle and foundation established for over two decades. The visibility, growth and institutionalization of the Africana Studies ...

“Black Codes” intentionally evoke multiple, conflicting meanings. The term “code” conjures up fantasies of the digital, including systemization, speed, and futurity. In opposition, “black” and “blackness” refer to the meanings and bodies that are continually excluded from the forward motion of technological development. As this special issue indicates, the combination of these terms only creates more complexity as black codes refer to the history of de facto and de jure systems that have restricted the movement of black bodies in space and the possibility of reprogramming the racial order. There has been considerable attention paid to the structures that give shape to racial divisions and, increasingly, to the ways they intersect with technology; yet we argue that, within this conversation, blackness itself often remains undertheorized. More specifically, we are interested in the way blackness, on its own, can be conceptualized as always in excess of the codes that might constrict its movements. Thus, in the same way that humanities research cannot successfully be done apart from concerns with blackness and race (because of the way racial subjects are excluded from the concept of the human that underlies the very idea of humanistic inquiry), the discourse of the digital must address the ways in which blackness operates as a node that connects bodies and objects. Indeed, the complexity of the notion of “black codes” may in fact be a function of the redundancy of the phrase, or the ways in which blackness already poses its own logic of digitality and connectivity. To parse the issue of “black codes,” it may be worth distinguishing between the black codes understood as the antiblack assemblages that have already been written and continue to define encounters with blackness, and the careful iterative work of blackness writing its own commands within its existing constraints, which we will call “black coding.” For liquid blackness, a research group at Georgia State University comprising faculty, graduate students, and alumni that collectively researches blackness and aesthetics, the purpose of this distinction is emphasizing the possibility for blackness to remain in-progress, and thus defy rigid classificatory systems. Like the concept of black codes, “liquid blackness” is strategically ambiguous. On one hand, it is meant to work as a diagnostic tool to understand the tremendous amount of desire and affect attached to the circulation of blackness in contemporary visual and sonic culture. On the other hand, “liquid blackness” expresses aesthetic and political possibilities available when blackness is understood as an expansive force—the latter point is clear not just in the research and scholarship produced by the group but also through its praxis, which aims to create collaborative opportunities between scholars, artists, and their communities. In this essay, we describe the deeply intertwined approach to research adopted by the liquid blackness group as

This reflexive essay chronicles the last two years of the author's PhD program and the negotiations of an emerging black female critical scholar in response to the growing tensions between academic obligations and growing racial unrest. Guiding questions of, “what are you going to do? And what are you willing to pay?” were used to think through what it meant to dedicate oneself to critical social justice work and apply that dedication to everyday practices despite perceived limitations.

Introductory essay for the special issue dedicated to Dominican Black Studies of The Black Scholar (Vol. 45, No. 2, 2015), co-written with Amaury Rodriguez. Explores what "Dominican Black Studies" could offer, or how both Dominican Studies and Black Studies change when brought together. One central purpose: to push for "avenues of research that would move scholarship on Santo Domingo beyond the politically limited and limiting emphasis on black self-recognition and into a more expansive notion of black studies" (from the introduction).

Beginning in the 1990s, the discipline of African-American Studies underwent a second renaissance in higher education. This renaissance is an extension of the struggle and foundation established for over two decades. The visibility, growth and institutionalization of the Africana Studies ...

This reflexive essay chronicles the last two years of the author's PhD program and the negotiations of an emerging black female critical scholar in response to the growing tensions between academic obligations and growing racial unrest. Guiding questions of, “what are you going to do? And what are you willing to pay?” were used to think through what it meant to dedicate oneself to critical social justice work and apply that dedication to everyday practices despite perceived limitations.