[-empyre-] Liquid Blackness and Materiality

Wed Apr 20 12:25:43 AEST 2016

Thank you Alessandra for inviting me to be part of this conversation, I’ve
been enjoying following along with the discussions this month. Cameron I
appreciate your example of West's "Black Skinhead.” It leads me to think
through my own work on films and embodiment, as discuss below. As an
artistic rendition, it quite literally can play with fluidity between the
body and blackness, something I try to explore within an ethnographic
framework in my own work.

Ken I also enjoyed your research projects, and interpretations.  I
especially like your point about the considering the political ontology of
racialization instead of the material ontology of race.

In being asked to think about how materiality, and liquid blackness, relate
to my own research, I want to turn to my use of video as a research method.
This has brought to the fore a type of embodiment that I did not initially
anticipate.

My research involves collaborative filmmaking with a network of African
American farm cooperatives in the US South. Nearly all participants used
the term "black farmer" in reference to themselves and their movement, but
the term black was loosely understood. It included some people who were not
phenotypically black, but had been associated with the organization for
years. It also included African immigrants who had moved to the US as
adults. It also excluded African American farmers or extension agents who
were not part of the cause. The term, "black farmer," therefore was perhaps
"liquid" in that it morphed in its use and focus in order to reference
either an alliance, or a form of external discrimination or imposed
perception. I used this lens to analyze my data and explore the discursive
slipperiness found in my research. But when I turned to my films, blackness
becomes much more material, and specifically more embodied.

In exploring the formation of the category of "black farmer" within my
films, I began to find and approach embodied moments of generation - when
bodies demonstrated, replicated, mimicked, and trained each other in order
to cultivate the identity  of the "black farmer" that participants
discursively referenced. My interaction with the films was quite different
than with the interviews and textual material, since I had to deal with
real bodies that acted in a time-based medium, being placed within a
specific context and with other people. There was a risk, I feared, in
inadvertently fixing the notion of black farmer onto the bodies in the
films, and losing the fact that this was a generated, flexible, and
"liquid" identity. What was most interesting was the simultaneous
embodiment of the concept of the “black farmer” alongside a certain
fluidity in which the concept also was detached from the body - blackness
not of the body but produced through the body for a specific purpose, in
this case that of collective identity formation.

As I shared these films back with participants another level of the
formation of the term "black farmer" emerged. The films were evaluated and
even used to encourage the collective identity formation. Filmmaking, as an
ethnographic practice, has served as a means to dig deeper into these
moments in which identity formation is not just a discursive practice, but
embodied.

I look forward to furthering the discussion around materiality throughout
the week.

Sarah

On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 9:22 PM, Alessandra Raengo <araengo at gsu.edu> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Thank you, Ken, for joining the conversation and for sharing your current
> work.
>
> I am particularly interested in your ideas of black plasticity and, while
> I agree with you that crude analogies should be avoided, I can’t help but
> being drawn to a certain duality or ambivalence you highlight about the
> specific plasticity of petroleum: how, you say, it is involved in
> "technologies of domination that double as agents of radical
> transformation.”
>
> Ideas of liquidity lend themselves quite easily to ideas of plasticity but
> the type of plasticity you are invoking here has more than some evocative
> parallelism with the undecidability of the very expression “liquid
> blackness” we have been grappling with last week. At some point I described
> it through the idea of two poles, one diagnostic and the other expansive,
> but I am still unable to really theorize their relationship (obviously
> outside of “one is good’ and “the other is bad”). What you said about your
> work makes me think already that one way to tackle this is to think about
> the specific type of actions each pole performs.
>
> Anything else you can share about social and political plasticity
> petroleum brings to these historically black Los Angeles communities?
>
> (And thank you for your appeal in favor of the interpretive value of
> critical race scholarship: one of the connotations of the idea of
> “liquidity” is the ability to infiltrate seemingly impermeable discourses,
> and I can’t deny that this fact has been on my mind throughout the
> beginning and growth of the liquid blackness project.)
>
>
> Alessandra
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Apr 19, 2016, at 2:46 PM, Ken Rogers <krogers1 at yorku.ca> wrote:
> >
> > ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > Sorry for the late arrival, but I encountered a few technical glitches
> on the way here.
> >
> >
> > I’m very pleased to join the conversation and hope to make a worthwhile
> contribution to this rich, ongoing discussion on liquid blackness. I want
> to extend my appreciation to all the other contributors and to Alessandra
> for the invitation to participate in this sustained forum.
> >
> >
> > I’ve been reading through the group's posts with great interest and
> enthusiasm, and I have already learned a great deal from the exchange. I
> find the idea of linking liquidity and blackness together to be a
> compelling framing device for developing a critical understanding of the
> inherent fluidity of blackness in contemporary culture, one that is
> naturally allied to the expanding vocabularies of new black thought and
> corresponds to the diverse ways that blackness can be felt and understood.
> I find liquid blackness to be a more ample and adaptable construct for
> assessing the cultural moment than the dubious term “post-blackness,” which
> has always made me uneasy. I’ve found the conversation so far has dealt
> quite expertly with how blackness flows into modernity, aesthetics, affect,
> phenomenology, perception, art, media, and representation. It demonstrates
> the vital contribution of a new wave of humanities-based black studies and
> critical race theory in advancing a set of concepts, theories, and critical
> tools for accessing how black experience resonates throughout the social
> sensorium—a critical discourse that moves beyond rhetorics of slavery and
> emancipation and the politics of identity.
> >
> >
> > I would like to say as an aside that this discussion points to the
> irreplaceable sphere of critical race scholarship in the humanities that
> pursues knowledge about race that is interpretive, non-reductive, and
> qualitative in nature, which I fear continues to be dangerously undervalued
> labor within the present climate of the research university and remains at
> risk in a university system that has taken up an increasingly
> instrumentalist point of view on knowledge output, a troubling fact I’m
> realizing more acutely as I have recently taken a role in administration
> (I’d be willing to take up this point later should the occasion arise).
> >
> >
> > The topic for this week orbits around the twin themes of materialism and
> ontology and is inclusive of broad concepts like plasticity and
> malleability as well as more formalized theoretical fields such as new
> materialism(s) and object-oriented-ontology. We were asked to discuss these
> issues in relationship to our own scholarship, so rather than begin with a
> top down theoretical assessment of how such theories might align with
> liquid blackness, I thought it more useful to begin by starting from the
> ground up and throwing out a couple of specific examples in my own work to
> collaboratively speculate about how liquid blackness might support a way of
> thinking through a concrete problem.
> >
> >
> > 1. Black plasticity. I’m working on a book exploring the interdependent
> histories and cultures that emerge from the rise of petroleum extraction
> and consumption (including consumer plastics) and media technology, which I
> call petromedia. Oil is itself a kind of liquid blackness, but resisting
> this crude analogy, I wish to develop a more integrated material analysis
> of petroleum that argues how it is a conduit for  social and political
> plasticity. Liquid blackness might be a way of thinking through the
> flexible, plastic, malleable social response to the power of oil in black
> communities, which, much like the history of petroleum itself, involves
> certain technologies of domination that double as agents of radical
> transformation. One chapter focuses on an active urban oil field located at
> the center of historically black Los Angeles (Baldwin Hills, Ladera
> heights, Crenshaw, Leimert Park and parts of Inglewood) to illustrate the
> material intertwining of black modernity and petromodernity. More generally
> I hope this project can help bring more new black thought into the
> environmental humanities.
> >
> >
> > 2. Black Friday. In 2012 I published a piece in WSQ about the death of
> Jdimytai Damour, a Haitian Wal-Mart contract worker who was killed in a
> Black Friday shopping spree in 2008, that is a kind of critical companion
> piece to to Amber West’s poetic reflection on the exact same incident that
> can be found in the new issue of Rhizome on Afro-Pessimism. I’d be also
> willing to revisit that piece in the context of liquid blackness as well as
> emergent discourse of afro-pessimism, since it has entered the conversation
> already and many of us are probably rapidly working our way through the
> articles in that issue. If there is interest, I could certainly make a link
> to that article available to the list.
> >
> >
> > Either or neither of these cases might be a fruitful place to begin. I
> suppose what is common to both of these projects—and perhaps points toward
> an underlying methodological here—is that they identify areas of social
> experience where blackness appears as a material ontology of race (broadly
> conceived) when in fact it is a political ontology of racialization, one
> that is always localized and specific to its historical-material context.
> This might also contain an implicit critique of the applicability of the
> ontological turn to the sphere of political thought in general, although I
> haven’t yet pursued such a line of critique any further.
> >
> > -Ken
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > empyre forum
> > empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> >
> https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3a%2f%2fempyre.library.cornell.edu&data=01%7c01%7caraengo%40gsu.edu%7c1c2b6d0547e14a2de80c08d36885dbf1%7c515ad73d8d5e4169895c9789dc742a70%7c0&sdata=LCnQlqb5xqZr3MtQDG2%2fQm1WRnGPydPymlMoHKwM9VY%3d
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

-- 
Ph.D. Candidate
Institute of the Liberal Arts
Emory University
Atlanta, GA
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20160419/7914a952/attachment.html>