[-empyre-] Liquid Blackness Week IV: spatiality

Wed Apr 27 08:03:15 AEST 2016

Hi all,

I would like to bring us back the topic of the week, which is also the concluding topic for this month so generously devoted to liquid blackness. 

Fearing a couple of glitches I have not yet had the opportunity to verify I am 
1. cutting and pasting Sarah Cervenak’s post here so that it’s in the same thread as Lauren’s. 
2. I will send a separate email with a question directed at both of them

Hence: more soon. Here is Sarah’s wonderful post

>From Sarah:

Thank you Alessandra for the invitation to participate.  I’ve been following the discussion with great interest and am still processing the various ways that participants have been theorizing blackness in and as liquidity.  I think I see my current work (both singly authored and collaboratively composed with J. Kameron Carter—those distinctions really always undone the more our collaborative engagement grows--) connects to this concept of “liquid blackness” in several ways.  To begin, my second monograph in progress is called Black Gathering: Toward an Aesthetics of Un/Holding.  Black Gathering thinks about modes of assembly that intervene against long historical operations where gathering itself is coextensive with anti-blackness and settler colonialism. Engaging with post 1960s black literary and cultural production, I think about forms of gathering that bespeak a notion of blackness unmoored from the calculative constraints and spatiotemporal suffocatings engendered by post-Enlightenment sense-making.  That is, an enduring logic of settler colonialism and the anti-blackness that was slavery’s condition and ongoing legacy presumes that blackness ambles as to be-held and settled matter.   According to Denise Ferreira da Silva’s enormously influential essay (at least for my work and the work Jay and I do together), “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics:  The Quest(ion) of Blackness at the End of the World,” "the Category of Blackness consistently reproduce the effects of efficient causality.  Stuck in the always already there (of) Thought—as reproduced in concepts and categories—where the Category of Blackness (like other social categories), because it refigures formalizations (as laws, calculations,or measurements), arrests Blackness’s creative potential. (84)” 

This arrest—or seizure, what Frank Wilderson, Omise’ekeTinsley, Fred Moten, Christina Sharpe and Jay Carter have described as the state/ship hold—presumes that Blackness can be held, used, contained, that if it exists as liquidity, that liquidity can be governed.  Against such (post) Enlightenment logic, however, Black people have enacted, created, participated in forms of gathering that not only forego its hegemonically regulative features but that presumes that integral to such re/assemblage is the ethical commitment to release.  That is, the condition and ‘end’ of such movement is a notion of blackness as an ongoing letting go-ness.  Unfettered travel and other/wordly communion.  An example of a hold that heals, a gathering that releases, appears in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987).   In this ex-slave narrative, the former slave and “unchurched preacher” Baby Suggs held communal prayer amidst previously gathered life within previously gathered space, in a “wide-open place […] nobody knew […] known only to deer and whoever cleared the land in the first place” (106).  “Cry,” she told them. “For the living and the dead. Just cry.” And without covering their eyes the women let loose. It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath” (107).  Poignantly this gathering coalesces precisely in a “refusal to coalesce” (Moten, “Blackness and Poetry”), where dancing became crying becomes the ecstatic time for breath-recovery.  In many ways, Morrison helps us to consider what’s at stake in a (non or anti) notion of blackness that at once moves as tired flesh and ethereally ambles as the breath that comes out as gasp, caress?  Rustles in the tree, otherwise knowledges ushered in by another kind of gravitational inhabitation.  

Flesh, breath, the fluorescence and immeasurable weightiness of life in between category.  It is toward and in the interest of this “poethics” of unholding where my research questions and modalities of engagement reside.

thanks, Sarah

> On Apr 25, 2016, at 12:05 PM, Lauren Michelle Cramer <lmcleod2 at mygsu.onmicrosoft.com> wrote:
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> First, I would like to say “thank you" to the editors of -empyre- for providing this space to discuss liquid blackness and to all of the people who have already helped shape this conversation over the last three weeks. 
> 
> I am proud to be one of the founding members of liquid blackness and a member of the Editorial Board. My research considers the spatiality of blackness. My dissertation, “A Hip-Hop Joint: Thinking Architecturally About Blackness” argues blackness is the architectonic logic of hip-hop’s expanding visual culture. liquid blackness is so vital to my work because it considers 1) how blackness fills, flows, and moves through space and 2) how these flows move with/against/away from the body. I understand this second issue has been a point of tension in this conversation. So briefly, I would like to explain why I do this work. I simply cannot account for the things my blackness does if it is always with me. Instead, I imagine it wanders when I am not looking. Of course, when I turn my attention back to my blackness it returns and claims innocence and I am left to manage the fall out. That is the space between experience and liquid blackness for me. 
> 
> This covert movement brings me to the topic of this final week—space and suspension. As writers like Sara Ahmed and Huey Copeland have argued, spaces can be racialized by the bodies and objects that move through them. My work on blackness and architecture tries to recognize how a space can be designed with the spatial logics of blackness (i.e. curvilinearity and continuity, the appearance of transparency, and kinds of surface appeal). My work on blackness and architecture brought me to the topic of suspension as not just a pause, but an actual form that is produced through tension. Suspension describes a body or mass that is not destabilized or made so light that it is inconsequential. Instead, a suspended body is stable in multiple ways—these are the physics of ambivalence, which are so vital to understanding encounters with blackness. As Greg Lynn has described in his influential work on “blob architecture,” the folds, waves, and pleats that characterize so much digital design and architecture are the product of these kinds of unresolvable complexities. These shapes show us what it looks like when a object is ‘both/and.’ So I see suspension as the form of complex questioning (to understand suspension means understanding the opposing forces acting on a body and the way the body distributes its mass to achieve the appearance of weightless movement). The more I consider blackness, the more I feel the need to suspend it so that it does not ‘sink' (to echo Ken Rogers from last week). In other words, that means catching it wandering. 
> 
> Looking forward to this week’s conversation! 
> 
> Lauren
> Lauren M. Cramer
> Doctoral Student, Moving Image Studies
> Associate Editor, InMediaRes
> Editorial Board, liquid blackness
> Department of Communication
> Georgia State University
> 
> ________________________________________
> From: empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of Alessandra Raengo <araengo at gsu.edu>
> Sent: Sunday, April 24, 2016 7:00 PM
> To: empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> Subject: [-empyre-] Liquid Blackness Week IV: spatiality
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Hi again,
> 
> I want to officially announce the beginning of Week IV of our conversations on liquid blackness.
> 
> As I say so, I am already anticipating how much I am going to miss this really challenging and wonderfully stimulating forum. So, before I actually introduce them, let me thank once again everybody who has so thoughtfully contributed so far. I recognize that April is one of the busiest months in the academic year and I truly and deeply appreciate the effort that was put into this.
> 
> The incoming week is going to be about spatiality, as well as, at least in our original conception, about suspension too. So, once again, we are looping back to a concern that Johannes brought up: what does it mean to “hold blackness in suspension”? I won’t let this question overdetermine what the discussants want to talk about, but I do want to signal that I am happy to offer more clarifications if and when the opportunity arises.
> 
> One more point, before I introduce our next discussants:
> the conversation surrounding Afro-pessimism as well as the conversation surrounding OOO and New Materialism have been variously brought up in several occasions in the past 3 weeks. The rhizomes no. 29 issue came out and I am catching glimpses of the Winter 2016 October issue with a questionnaire on New Materialism. TDR Volume 59, Issue 4 is special issue on similar themes and GLQ had a special issue on Queer Inhumanism (Volume 21, Number 2-3, 2015) last summer. The next issue of Discourse, as I already mentioned, will feature a section where film studies responds to OOO. My piece on Fred Wilson’s black glass drops (his Black Like Me show) is in there. And there are revisions of OOO doctrine, New Materialism doctrine, etc. being published (or happening in blogs) quite steadily and at an increasing pace.
> This is a way to say that the conversation is happening and, as much as I would love to represent it, I can’t do this adequately in this format or within this window.
> 
> Yet, I wanted to mention this to acknowledge the depth and breath of the conversation as a way to also underline some of the stakes that liquid blackness is aware of and therefore pursuing as part of the language that will be needed to continue to stand by the very idea of "liquid blackness" itself.
> 
> 
> And now let me introduce the discussants for the upcoming and final week.
> I am absolutely thrilled to have them on board. Thank you Lauren, Sarah and Jay for agreeing to participate.
> 
> 
> Lauren Cramer is a PhD candidate in the Moving Image Studies program in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University. Her research is focused on visual culture, space and architecture, hip-hop, and the aesthetics of the racial encounter. Her dissertation is entitled, "A Hip-hop Joint: Thinking Architecturally About Blackness." She is an Associate Editor of the collaborative online scholarship project, In Media Res, part of Media Common's digital scholarly network, for which she has coordinated several theme week on race and contemporary cinema. Lauren is also on the Editorial Board of liquid blackness, a research collective focused on blackness and aesthetics.
> 
> 
> 
> Sarah Jane Cervenak is an assistant professor, jointly appointed in the Women’s and Gender Studies and African American and African Diaspora Studies programs at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.  Her areas of research and teaching are critical race theory, feminist theory, Black studies, performance studies, visual culture and philosophy.  Her current book project, tentatively titled Black Gathering: Toward an Aesthetic of (Un) Holding queries the Black radical, feminist potential of gathering in post-1960s Black literary and visual arts.  Essays connected to the new project are forthcoming in Feminist Studies and Women and Performance.  She is the author of Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom (Duke University Press, 2014)
> 
> https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3a%2f%2flibres.uncg.edu%2fir%2funcg%2fclist.aspx%3fid%3d7660&data=01%7c01%7clmcleod2%40mygsu.onmicrosoft.com%7ccc3750c409c447a93b0708d36c943610%7c515ad73d8d5e4169895c9789dc742a70%7c0&sdata=BbShzwH4cB4Ka6eMbQ4gClE1ranZcItK9lzzPibsfRs%3d
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> J. Kameron Carter is an associate professor at Duke University Divinity School. His areas of research and teaching are black religious and theological discourses, critical race theory, feminist theory, Black studies, poetry, performance studies, visual culture and philosophy. He is bringing several projects to completion, the most immanent of which is Dark Church: A Poetics of Black Assembly which explores what might be called the theological protocols of racial capitalism as a practice of would be ge(n)ocide. Those protocols are churchly, that is, they enable racial capitalism as a violent practice of “congregation,” of fraudulent communion, of assembling a world by disassembling (another name for which is “settling”) the earth. Such violent assembly is a kind of “church” event, a violent practice of the sacred that demands normative coalescence. Dark Church considers the church-like protocols of such violent assembly-through-disassemblage but in the interest ultimately of thinking blackness appositionally or as as an ante-(and not merely anti-)churchical kinesis. “Church in the water,” as poet Ed Roberson puts it, blackness moves oceanically and atmospherically in racial capital’s break, in that cramped yet capaciousness zone that surrounds capital as the black outdoors in unstately communions outside of the state, black radical potentials of black assembly. J Kameron Carter is the author of Race: A Theological Account and is editor of Religion (2008) and the Futures of Blackness (a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, 2013).
> 
> https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3a%2f%2fdivinity.duke.edu%2ffaculty%2fj-kameron-carter&data=01%7c01%7clmcleod2%40mygsu.onmicrosoft.com%7ccc3750c409c447a93b0708d36c943610%7c515ad73d8d5e4169895c9789dc742a70%7c0&sdata=ivpyUFzWruWKOm96%2ft6igHK6PxGh8R4zfqZOWyjy98w%3d
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> Looking forward to the conversation.
> Alessandra
> 
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