liquid blackness

liquid blackness is a research group that explores issues of blackness and aesthetics. It is composed of graduate students and alumni of the Moving Image Studies program in the School of Film, Media & Theatre in the College of the Arts at Georgia State University and is coordinated by faculty member, Dr. Alessandra Raengo.

The purpose of the group is to create critical encounters around art. To do so, liquid blackness fosters conversations between academic, artistic and wider communities, while harnessing and championing local artistic and scholarly talent.

liquid blackness develops innovative and adaptable tools to analyze the mercurial ways in which blackness is encountered in our contemporary visual and sonic culture. To do so liquid blackness engages in both historical and contemporary research projects emphasizing fluid interchanges between past and current experimentations in the context of transnational artistic and intellectual flows. Our events (film series, lectures, symposia, conversations) are conceived as collective research projects. For each, liquid blackness reaches out to Atlanta scholarly and artistic communities, organizes reading and research groups, and issues an online scholarly journal.

Alessandra Raengo is Associate Professor of Moving Image Studies at Georgia State University, coordinator of liquid blackness, a research project on blackness and aesthetics, and Founding Editor of its online journal. She writes about contemporary films and arts of the Black Diaspora and is the author of On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value (Dartmouth College Press, 2013) and of Critical Race Theory and Bamboozled (Bloomsbury Press, October 2016).