Black Study @ GSU

Abstract

Tasked with the mandate to “set the record straight” about the beginning of the liquid blackness research group and journal and to explicate the theoretical and conceptual parameters of the idea of black liquidity, this introduction negotiates the irreconcilable tension between keeping record and record keeping as a way to maintain the anaoriginarity of black study as an ensemblic and jurisgenerative practice. To do so, it draws inspiration from one of its objects of study, Larry Clark's 1977 cult film Passing Through, and specifically from the way the film's formal structure and historical existence as a withdrawing object mirror the elusiveness of the album that the musicians it depicts were never able to record. This introduction is divided into “tracks” to reproduce the same withdrawing effect, trigger a similar ensemblic gathering, and in the process, honor the object-oriented and immanent methodology developed by the liquid blackness project.

Fake news and fading views: A vanishing archive of the 1906 Atlanta race massacre

“…It is a practice not solely limited to writing alternative accounts or highlighting the violence contained within the institution. This practice always grapples with the tension between the “Books of Empire” and the precarious archives of communities that “are made of relationships and of sometimes intense, and at other times only casual, investments” (Raengo, 2021: 10). On the one hand, the archive, the academy, the museum, represent sites of power—regulating notions of legitimate records, intellectualism, art.…”