The Jurisgenerativity of a Liquid Praxis

Abstract

liquid blackness founder Alessandra Raengo talks with filmmaker and installation artist John Akomfrah about the emergence of the trope of liquidity in his work, in the context of the reversibility between aesthetics, practice, and praxis exhibited since his output with the Black Audio Film Collective, and about the intellectual errantry of his practice ever since. Together they explore liquidity as a feature of double consciousness, a way to comprehend the dispersion of the polyrhythmic, and a key to approach the aesthetic philosophy of collective praxis.

Aporias at the intersection of geography and feminist science and technology studies: Critical engagements with Black studies

“…By thinking the marronage of enslaved Africans as a form of ecological becoming, Allewaert (2013) develops the concept of the relationally interdependent "parahuman" against both the primacy of the human and claims to liberal humanism as remedy for slavery's dehumanization. In a recent interview in liquid blackness (Raengo, 2021), filmmaker John Akomfrah highlights how his methodological use of montage is integral to exploring the liquidness of identity. Through sound and audio collage, non-linear narrative, and video installation, Akomfrah explores modes of Blackness that defy stable, identitarian forms of agential being.…”

‘Nothing to practice’: Julius Eastman, queer composition, and Black sonic geographies

“…Most Black geographic engagements with music have engaged with place-making through hip-hop, 26 the blues, 27 and techno, 28 as well as performance more broadly 29 but have focused less on the complexities of Black composition in/against forms of expression popularly deemed 'white'. Eastman's rupture of avant-garde classical idioms and spaces through processes of improvisation, sampling, and montage 30 challenges the temporal and spatial structures of modernity, 31 while also contesting the ontological boundaries and spatial codifications that attempt to define and contain Black and queer creativity. 32 Thus, I engage with recent concerns at the nexus of cultural geography, sound geographies, and Black and queer theory that seek to complicate the overlapping meanings and belongings attached to queer and Black performance that exceeds geographic space structured by anti-Blackness and homophobia.…”

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

“…My investment lies in blackness 1 as a matter of process and practice. Such inquiry relies on a liquid aesthetic that recognizes the flow of blackness from subject to object and maintains “a productive tension between experience and expression, between people and sensorial or aesthetic regimes” (Raengo, 2014: 7). As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (2013) put it, blackness “must be understood in its ontological difference from black people who are, nevertheless, (under)privileged insofar as they are given (to) an understanding of it” (p. 47).…”