Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Through sensitive engagement with the experimental films of Arthur Jafa, the flex choreography of Storyboard P, and performance of #BlackLivesMatter protests, this essay submits revenant motion as a concept through which to think about black being and phenomenology in this era. The entwined reflections on black life, death, and aesthetics offered up by Jafa, Claudia Rankine, Hortense Spillers, Elizabeth Alexander, and Sylvia Wynter shape these speculations toward a black creative, curatorial, and cultural practice attentive to the other(wise) worlds opened by uncanny reanimation. The suggestion here is that revenant motion might name a genre (à la Wynter) of the perennial danse macabre, which often figures Death dancing among the living as a reminder to too-worldly humans of its ever-presence and equalizing power. The creative and critical practices considered here also persistently foreground the melancholy possibilities and pleasures that our collective entanglements with black after/other/lives affords. This study of the macabre aesthetic as it manifests in latter-day memento mori sharpens our awareness of the proximity of horror and romance. In doing so it provides us with an occasion to think about how the gothic character of black life emerges in the sensual and sensorial performance of mourning and artful response to grief.

AbstractThe introduction presents Afro-Gothic as an aesthetic and theoretical framework for understanding the various works in the special issue, which includes essays, interviews, a playlist, and a roundtable. Taking up Cauleen Smith's Crow Requiem (2015) as its point of departure, the authors discuss how the experimental video illustrates Afro-Gothic sensibilities in its allegorizing the ambient feeling of precarious and collective vulnerability to gratuitous violence that characterizes our everyday. The introduction considers how theoretical formulations of Afro-Gothic as mood (Leila Taylor) and aesthetic tool (Kobena Mercer) are especially relevant to the present study before moving on to summarize the contents of the issue. Rather than argue for the originality or definitiveness of this work, the authors propose this special issue as a contribution to a growing body of exciting scholarship by authors in the burgeoning field of black Gothic studies.

Abstract
The roundtable gathers specialists dedicated to thinking through the Afro-Gothic as a conceptual approach to black aesthetics and as a theoretical framework. In the spirit of camaraderie and intellectual curiosity, contributors consider meanings of the Afro-Gothic from various disciplines and diasporic perspectives. The participants discuss the ways in which horror, haunting, the uncanny, the monstrous, and the fantastic are manifest in black aesthetics and, in doing so, they conceptualize Afro-Gothic, indicate how its tenets manifest in each of their work, and indicate directions for future study.