liquid blackness 6.2, “Afro-Gothic,” is the first guest-edited issue in the journal's eight-year history. As such, it marks an exciting collaboration with guest coeditors Sybil Newton Cooksey and Tashima Thomas, who recognized an alignment with the journal's mission and methods—to pose urgent questions in black studies through a focus on aesthetic practices and experimental research—and approached us with their proposal as soon as the news of Duke University Press's acquisition of the journal became public. Their intention was to lay theoretical ground on a growing aesthetic sensibility that reframes what have been traditionally perceived as Gothic themes and tropes to reflect instead on the unending everyday violence against black people. The conceptual work Cooksey and Thomas gather here builds on Kobena Mercer's theorization of the Afro-Gothic, one that “unearths” the Gothic's dependence on the history of enslavement and its perverse imbrication with Enlightenment thinking.
The guest editors’ call for an analytical language that can properly attend to black diasporic experiences returned contributions that focus on issues of performance, dance, visual and popular culture, the plastic arts, experimental filmmaking, literature, theater, and music and thus collectively perform their own “unearthing” of generic and stylistic categories. The liquid blackness editors welcome this dialogue's disciplinary expansiveness, which includes the decision to reprint two works (a blog post by Lea Anderson, “The Ontology of Open Mouths: The Scream and the Swallowing,” and an essay on Marlon James's novels by Sheri-Marie Harrison) that put earlier writings in direct dialogue with the conversations they have initiated, ignited, or energized. We hope this issue will galvanize an existing community of both established and emerging scholars, artists, and writers to come together around the history of Afro-Gothic art and scholarship as they continue to define its future.
Every collaboration with new team members is unavoidably adventurous. We want to thank Sybil and Tashima for their determination to bring this issue to light; our brilliant, gracious, and witty managing editor, Corey Couch; our art director, Derrick Jones (artistically known as djones); and Ashley Hendricks and Gail McFarland, doctoral students from the Moving Image Studies program at Georgia State University, who helped with proofreading.
Without further ado, we leave it up to Sybil and Tashima to chart the course of their guest-edited issue.
