This is the appeal for the next issue of the paper Liquid Blackness: Journal of Aesthetics and Black Studies (Vol. 10, no. 2, fall 2026)– “Caribbean Pervert,” guest edited by Christina Leon, CC Mackie and Judith Rodriguez. The submission deadline is September 15th, 2025. [The liquid blackness project is a nonprofit research group collaboratively studying blackness and aesthetics. (Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention!)]
explanation: The Caribbean has a tense relationship with aesthetics because of how islands, geopolitics and history have been engulfed by colonial and tropical discourses. In his third attempt on orbiting the planet, Christopher Columbus revised the Ptolemy theory of the globular Earth, rendering it in the form of a Caribbean pear or female breasts near the nanny or heaven. This Colombian aesthetic ideology of earthly paradise floats in the Caribbean both historically and in a modern moment when the coastline functions primarily for the speculative finances and tourism industry. This violent beauty creates an ideal postcard that transforms the Caribbean as a global zone of northern resources and rest. Due in part to the colonial violence of Colombian vision, the Caribbean is hoping to produce writers, theorists, visual artists, critics, filmmakers, historians, and musicians who transform this aesthetic overlay into cannibalism in a glorious way, asking us to see “beauty” itself again. The undeniable beauty of this region is considered in parallel with the issues of beauty of these islands in the writings of Suzanne Seyser. TROPIQUES;Written in a small location in Kincaid, Jamaica. Literary productions by authors such as Marie Vieux Chaubett and Tiffany Jannique. In the visual arts practice of artists like Wifredo Lam. Performance by Maria Magdalena Campos Pon. And at the vast festival arts of Carnival.
Given this Caribbean heritage tackles aesthetics, the guest editor of “Caribbean Pervert” is Liquid Blackness: Journal of Aesthetics and Black Studiesurging artists, critics and theorists to contribute to publishable efforts for rigorous and experimental scholarships, including visual portfolios, music playlists, film criticism, music writing, and other representative works of dynamic independent black research. We film the title of this special issue from Sylvia Winter’s unpublished manuscript, “Black Pervert.” This tracks ontological changes in Africans in a new world state, but not obviously limited to, by colonial enslavement. She describes the process of “indigenousization” of blacks in the Caribbean, not as an alternative to the archipelago’s indigenous people, but as an ontic process of being present in places by creating relatives amidst these forms of humanity. This issue welcomes submissions that may address the complexities and possibilities that Winter is portrayed throughout the Caribbean.
The contribution may begin with interrogating what Kamau Brathwaite calls the “inner plantation.” The Caribbean can be thought of as derived from “core and kernel, local forms of resistance, roots, stumps, and survival rhythms.” Elsewhere, Sylvia Winter offers another valence of “Inner Plantation,” along with her novelistic and provocative psychosocial framing, as revealed after the life and death of the John Conne festival in Jamaica. This intellectual entanglement of the Caribbean expands this blackness and encourages us to read the Caribbean as an aesthetic knowledge project for black spaces.
Brathwaite and Winter concentrate artist theorists within the intellectual traditions of the Caribbean, reading their diaspora in the geopolitical deposition amidst the formative and material violence of African slavery and indigenous genocide. And because of the tense relationship between global North/North American epistemology and aesthetics, and all stories with Latin American eugenic discourse, guest editors are looking for works that either completely complicated or separate them completely, rather than embodying their recognizable stories and practices. Following Rinaldo Walcott’s criticism of American black research, he hopes to try and reject “creoleolyization” as a philosophical suture of both “romance” of “plant systems” and “biology” of “biology” because of the pluralism of interpretation of Caribbean research as a geographical category. We do this and support Caribbean research drawing a non-subsidized, discourse path, centered around black research practices.
Submissions in a variety of formats are recommended, including essays, visual related documents and other creative aesthetic forms.
- Integrification
- Afrocaribian cosmology and nonlinear temporality
- Black ecological entanglement (beyond disasters)
- The Caribbean Sea as Unlimited Space
- Caribbean aesthetic strategy (opaque, camouflage)
- Caribbean aesthetic of the diaspora
- Caribbean heritage of fascism and resistance
- Caribbean beauty and the formation of violence
- Caribbean unsovereign modalities
- Archipelagos of imagination or imagining Caribbean thoughts in transit: Caribbean thinkers and conceptual travel
- Lower Caribbean classes
- Translation and the Afro-Caribbean
- “CRIC? CRAC!” Story and ancestors
- Creation of diversity, Antilanite, unified
- Philosophical negativity in the tropical
See the complete guidelines https://liquidblackness.com/news?category=cfps
Please submit: https://mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/dup-lbk
Contact: journalsubmissions@liquidblackness.com
https://liquidblackness.com/news/liquid-blackness-issue-102-cfp-caribbean-metamorphosis
[Shown above: Detail from artwork at https://liquidblackness.com/curating-for-blackness-1]
