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In this work of critical theory, Black studies, and visual culture studies, the author reads race as a theory of the image. By placing emphasis on the surface of the visual as the repository of its meaning, race presents the most enduring ontological approach to what images are, how they feel, and what they mean. Having established her theoretical concerns, the author's eclectic readings of various artifacts of visual culture, fine arts, cinema, and rhetorical tropes provoke and destabilize readers' visual comfort zone, forcing them to recognize the unstated racial aspects of viewing and the foundational role of race in informing the visual. -- Back cover.

Abstract
This introductory essay approaches the problem of form as a problem of value and, more precisely, of the aesthetics of valuation. Building on the scene of exchange outlined by Denise Ferreira da Silva's "modern ethical scene of value," the essay approaches Hannah Palmer's installation Ghost Pools, which marks the location of two segregated pools in East Point, Georgia, reinterred in the early 1980s, by refusing to compare or equate them, and attending instead to their repressed informalities. Avoiding the equation of value that sustains most formalist readings, this essay instead "reads for informality."

AbstractThinking along Ariel Brown's 2021 video history | alchemy | evolution, this introduction approaches "suspension" as a concept, hermeneutic, aesthetic practice, and ethics of intellectual praxis by focusing on the way it dovetails with the radical work the prefix ana- performs in Black studies and the way black aesthetic practices often hinge on anaoriginarity and anachronism as they seek to effect anarchitectural interventions in the languages and institution of artmaking.

AbstractThinking with Fred Moten's approach to aesthetics in the trilogy consent not to be a single being and Kevin Beasley's A view of a landscape: A cotton gin motor, 2012–18, this introduction reflects on the way the philosophical project of aesthetics is entangled in the relationships between the legal and the paralegal, law and lawlessness, sensibility and sensoriality, form and informality, nonsense and common sense, exclusion and invagination, objecthood and thingness, motion and stillness, as well as the previousness, prematurity, and postexpectancy of black generativity. Inspired by the issue's contributions' option for incompleteness and canted temporality and by Moten's description of a "church problem" as the problem of the togetherness of things, it then approaches the issue's content thinking, practicing, or witnessing "undercommonsense" in the making, whereby the aesthetic can be understood not only as a processing site but also as a space of congregation.

AbstractThis introduction contextualizes the present issue within the question posed by its call for papers: "How does blackness index its own processes?" Following an immanent methodology that seeks formal principles at work within each contribution, it retrieves a variety of archival investments coupled with a shared ethos of critical vulnerability. While approaching blackness as process attempts to think about its ongoingness, it also reaffirms the aesthetic realm as a privileged processing site.

AbstractTasked 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.

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.

AbstractAcross his vast body of multimedia art, Kevin Jerome Everson pursues sophisticated formal exercises that deploy representational devices with the aim of achieving "massive abstractions." Focusing on the sculptural potential of film as a time-based medium, Everson crafts his films as sculptural objects. It is a process that works toward a point of critical density in which time's material effects on a space, a body, or the screen are rendered visible. In order to reach this point, Everson has developed a rigorous practice that includes casting his own solid rubber props, carefully choreographing films that repeat formal and bodily gestures, and making oblique references to cinematic history and its foundational relationship to factory labor. In this interview the liquid blackness editors speak with Everson about his "massive" creative project; its pursuit of layered self- referentiality; the work's sheer size (measured in labor hours, custom props molded, and film titles); his fine art training; artistry as the mastery of craft; the high art of Richard Pryor; his hesitant, delicate approach to blackness; and the possibility of a midwestern, or specifically Mansfield, Ohio, artistic sensibility.

Abstract
Critical Art Encounters offer sustained and at times meditative engagements with contemporary artworks. This Critical Art Encounter is a kind of reprise, a return to a joint performance by visual artist Suné Woods, poet and theorist Fred Moten, and musician and theorist James Gordon Williams. Titled You are mine. I see now, I'm a have to let you go, the piece was performed live at the Hammer Museum during their 2018 biennial event "Made in L.A." This special section of liquid blackness aims to sample the fully realized collaboration and audiovisual experimentation that took place in the largely improvised art event. This Critical Art Encounter includes the intimate ecological exploration that takes place in Woods's video work; Moten's poem "the general balm," which was written in part for the performance and later published in his book of poetry and criticism all that beauty (2019); and finally, a conversation with Erin Christovale, an associate curator at the Hammer who helped organize the event. Although not all three artists are featured (Williams's original compositions can be heard in the footage from the performance), we were fortunate to expand this creative dialogue by including a curatorial perspective. Thus we are able to consider how this work expresses liquidity as both a concern of contemporary black art and a call to the congregation.