Race and Visual Culture
CMII is among the programs that support Liquid Blackness, a research collaborative organized by Alessandra Raengo. Liquid Blackness is a core research initiative of the School of Film, Media, and Theatre, and CMII frequently collaborates to support its work and events.
For example, CMII co-sponsored a visit to campus by Kahlil Joseph and underwrote a symposium focused on the groundbreaking work of LA Rebellion.
The purpose of the group is to create critical encounters around art. To do so, Liquid Blackness fosters conversations among academic, artistic and wider communities while harnessing and championing local artistic and scholarly talent.
For more information on race and visual culture research, complete our Research Information Form:
Alessandra Raengo is one of many Georgia State scholars working on the broader topic of race and visual culture. Her main research question for the past few years has been how race – a visual system that still operates as a language of social relations – theorizes the ontology of images. How, that is, does race represent the visual? The book that reflects this research is titled “On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value.”
Raengo’s previous work includes two co-edited volumes (with Robert Stam) on film adaptation from literary sources (“Literature and Film, A Companion to Literature and Film”) published by Blackwell and two multilingual volumes of Conference Proceedings of the Udine International Film Studies Conference (Italy) co-edited with Leonardo Quaresima and Laura Vichi on “The Birth of Film Genres” and “The Bounds of Representation.” Raengo has also translated and curated the Italian edition of Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, “New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics.”
Liquid Blackness develops innovative and adaptable tools to analyze the mercurial ways in which blackness is encountered in our contemporary visual and sonic culture. It engages in historical and contemporary research projects emphasizing fluid interchanges between past and current experimentations in the context of transnational artistic and intellectual flows. Its events (film series, lectures, symposia, conversations) are conceived as collective research projects. Liquid Blackness reaches out to Atlanta scholarly and artistic communities, organizes reading and research groups, and issues an online publication.
CMII also collaborates with the School of Film, Media, and Theatre to support other special programs in cinema studies, especially when they have interdisciplinary reach. In February 2018, CMII is a principal co-sponsor of an international conference on Rendering the Visible, the third iteration of a symposium, this one focused on the concept of liquidity.