The collection of articles in this issue are in conversation with one another across disciplinary, geographic, and temporal boundaries. Together they explore “scenes” from Black life past and present, including an engagement with theories that attempt to explain both the intimate lives and the very public and political lives of Black people on at least three continents.
BLACK SCENES (Vol. 19 #2/ Apr-June 2017)
Editor:
Barbara Ransby, University of Illinois at Chicago
Souls has published a number of theme-driven issues recently. This issue was intended to be our general issue, but alas, a theme, albeit a general one, has emerged. All of the six articles in this issue touch on the theme of Black culture in one way or another. All of the authors here are wrestling with the ways in which visual culture, literary culture, intellectual traditions, music, and even the politics of “touch,” reveal new insights about the evolving dynamics of race and power, past, present, and trans-nationally. The collection of articles in this issue are in conversation with one another across disciplinary, geographic, and temporal boundaries. Together they explore “scenes” from Black life past and present, including an engagement with theories that attempt to explain both the intimate lives and the very public and political lives of Black people on at least three continents. At a time when the hyper-commodified and profit-driven Black culture industry is gesturing toward Black politics, and when the disciplines of Black literary theory and Black Diaspora Studies are both in transition and under assault, rigorous analyses, like those offered by Calvente, Walker, Carrington, Blake, Gomer, and Burden-Stelly, are desperately needed.
