While Afrosurrealist works may signify on magical or hallucinatory levels, their sense of heightened reality often arcs toward current or familiar political, cultural, and ethnic contexts and references. Experimental film/video refers to work that reflects the expansive use of surrealistic principles such as abstraction, animation, parody, symbolism, incongruous juxtapositions, disinterested play of thought, and/or direct manipulation of the film image, particularly by handcrafted or artisan techniques such as painting or scratching on the film. These films may seek to explore aspects of the unconscious, or they may approach reality through the lens of the fantastic through editing, unconventional use of sound, appropriation of found footage, or the use of film stock that is out of date, tinted, baked, or processed by unconventional means. Simultaneously, in Afrosurrealist film, the conventional opposition between the real and the imagined is displaced.
The editor is interested in essays that unpack the historical development, material conditions, or artistic/political claims or sensibilities of black experimental cinemas, possibly drawing upon interdisciplinary methods that reference music, dance, painting, photography, and theater or collaborations between filmmakers and artists who work in such fields.
Topics include: artifice, black arts movement, site of memory, LA Rebellion, the sublime, jazz and film, film clubs, shadow and act, settlement/Call for Papers 7 displacement/migration, the 1940s avant-garde movement, sound, anthropology, diary films, implied revelation, dreams, contemporary art, the body, rupture, the archive, surrealism, Black Film Audio Collective, race and representation, modernism, Afrosurreal expressionism, visual pleasure, the Harlem renaissance, editing, painting, cinematography, folklore, the unconscious, dance, physical properties of film, collage, race films, alien familiar, Afromodernism, myth, theatricality, beauty, the black interior, photography and film, abstraction, documentary, handicraft or obscure techniques for processing film, conceptual art, amateur films, quilts, literary precursors or corollaries, the marvelous, negritude, the erotic, found footage, expressionism, liberation, ambiguity, non/theatrical exhibition, "blackness as metaphor," funding sources, politics and aesthetics, and technology.
Essays, book and film reviews, interviews, and commentaries will be accepted. Essays should be 6,000–10,000 words. Interviews (6,000 words), commentaries (1,000–2,000 words), and book and film reviews (500–1,500 words) should also pertain to the theme of the journal issue. The editor welcomes work from a variety of disciplines and from a broad range of theoretical and political perspectives.
Please submit completed essays, a 100-word abstract, a fifty-word biography, and a CV. Submissions should conform to The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition. Please see journal guidelines below for more on submission policy.
Direct all questions and correspondence to guest editor Terri Francis (terri.francis@yale.edu).
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
- Feature articles, essays, and interviews can be 8,000-10,000 words.
- Commentaries can be 1,000-2,000 words.
- Book and film reviews can be 500-1,500 words (exceptions will be considered for review essays).
- Notes can be up to 500 words.
- All submissions should be double spaced, use Times New Roman font with 12 point font size, and have numbered pages.
- Authors must provide any illustrations and captions and are responsible for obtaining all permissions required to publish an illustration. Illustrations should be submitted as EPS or TIFF files.
- Submissions can be submitted either electronically by email attachment or by hard copy with a disk. Work should be saved as a Microsoft Word document. Please complete and include the Black Camera Contributor form with any submission.
- An endnote citation format is required for scholarly essays. Contributors should use the most recent edition of The Chicago Manual of Style.
- An abstract of 150-250 words must be included.
- Please include brief biographical, affiliation, and contact information.
- Regrettably, we can neither respond to, guarantee publication of, or return unsolicited manuscripts.
- We reserve the right to make editorial and stylistic changes.
- If a submission is selected for publication, a signed Memorandum of Agreement will be sent and must be signed before publication.
- Articles submitted must contain significant information by or about Blacks in cinema. No exceptions.
CONTACT INFORMATION:
For queries/ submissions: terri.francis@yale.edu
Website: http://www.indiana.edu/~blackcam
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