Black Camera invites submissions for a special issue on Afrosurrealism in Film/Video, i.e. black experimental film to be published Fall 2013.

Black Camera is a peer-reviewed journal devoted to the study and documentation of the Black
Cinematic experience and is the only scholarly film journal of its kind in the United States.

In the conceptual space offered by Amiri Baraka's notion of Afro-Surreal Expressionism, this special issue of Black Camera invites contributions that explore the experimental, absurd and whimsical dimensions of Black filmmaking. We seek to uncover avant-garde, experimental or noncommercial motion pictures, artists and publics throughout the African Diaspora, particularly the Caribbean and Afro-Latin America. In no way prescriptive, this issue serves as a platform to redefine the genres of black film and of experimental film through comparing and situating them in the larger frame of surrealism's many reverberations in music, literature, art, and theater as expressed in African Diaspora cinemas.

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 handcraft 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of the fantastic through editing, unconventional use of sound, appropriating found footage or using film stock that is out of date, tinted, baked or processed by unconventional means.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, perhaps in service to exploring the erotic, the sensual, the divine, the historic, or the unspoken.

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, the sonic, internationalism, Black Arts Movement, site of memory, LA Rebellion, the sublime, jazz, film clubs, shadow and act, settlement/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, handcraft or obscure techniques for processing film, conceptual art, amateur films, quilts, literary precursors or corollaries to film, the marvelous, negritude, the erotic, found footage, Expressionism, liberation, Afrofuturism, ambiguity, non/theatrical exhibition, "blackness as metaphor," funding sources, politics and aesthetics, and technology.

Accepting essays, book and film reviews, interviews, and commentaries. Essays should be 6000-10000 words. Interviews (6000 words), commentaries (1000-2000 words), book and film reviews (500-1500 words) should also pertain to theme of the journal issue. Editor welcomes work from a variety of disciplines and from a broad-range of theoretical and political philosophies.

Please submit completed essays, a 100-word abstract, a 50-word bio and a CV by April 6, 2012.
Submissions should use the Chicago Manual of Style 15th Edition. Please see journal guidelines for more on submission policy: http://www.indiana.edu/~bfca/publication/blackcamera_contribute.shtml