Call for Papers:

Black Performing Arts: Sound, Movement, Image, Text

Submission Deadline: November 1, 2025

The Black Performing Arts Area provides a scholarly forum to share and disseminate research pertaining to the Black performing arts across expressive forms.  Broadly defined, the area focuses on all forms of performing and visual arts, including jazz, blues, gospel, hip-hop, rhythm and blues, Caribbean music, dance, poetry, drawing, painting, sculpture, ceramics, photography, acting, and directing.  In all these contexts we are interested in investigating the where aesthetic technique and embodiment merge across Black diasporic expressivity.

The panels on Black Performing Arts: Sound, Movement, Image, Text will showcase interdisciplinary discussions of cultural identity, art, religion, ritual, power, image, representation, symbols and their meaning, and the social processes and systems that influence and inform the innovation, production, regulation, and consumption of Black performing arts.  Additionally, we invite research that examines the role of Black music within society, how Black performing and visual arts might be read intersectionally with attention to race, class, gender, and sexual identity, and the relationship between Black performing arts and their broad political and economic context.

For the 2026 conference, we are particularly interested in research that explores the rich history of Black performance in Atlanta. 

Submissions must be made at https://pcaaca.org/page/submissionguidelines

Inquiries may be made to the Black Performing Arts area co-chairs:

Michael Borshuk

Professor, Texas Tech University

michael.borshuk@ttu.edu

Jonafa Banbury

Independent scholar

txbanbury@yahoo.com