Black Performing Arts: Sound, Movement, Image, Text
Black Performing Arts: Sound, Movement, Image, Text
Submission Deadline: October 31, 2026
The Black Performing Arts Area provides a scholarly forum to share research pertaining to Black performance across expressive forms. Broadly defined, the area focuses on all forms of performing and visual arts, including all musical genres, theatrical performance and performance art, performance elements in visual art, and connections between different Black expressive forms. In all these contexts we are interested in investigating 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 2027 conference, we are particularly interested in research that explores the rich history of Black performance in Boston and New England, and for papers that connect to the conference’s broad theme, “Revolutions and Revisions in Popular Culture.”
Submissions must be made at https://pcaaca.org/page/submissionguidelines
Inquiries may be made to the Black Performing Arts area chair:
Michael Borshuk
Professor, Texas Tech University