liquidblackness Volume 6 Issue 2liquid blackness 6.2, “Afro-Gothic,” is the first guest-edited issue in the journal's eight-year history. As such, it marks an exciting collaboration with guest coeditors Sybil Newton Cooksey and Tashima Thomas, who recognized an alignment with the journal's mission and methods—to pose urgent questions in black studies through a focus on aesthetic practices and experimental research—and approached us with their proposal as soon as the news of Duke University Press's acquisition of the journal became public. Their intention was to lay theoretical ground on a growing aesthetic sensibility that reframes what have been traditionally perceived as Gothic themes and tropes to reflect instead on the unending everyday violence against black people. The conceptual work Cooksey and Thomas gather here builds on Kobena Mercer's theorization of the Afro-Gothic, one that “unearths” the Gothic's dependence on the history of enslavement and its perverse imbrication with Enlightenment thinking.
