Abstract This article discusses embodied practices of submerged breathing in waterscapes connected to the translatlantic slave trade. The central question this article addresses is: How does submerged Black breath sonically liberate new understandings of the past and present? Specifically, the article explores acts of submerged breathing carried out by Black scuba divers at submerged sites of enslavement as an expression of Black aurality that critically examines Black life. It argues that these fugitive practices of submerged existence cut across space and time. The article explores these embodied practices of breathwork in the author's dive experience and the experiences of two men, Kamau Sadiki and Jay Haigler, at a submerged site of enslavement, the Clotilda shipwreck in Mobile, Alabama. The author's attention to what is made possible when one attunes oneself to submerged breathing practices builds on the scholarship of Alexis Pauline Gumbs in her text Undrowned and Ashon Crawley's text Blackpentecostal Breath. Breathwork here demonstrates oceanic-rooted modes of memory making and commemoration that create breath-giving experiences that work to alchemize and heal transgenerational trauma.

Abstract How might we think with joy? What might focusing on joy in an anti-black world teach us about collective action and relational feeling? What if relational, antiracist critiques were framed by mutual investments in joy's flourishing? In this introduction, coeditors John Brooks and Jonathan Leal probe these questions through a dialectical exploration of radical ecstasy that refutes the rigidities of traditional methods, forms, and categories, animating joy as an analytic and aspiration. Written as a joyride, structured like a playlist unfolding in real time, built from the spirit of the peel-out and the U-turn, “Joyride” weaves through black popular music, photography, visual art, and live performance to survey conditions of joyous possibility and co-investment under racial capitalism and, in effect, to contextualize this issue's offerings: articles, conversations, soundtracks, playlists, reflections. By turning to generative euphoria, to arts of provocation, and to expressions of improvisatory freedom, the pieces introduced in this essay celebrate joy's affective reach, all while demonstrating its conceptual power.

Abstract In choreographer Will Rawls's collaboration with poet Claudia Rankine, What Remains, which toured nationally in 2016 – 21 and in which the author was one of four performers, improvisation serves as a strategy for the playful and indeterminate navigation of categorizations and curtailments of Black living and dancing in the charged landscape of the theatrical stage. This collaboratively constructed choreography was made up of tightly honed vocal and bodily improvisational scores using fragments and stanzas from Rankine's poetry, alongside physical practices of shapeshifting, repetition, and the sounding body. Detailed description of the opening section of the performance — especially an extended gamelike section called “The Already Dead Game” — is paired with theories of dance improvisation and Black thought, alongside the author's reflections during rehearsals.

Abstract Working against joy, this written accompaniment to a connected playlist fills out concerns about joy as an opioid. Instead, the author presents a brief theory of (Black) rock music through a playlist.

Abstract This essay wanders with and wonders about forms of diasporic dissolving in the works of Black artists identifying with the African American, Caribbean, and Afro-European diaspora. Dissolving is a material and metaphorical process suggested here to name a possible encounter with Black sound when we allow improvisation in our listening practice. Thinking alongside the idea of im/possibility as a trope shaping and shaped by Black sonic itineraries, the research aims to amplify understandings of improvisation and joy in selected examples of sound poetry, music theater, and dance productions by artists including Tracie Morris, Charlene Jean, and Oxana Chi. In response to this special issue's call for improvisational forms of scholarship demanded by Black sound's slipperiness, the author offers an experimental encounter with performance studies methodologies, informed by her own musical practice as a saxophone player. Asking how sonic interventions transform our perception of and relation to space, time, and listening, the project centers discourses and practices that value and validate possibilities to transform society in, with, and through the subtlety of Black sounds.

Abstract In March 2023, John Brooks floated the idea of my contributing something to this special issue. Motivated by the topic, I immediately thought of Anthony Reed, whose book Soundworks presents a rigorous and poetic formulation of black sound work and its improvisatory renegotiations of what counts as common sense, both aesthetic and political. Dr. Reed agreed that a conversation would be rewarding, and we came up with a loose plan for collaborating on an interview project. Proceeding one question at a time, we moved forward without preconceived ideas of where to end up or what to cover along the way. Dr. Reed's responses were therefore always unanticipated and, as you'll see, invigorating. I am deeply grateful for his eager collaboration, sincere sound work, and spirit of camaraderie. While it may be clear to readers that we each come to this conversation from our respective and particular concerns, part of what I value so much in the result is the way that it further elaborates key themes across both of our projects while at the same time focusing on a set of problems we hope will be of interest across a wide range of disciplines.

Abstract This essay presents a theory of con-artistry as a queer practice of Black joy that claims relational and material abundance in the face of tropes of deviance and conditions of austerity. Drawing on auto-theory and describes how media-making can foment Black pleasure and institutional critique, it includes a discussion of the author's 2020 film Everyday Black Matter as a documentation of radical Black gathering in Richmond, Virginia. The film centers nuanced conversations about Black joy as a critical practice and the subversive efforts some are willing to undergo to secure it. Inspired by their theories of aesthetics, deviance, and femme worldmaking, the author collaborated with Jillian Hernandez, whose contribution “Ca$h App Connectivities” is included in this issue, to develop a conversation that centers everyday Black matter and extended well beyond the pages of this journal.

Abstract In 2013, the artist now known as American Artist changed their legal name to a generic singular, making themselves impermeable to authorial identification. Manifesting both their official entry in the art world and a withdrawal from it, this name change literally hacked Artist into the white American art canon, as their work now appears alongside Jackson Pollock's or Edward Hopper's in an internet search. This performative act was only the first in a series investigating issues of recognizable form and practices of identification. In 2021 Mother of All Demos II, a computer encased in dirt, the main piece in Artist's installation Black Gooey Universe, fringed on material formlessness as black goo oozed out of the keyboard, spilled over the desk and into the white box of the gallery space, its viscous drops suspended midair, rewriting the racial history of computer technology. This article traces these refusals of form in American Artist's Black Gooey Universe. Drawing on Zakiyyah Jackson's analysis of Western ontology, the article theorizes the edges in Artist's sculptures as sites of undoing, suspension, and speculation. Undoing the form of the GUI to find the “gooey,” Artist's installation ties an archaeological reframing of technology to a reimagining of anticolonial cosmology.