CFP: The Black Scholar: “Black Nights”

The Black Scholar, the leading research journal on modern Black studies in the United States, invites submissions for a special issue on “Black Nights,” which “probes the intersection between blackness and the night.” The dh+lib community may find intersections in our work related to critical digital humanities, data privacy and surveillance, critical media practices, radical pedagogy, and decolonial digital methods and approaches. From the call:

Within distinct and heterogenous regimes of racialization across the globe, nighttime and nightspaces often figure as a critical double-edge: on the one hand, sites of intensified surveillance, policing and repression of Black life, on the other hand, sites of survival, assembly, subversion of established orders and experiments in modes of living in excess to Enlightenment modes of conquest-knowledges and the spatial and temporal enclosures they entail. “Black Nights” aims to probe further the multiple ways in which nighttime and nightspaces emerge as not just a background of Black life, but critical terrains of meaning, contestation, resistance and possibility that both illuminate logics of racialization and their political economy, but also gesture at alternative forms of worldmaking.

We are especially interested in submissions exploring:

• Black ecologies and nighttime
• political economy and the materiality of darkness
• policing, surveillance, nighttime and Black life
• the night as metaphor for blackness or Black life
• rural nightlife, Black nightlife beyond the paradigm of the urban
• Black night workers and the labor of producing/curating nightlife
• Black sound studies and the night
• Queerness and/of Black nighttime/nightspaces
• Black visual and material cultures and nighttime/nightspaces

We encourage submissions from across the Black world, as we aim to tie together multiple and heterogeneous sites of Black life in diaspora and on the continent. In the spirit of Black studies, we also encourage submissions from various fields, within, in-between and beyond disciplines, as well as from practitioners of Black nightlife (i.e. DJs, sound and visual artists, night venue workers…). We encourage the inclusion of other forms of media. We welcome QR codes in papers or in multimedia submissions that link with playlists, film, interviews or other media. Please note that all media included through QR codes must link to official, legitimate material/ original source material per the copyright requirements of the publisher. Authors are responsible for ensuring the codes work.

Full manuscripts are due by 1 July 2026 for peer review. Email questions to guest editors Chrystel Oloukoï (coloukoi[at]uw.edu) and T. Roane (j.t.roane[at]rutgers.edu).