The Black Scholar invites submissions for a special issue on “Black Nights,” which probes the intersection between blackness and the night. 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 manuscript submissions ranging from 4000-5000 words for non-peer reviewed essays and 5000-7500 words for peer reviewed articles (all counts inclusive of endnotes) are due by July 1, 2026. Articles must be submitted to TBS’s Submission Portal using the “Submit an article” tab. Please include the issue title in your abstract. To avoid your manuscript being delayed or rejected, please read all the journal’s guidelines, format accordingly, and ensure that permissions to use third-party materials are secured prior to submission. Note: Authors should pay particular attention to the third-party materials section of TBS’s guidelines.
Black Nights will be published as TBS’s Spring 2027 issue (57.2).
Guest Editors
Chrystel Oloukoï, coloukoi@uw.edu
J. T. Roane, j.t.roane@rutgers.edu
*For questions regarding TBS’s guidelines, permissions for third-party material, or deadlines, please contact the journal’s managing editor, Shannon Hanks-Mackey, at hanks@theblackscholar.org
