Note from the Editor

162 CLA JOURNAL Note from the Editor Since the release of issue 61.3,CLA Journal has settled into a mutually beneficial relationship with the digital library powerhouse JSTOR and has already begun to receive impressive statistics on the extent of its national and global reach. With the publication of 61.4, I am proud to announce yet another sea change in the journal’s operations: an official CLA Journal Submission Portal! Longtime CLA members and former contributors will note that this new online tool will be a radical departure from past procedures that required authors to send their submissions along with supporting material directly to the editor. What followed then was a string of emails between author and editor that began with an acknowledgement of the initial submission to a final determination of its fate. Of course, if the submission was accepted with required minor or major revisions, a new round of emails emerged. Fortunately, the newly installed CLAJ Submission Portal software will significantly streamline communications for both author and editor. In addition to its capability to receive uploaded essay submissions, the portal will be set up to receive both solicited and unsolicited book reviews and to provide the Book Review Editor with a central online site for communicating in real-time with book review authors. On behalf of the CLA Journal’s Editorial Board, I sincerely welcome this latest upgrade! New submission procedures aside, the critical rigor and intellectual acumen on display in the five essays included in this pivotal issue remain the unchanging hallmark of CLAJ. Rachel Watson’s lead essay, “Blood Typing: Rudolph Fisher’s The Conjure-Man Dies,” considers how Rudolph Fisher, a prominent radiologist and writer trained at Howard University’s Medical School, thematizes the scientific gaze in his literary work to challenge dominant racial ideologies of the period and how this innovation articulated with the rise of forensic identification techniques and the modern American detective story. She argues that, in The Conjure-Man Dies (1932)—often considered the first African American detective novel—this scientific gaze sees “beyond” the boundaries of skin and social visibility in order to solve a murder mystery that otherwise appears supernaturally caused. She further holds that the same gaze also asserts the emptiness of biologized racial difference— the ideology that undergirded the legal and social logic of Jim Crow. Ultimately, her essay suggests that the real “protagonist” of the story is the epistemological method itself and that, for Fisher, the political value of the detection genre lay in its evocation of a deeply “rational” engagement with the social world—putting both science and literature to work together against the regime of Jim Crow. Carlyn E. Ferrari’s essay, “Anne Spencer’s ‘Natural’ Poetics,” bridges the discourse on Black female writers’ self-representation through discursive strategies and literary ecocriticism to illustrate how Anne Spencer articulates Black woman- CLA JOURNAL 163 Note from the Editor hood through ecocentric language and natural world imagery. She positions Spencer as a part of a rich tradition of Black women writers who map the experiences of Black womanhood onto the natural world as a vehicle through which to envision Black women’s liberation. Her essay highlights traditional ecocriticism’s failure to take race and gender fully into account and explores the place of the natural world and ecological materialities in Black women’s literature. While the Afrofuturist film Black Panther (2017) featured an African nation with technologies advanced far beyond the rest of the world, this representation of blacknessassupremelytechnologicallyadeptdepartsfromevenrecentdepictionsof blackness as more authentically human and therefore antithetical to technology. In many ways,Afrofuturism began as recuperation of neglected black voices engaging with the technologies of their day and imagining those of the future. However, as Afrofuturism has grown in scope and visibility, multiple theoretical voices have contributed metaphors for understanding the links between black histories of science and technology and the imaginary exploration of these in literature, music, and artwork, blurring the boundaries between what is inspirational fiction and literal engagement with technology. In her essay, “The Data Thief, the Cyberflaneur,and Rhythm Science:ChallengingAnti-Technological Blackness with the Metaphors of Afrofuturism,” Cassandra Jones explores metaphors from three major contributors to Afrofuturism: John Akomfrah...