the Black Theatre Review Vol. 4, No. 2.: Artificial/Ancestral: Black Theatre and the Question of AI

We are an academic journal of the Black Theatre Network.

As artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes cultural, educational, and creative institutions, the field of Black theatre confronts a familiar set of questions in a newly technological register: Who creates knowledge, who benefits from it, who gets remembered, and whose labor remains obscured? Public conversations about AI often proceed as though these technologies have arrived without history, entering an empty landscape awaiting innovation. Yet Black theatre has long grappled with questions of representation, embodiment, archives, intellectual inheritance, collective memory, labor, and futurity. Rather than asking simply what AI can do for Black theatre, this issue invites contributors to consider what Black theatre reveals about AI itself: its assumptions, limitations, aspirations, and consequences.

Volume 4.2 of the Black Theatre Review seeks essays, interviews, case studies, pedagogical interventions, archival investigations, artist statements, and process reflections that place Black theatre and performance studies in critical conversation with artificial intelligence and related technologies. We are particularly interested in work that moves beyond questions of adoption, utility, or rejection toward deeper examinations of power, ethics, governance, memory, embodiment, and knowledge production. We welcome contributions from scholars, artists, archivists, educators, practitioners, dramaturgs, designers, and cultural workers whose engagement with these questions emerges from both theory and practice.

The issue is organized around five interrelated areas of inquiry. These themes are offered not as rigid categories, but as points of departure for further investigation. Taken together, these areas encourage contributors to approach AI not simply as a technological development, but as a site through which questions of labor, memory, embodiment, governance, spirituality, and future-making can be reconsidered.

• AI, Labor and Extraction: The beneficiaries of AI systems, whose labor makes them possible and required forms of accountability when Black creative work becomes data. Possible points of investigation may include: (1) The labor of artists whose knowledge underlies any AI-readable record and what ethical stewardship of that labor requires. (2) Generative AI in dramaturgy, script analysis, and design workflows, and models of artist-led intentional integration. (3) Archives, Memory, and Black Theatre Histories: How do AI systems shape, distort, recover, or fail to capture Black theatrical histories and modes of remembering?

Possible points of investigation may include: (1) Digitization and AI-training projects involving Black theatre collections and their assumptions about what counts as trainable data. (2) AI-assisted archival misreadings, flattening, erasure, and historical distortion. (3) Embodiment, Liveness, and Performance: What happens when embodied, communal, and improvisational performance practices encounter technologies built on prediction, simulation, and abstraction?

Possible points of investigation may include: (1) Case studies of AI in the classroom, rehearsal hall, or production process. (2) The complementary offerings of embodied, ensemble-based theatre training to university-wide AI adoption. Relatedly, how do such offerings get recognized, funded, or institutionally protected? (3) Ancestral Intelligence, Spiritual Knowledge, and Black Futures: Understanding AI as a knowledge system entering into conversation with much older Black diasporic traditions of intelligence, memory, and futurity.

Possible points of investigation may include: (1) AI as ancestral intelligence, or Black diasporic traditions of pattern recognition, forecasting, memory, and knowledge transmission. (2) How do Black diasporic understandings of knowledge, memory, inheritance, ritual, and collective survival shape the technological futures we imagine? (3) Refusal, Governance, and Alternative Technological Practices: Forms of resistance, opacity, governance, and the possibilities of misuse

Possible points of investigation may include: (1) How Black artists are bending, breaking, or refusing AI against its intended use. (2) Teaching against technological inevitability.

Photograph, Visual Media, and Digital Project Documentation:
tBTR welcomes photographic, visual media, and digital project documentation that illuminates the intersections of Black theatre, performance, and artificial intelligence. We encourage submissions featuring productions, rehearsals, classroom projects, design processes, digital or hybrid performances, archival initiatives, community-based projects, and artistic experiments that engage the themes of this issue.

Submissions may include production photography, design renderings, screenshots, interface documentation, archival images, process documentation, and other visual materials that help narrate how artists, scholars, educators, and institutions are critically engaging AI and related technologies.

All submissions must include the project or production title, names and roles of key collaborators, location, creator and/or photographer credit, date, and a 2-3 sentence description explaining the work's relationship to the issue's focus on labor, archives, embodiment, pedagogy, artificial intelligence, ancestral knowledge, refusal, governance, or Black futures. Contributors are responsible for securing all necessary permissions and reproduction rights prior to submission. Please contact the managing editor for additional information.

Book Reviews, Performance Reviews, and Notes from the Field, and Multimedia Works:
In addition to scholarly articles, tBTR seeks book reviews, performance reviews, multimedia works, illustrative case studies, and notes from the field that engage the intersections of Black theatre, performance, and artificial intelligence.

We are particularly interested in contributions that document pedagogical experimentation, archival initiatives, institution-building efforts, production processes, dramaturgical and design practices, community engagement, and artist-led technological interventions. We also welcome reflections on the ethical, political, and aesthetic questions surrounding AI, including issues of labor, extraction, memory, embodiment, governance, ancestral intelligence, resistance, and alternative technological futures.

Submission Guidelines:
The last date for submissions is September 4, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. EDT. Please refer to the tBTR website for specific article section guidelines. Manuscripts must be submitted in Microsoft Word using standard formatting (1-inch margins, double-spaced, single-column layout, and 12-point Times New Roman font). Please include an abstract and a 150-word author biography with your submission.

All submissions must include footnotes and a bibliography and must fully comply with The Chicago Manual of Style (18th ed.), using the notes and bibliography system. Please do not use the author-date citation system or another style guide.

Please upload your complete manuscript through the journal's online submission portal via the website. Early submissions will receive preference in the review and publication process.