Black and Blur
- Author: Moten, Fred
At a time when both theory and criticism are frequently and convincingly attacked as exhausted forms, Moten's trilogy has reinvented both. . . . In its mixture of theoretical complexity and...
Black and Blur
- Author: Moten, Fred
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At a time when both theory and criticism are frequently and convincingly attacked as exhausted forms, Moten's trilogy has reinvented both. . . . In its mixture of theoretical complexity and...
About
"Taken as a trilogy, consent not to be a single being is a monumental accomplishment: a brilliant theoretical intervention that might be best described as a powerful case for blackness as a category of analysis."-Brent Hayes Edwards, author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination
In Black and Blur-the first volume in his sublime and compelling trilogy consent not to be a single being-Fred Moten engages in a capacious consideration of the place and force of blackness in African diaspora arts, politics, and life. In these interrelated essays, Moten attends to entanglement, the blurring of borders, and other practices that trouble notions of self-determination and sovereignty within political and aesthetic realms. Black and Blur is marked by unlikely juxtapositions: Althusser informs analyses of rappers Pras and Ol' Dirty Bastard; Shakespeare encounters Stokely Carmichael; thinkers like Kant, Adorno, and JosÉ Esteban MuÑoz and artists and musicians including Thornton Dial and Cecil Taylor play off each other. Moten holds that blackness encompasses a range of social, aesthetic, and theoretical insurgencies that respond to a shared modernity founded upon the sociological catastrophe of the transatlantic slave trade and settler colonialism. In so doing, he unsettles normative ways of reading, hearing, and seeing, thereby reordering the senses to create new means of knowing.
Contents
- Preface vii
- Acknowledgments xv
- 1. Not In Between 1
- 2. Interpolation and Interpellation 28
- 3. Magic of Objects 34
- 4. Sonata Quasi Una Fantasia 40
- 5. Taste Dissonance Flavor Escape (Preface to a Solo by Miles Davis) 66
- 6. The New International of Rhythmic Feel/ings 86
- 7. The Phonographic Mise-en Scene 118
- 8. Line Notes for Lick Piece 134
- 9. Rough Americana 147
- 10. Nothing, Everything 152
- 11. Nowhere, Everywhere 158
- 12. Nobody, Everybody 168
- 13. Remind 170
- 14. Amuse-Bouche 174
- 15. Collective Head 184
- 16. Cornered, Taken, Made to Leave 198
- 17. Enjoy All Monsters 206
- 18. Some Extrasubtitles for Wildness 212
- 19. To Feel, to Feel More, to Feel More Than 215
- 20. Irruptions and Incoherences for Jimmie Durham 219
- 21. Black and Blue on White. In and And Space 226
- 22. Blue Vespers 230
- 23. The Blur and Breathe Books 245
- 24. Entanglement and Virtuosity 270
- 25. Bobby Lee's Hands 280
- Notes 285
- Works Cited 317
- Index 329
Awards and reviews
At a time when both theory and criticism are frequently and convincingly attacked as exhausted forms, Moten's trilogy has reinvented both. . . . In its mixture of theoretical complexity and disarming directness, Moten's beautifully written trilogy offers the sheer pleasure of art." -- Lidija Haas
