Black and Blur (consent not to be a single being)

Description

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. Fred Moten is Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and the author of B Jenkins, also published by Duke University Press, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, and coauthor of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Contents......Page 6 Preface......Page 8 Acknowledgments......Page 16 1. Not In Between......Page 20 2. Interpolation and Interpellation......Page 47 3. Magic of Objects......Page 53 4. Sonata Quasi Una Fantasia......Page 59 5. Taste Dissonance Flavor Escape (Preface to a Solo by Miles Davis)......Page 85 6. The New International of Rhythmic Feel/ings......Page 105 7. The Phonographic Mise-en Scène......Page 137 8. Liner Notes for Lick Piece......Page 153 9. Rough Americana......Page 166 10. Nothing, Everything......Page 171 11. Nowhere, Everywhere......Page 177 12. Nobody, Everybody......Page 187 13. Remind......Page 189 14. Amuse-Bouche......Page 193 15. Collective Head......Page 203 16. Cornered, Taken, Made to Leave......Page 217 17. Enjoy All Monsters......Page 225 18. Some Extrasubtitles for Wildness......Page 231 19. To Feel, to Feel More, to Feel More Than......Page 234 20. Irruptions and Incoherences for Jimmie Durham......Page 238 21. Black and Blue on White. In and And in Space.......Page 245 22. Blue Vespers......Page 249 23. The Blur and Breathe Books......Page 264 24. Entanglement and Virtuosity......Page 289 25. Bobby Lee’s Hands......Page 299 Notes......Page 304 Works Cited......Page 336 Index......Page 348