Black and Blur
Fred Moten
(Author)
Description
"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.Product Details
Price
$34.44
Publisher
Duke University Press
Publish Date
December 08, 2017
Pages
360
Dimensions
6.0 X 9.0 X 0.8 inches | 1.14 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780822370161
Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliate
About the Author
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.
Reviews
"Simply put, Moten is offering up some of the most affecting, most useful, theoretical thinking that exists on the planet today.... Moten's work makes the activities of reading and thinking feel palpably fresh, weird, and vital."-- (12/01/2017)
"Some readers will come here because of The Feel Trio, because of The Undercommons. Some because Moten is the activists' theorist, the contemporary art institution's darling, because of performance studies, jazz studies, literature. Some readers will come here to encounter a brain that is at once more erudite, generous, capacious, fierce, jokey and infuriating than most others on the planet right now. Everybody ought to arrive here to be schooled and troubled, elated and confused, invited and indicted by a sparklingly original vision for black study."-- (02/27/2018)
"It's this spirit of the collective effort of study and exchange and resonance, the effort to keep the channels open and keep listening, that has made Moten (or, maybe, 'Moten/s') such a celebrated thinker. At the end of sentences like these, you want to say something like Amen."-- (04/01/2018)
"Be ready to be wowed; be ready to be challenged; most of all, be ready for the long haul. It is, apparently, the first in a planned trilogy. Moten is tracking his own course, and it's fast-moving and spectacular."-- (05/17/2018)
"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." -- (09/17/2018)
"2018 must go down for me as the year of Fred Moten's trilogy: Black and Blur, Stolen Life, and The Universal Machine. You could say they're essays about art, philosophy, blackness, and the refusal of social death, but I think of them more as a fractal universe forever inviting immersion and exploration, a living force now inhabiting my bookshelf."-- (11/01/2018)
"My favorite book(s) of 2018 are the three volumes of Fred Moten's consent not to be a single being, individually titled Black and Blur, Stolen Life, and The Universal Machine. In this collection of essays stretching back fifteen years, Moten challenges the reader to imagine a radically interconnected aesthetic and political sphere that stretches from Glenn Gould to Fanon to Kant to Theaster Gates, sometimes in the space of a single sentence. This trilogy is one of the great intellectual adventures of our era."-- (11/01/2018)
"Some readers will come here because of The Feel Trio, because of The Undercommons. Some because Moten is the activists' theorist, the contemporary art institution's darling, because of performance studies, jazz studies, literature. Some readers will come here to encounter a brain that is at once more erudite, generous, capacious, fierce, jokey and infuriating than most others on the planet right now. Everybody ought to arrive here to be schooled and troubled, elated and confused, invited and indicted by a sparklingly original vision for black study."-- (02/27/2018)
"It's this spirit of the collective effort of study and exchange and resonance, the effort to keep the channels open and keep listening, that has made Moten (or, maybe, 'Moten/s') such a celebrated thinker. At the end of sentences like these, you want to say something like Amen."-- (04/01/2018)
"Be ready to be wowed; be ready to be challenged; most of all, be ready for the long haul. It is, apparently, the first in a planned trilogy. Moten is tracking his own course, and it's fast-moving and spectacular."-- (05/17/2018)
"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." -- (09/17/2018)
"2018 must go down for me as the year of Fred Moten's trilogy: Black and Blur, Stolen Life, and The Universal Machine. You could say they're essays about art, philosophy, blackness, and the refusal of social death, but I think of them more as a fractal universe forever inviting immersion and exploration, a living force now inhabiting my bookshelf."-- (11/01/2018)
"My favorite book(s) of 2018 are the three volumes of Fred Moten's consent not to be a single being, individually titled Black and Blur, Stolen Life, and The Universal Machine. In this collection of essays stretching back fifteen years, Moten challenges the reader to imagine a radically interconnected aesthetic and political sphere that stretches from Glenn Gould to Fanon to Kant to Theaster Gates, sometimes in the space of a single sentence. This trilogy is one of the great intellectual adventures of our era."-- (11/01/2018)
