Black and Blur

by Fred Moten

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 Jos� Esteban Mu�oz 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.

Genres: Race, Poetry, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Theory, Essays, Art

360 pages, Paperback

First published December 8, 2017

About the author

Fred Moten is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press), Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works), B. Jenkins (Duke University Press), The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions) and co-author, with Stefano Harney, of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia). His current projects include two critical texts, consent not to be a single being (forthcoming from Duke University Press) and Animechanical Flesh, which extend his study of black art and social life, and a new collection of poems, The Little Edges.

In 2009 Moten was Critic-in-Residence at In Transit 09: Resistance of the Object, The Performing Arts Festival at the House of World Cultures, Berlin and was also recognized as one of ten “New American Poets” by the Poetry Society of America; in 2011 he was a Visiting Scholar and Artist-in-Residence at Pratt Institute; in 2012, he was Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University and a member of the writing faculty of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College; and in 2013 he was a Guest Faculty Member in the Summer Writers Program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa Institute. He was also a member of the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine from 2002 to 2004 and a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York from 2001 to 2002.

Moten served as a member of the Board of Managing Editors of American Quarterly and has been a member of the Editorial Collectives of Social Text and Callaloo, and of the Editorial Board of South Atlantic Quarterly. He is also co-founder and co-publisher (with Joseph Donahue) of a small literary press called Three Count Pour.

Reviews

[Amber Manning · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book kicked my ass. It just absolutely kicked my ass.
It is thoughtful, incisive, beautiful.

[Aeven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fred Moten you are a genius

[K · Rating 5 out of 5]

Virtuosic method and style of music and art writing, most enchanted by his interest in painting across jazz across Adorno; excellent work on the dialectic in the first chapter; but have some questions about the idea of "constant escape" as freedom... edges on capitulatory. But overall, the most dynamic approach to theory I've read in a long time; invigoriating.

[Iza Cupial · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5

[Austin · Rating 5 out of 5]

urgent, necessary, difficult

[Isidora Stanković · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.8 weird, disjointed, rich, beautiful, expansive, genius. Really good book for your first exposure to Moten.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

You need google to read this book--both to keep up with its wording and to get some sort of idea of the art that's addressed, invoked, but rarely described. Occasionally sublime, often inscrutable. The book seems to struggle to express something, but the stakes of success or failure are not always clear. The last parts of the book were rich, but as a whole it was disjointed, often confusing. But I haven't read The Undercommons and can be kinda dumb so maybe I'm just missing something.

[J. Moufawad-Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

I reviewed Black and Blur within my review of the entire "Consent Not To Be A Single Being" trilogy for Symposium:

https://www.c-scp.org/2019/07/09/fred...

[Mills College Library]

305.896 M917 2017