Overview

""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 Jose Esteban Munoz 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.

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9780822370062

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Reviews

In this profound work, Fred Moten makes a sustained and thrilling attempt to think philosophy and music together, which is also to think philosophy as music, which is also necessarily to think music as philosophy. In its capaciousness and in its persistent, challenging, dazzling intelligence, Black and Blur is a book that is worthy of the reputation and influence of its author. Its publication is a major event. --Brent Hayes Edwards, author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination

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. -- Maggie Nelson * 4Columns * Poetry and philosophy can't convincingly be condensed or speeded up. To feel each fully they must be read and sounded in time. Such is the case with Fred Moten's words. Black and Blur allows and opens this feeling-mind-sense-body splitting possibility, in its stunning and generative appositionality of aesthetics and life. An intertwined, journeying flight, examining and composing variegations distinctly, yet together placed to read and imbibe. Beautiful, sobering, intricately pleasurable, delicious, and necessary as a way to now begin again delving into the specific immense variegated borderless blur of black that is profound, wide, and bittersweet. -- Renee Green, artist, filmmaker, and author of * Other Planes of There * In this profound work, Fred Moten makes a sustained and thrilling attempt to think philosophy and music together, which is also to think philosophy as music, which is also necessarily to think music as philosophy. In its capaciousness and in its persistent, challenging, dazzling intelligence, Black and Blur is a book that is worthy of the reputation and influence of its author. Its publication is a major event. -- Brent Hayes Edwards, author of * Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination *

In this profound work, Fred Moten makes a sustained and thrilling attempt to think philosophy and music together, which is also to think philosophy as music, which is also necessarily to think music as philosophy. In its capaciousness and in its persistent, challenging, dazzling intelligence, Black and Blur is a book that is worthy of the reputation and influence of its author. Its publication is a major event. -- Brent Hayes Edwards, author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination

In this profound work, Fred Moten makes a sustained and thrilling attempt to think philosophy and music together, which is also to think philosophy as music, which is also necessarily to think music as philosophy. In its capaciousness and in its persistent, challenging, dazzling intelligence, Black and Blur is a book that is worthy of the reputation and influence of its author. Its publication is a major event. -- Brent Hayes Edwards, author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination Poetry and philosophy can't convincingly be condensed or speeded up. To feel each fully they must be read and sounded in time. Such is the case with Fred Moten's words. Black and Blur allows and opens this feeling-mind-sense-body splitting possibility, in its stunning and generative appositionality of aesthetics and life. An intertwined, journeying flight, examining and composing variegations distinctly, yet together placed to read and imbibe. Beautiful, sobering, intricately pleasurable, delicious, and necessary as a way to now begin again delving into the specific immense variegated borderless blur of black that is profound, wide, and bittersweet. -- Renee Green, artist, filmmaker, and author of Other Planes of There

Poetry and philosophy can't convincingly be condensed or speeded up. To feel each fully they must be read and sounded in time. Such is the case with Fred Moten's words. Black and Blur allows and opens this feeling-mind-sense-body splitting possibility, in its stunning and generative appositionality of aesthetics and life. An intertwined, journeying flight, examining and composing variegations distinctly, yet together placed to read and imbibe. Beautiful, sobering, intricately pleasurable, delicious, and necessary as a way to now begin again delving into the specific immense variegated borderless blur of black that is profound, wide, and bittersweet. -- Renee Green, artist, filmmaker, and author of * Other Planes of There * In this profound work, Fred Moten makes a sustained and thrilling attempt to think philosophy and music together, which is also to think philosophy as music, which is also necessarily to think music as philosophy. In its capaciousness and in its persistent, challenging, dazzling intelligence, Black and Blur is a book that is worthy of the reputation and influence of its author. Its publication is a major event. -- Brent Hayes Edwards, author of * Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination *

Author Information

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.

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