Overview

Deeply informed by jazz, Billie's Bent Elbow explores the nonsensical and nonsensuous in black radical thought and expression. Extending the encounter between black study, Frankfurt School critical theory, and sound studies staged in her first book, Jazz as Critique, and, crucially, bringing Yoruba aesthetics into the conversation, Okiji attunes to various sites of intemperance and equivocation in thought and music. Billie's Bent Elbow eschews the parsimonious tendencies of the Western philosophical tradition, in its contribution to a shared project of improvised correspondence that finds its criticality in its heterophony of approach and intention. The book ranges from Haitian revolutionaries' rendition of ""La Marseillaise,"" to Cecil Taylor's synesthetic poetics, to the aporetic mien of the orisha Esu, to Billie Holiday's undulating arm. What is more, by way of her intense fascination with these sites of fantastic noise, Okiji brings our attention to a galaxy of intimacies that flash up in her experiments in array and correspondence. The nonsensuous standard Okiji cultivates in this musical and essayistic book, in concert with a host of theorists, musicians and artists, is as much a statement of non-citizenry as it is preparation for intoxicated gathering.

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9781503640467

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Reviews

"""It's not just that Okiji places study of and in the ongoing cosmological, ecological, topographical, and poethical experiment of The Music on a new footing; she also radicalizes and exacerbates the displacements that make up study's general attitude."" —Fred Moten, New York University ""In this exorbitantly questioning book, Okiji sings and swoons through a set of classic standards: mimesis, dialectics, art, indeterminacy. She offers up these songs of Black life as if she had the world's ear, and I believe that she will."" —Benjamin Piekut, Cornell University ""Okiji's generous solo provocatively adds to the chorus that is contemporary Black Thought an intervention in critical theory which, exploring beyond the confines of the practice, dares and excavates its potentially generative gifts."" —Denise Ferreira da Silva, New York University"

""It's not just that Okiji places study of and in the ongoing cosmological, ecological, topographical, and poethical experiment of The Music on a new footing; she also radicalizes and exacerbates the displacements that make up study's general attitude."" —Fred Moten, New York University ""In this exorbitantly questioning book, Okiji sings and swoons through a set of classic standards: mimesis, dialectics, art, indeterminacy. She offers up these songs of Black life as if she had the world's ear, and I believe that she will."" —Benjamin Piekut, Cornell University ""Okiji's generous solo provocatively adds to the chorus that is contemporary Black Thought an intervention in critical theory which, exploring beyond the confines of the practice, dares and excavates its potentially generative gifts."" —Denise Ferreira da Silva, New York University

Author Information

Fumi Okiji is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited (Stanford, 2018). She arrived at the academy by way of the London jazz scene and draws on sound practices to inform her writing.

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