In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition

In his controversial essay on white jazz musician Burton Greene, Amiri Baraka asserted that jazz was exclusively an African American art form and explicitly fused the idea of a black aesthetic with radical political traditions of the African diaspora. In the Break is an extended riff on "The Burton Greene Affair, " exploring the tangled relationship between black avant-grade in music and literature in the 1950s and 1960s, the emergence of a distinct form of black cultural nationalism, and the complex engagement with and disavowal of homoeroticism that bridges the two. Fred Moten focuses in particular on the brilliant improvisatory jazz of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, and others, arguing that all black performance--culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself--is improvisation. For Moten, improvisation provides a unique epistemological standpoint from which to investigate the provocative connections between black aesthetics and Western philosophy. He engages in a strenuous critical analysis of Western philosophy (Heidegger, Kant, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Derrida) through the prism of radical black thought and culture. As the critical, lyrical, and disruptive performance of the human, Moten's concept of blackness also brings such figures as Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx, Cecil Taylor and Samuel R. Delany, Billie Holiday and William Shakespeare into conversation with each other. Stylistically brilliant and challenging, much like the music he writes about, Moten's wide-ranging discussion embraces a variety of disciplines--semiotics, deconstruction, genre theory, social history, and psychoanalysis--to understand thepoliticized sexuality, particularly homoeroticism, underpinning black radicalism. In the Break is the inaugural volume in Moten's ambitious intellectual project--to establish an aesthetic genealogy of the black radical tradition.

Arts & Photography

Moten, Fred

Music

Univ. of Minnesota Press

In his controversial essay on white jazz musician Burton Greene, Amiri Baraka asserted that jazz was exclusively an African American art form and explicitly fused the idea of a black aesthetic with radical political traditions of the African diaspora. In the Break is an extended riff on OC The Burton Greene Affair, OCO exploring the tangled relationship between black avant-garde in music and literature in the 1950s and 1960s, the emergence of a distinct form of black cultural nationalism, and the complex engagement with and disavowal of homoeroticism that bridges the two. Fred Moten focuses in particular on the brilliant improvisatory jazz of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, and others, arguing that all black performanceOCoculture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itselfOCois improvisation. For Moten, improvisation provides a unique epistemological standpoint from which to investigate the provocative connections between black aesthetics and Western philosophy. He engages in a strenuous critical analysis of Western philosophy (Heidegger, Kant, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Derrida) through the prism of radical black thought and culture. As the critical, lyrical, and disruptive performance of the human, MotenOCOs concept of blackness also brings such figures as Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx, Cecil Taylor and Samuel R. Delany, Billie Holiday and William Shakespeare into conversation with each other. Stylistically brilliant and challenging, much like the music he writes about, MotenOCOs wide-ranging discussion embraces a variety of disciplinesOCosemiotics, deconstruction, genre theory, social history, and psychoanalysisOCoto understand the politicized sexuality, particularly homoeroticism, underpinning black radicalism. In the Break is the inaugural volume in MotenOCOs ambitious intellectual project-to establish an aesthetic genealogy of the black radical tradition. "

Winner of the Guggenheim Fellowship (2016) The Little Edges is a collection of poems that extends poet Fred Moten's experiments in what he calls "shaped prose"--a way of arranging prose in rhythmic blocks, or sometimes shards, in the interest of audio-visual patterning. Shaped prose is a form that works the "little edges" of lyric and discourse, and radiates out into the space between them. As occasional pieces, many of the poems in the book are the result of a request or commission to comment upon a work of art, or to memorialize a particular moment or person. In Moten's poems, the matter and energy of a singular event or person are transformed by their entrance into the social space that they, in turn, transform. An online reader's companion is available at http: //fredmoten.site.wesleyan.edu.

The Little Edges (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Wesleyan University Press

The Little Edges

Wesleyan

Winner of the Guggenheim Fellowship (2016) The Little Edges is a collection of poems that extends poet Fred Moten's experiments in what he calls "shaped prose"―a way of arranging prose in rhythmic blocks, or sometimes shards, in the interest of audio-visual patterning. Shaped prose is a form that works the "little edges" of lyric and discourse, and radiates out into the space between them. As occasional pieces, many of the poems in the book are the result of a request or commission to comment upon a work of art, or to memorialize a particular moment or person. In Moten's poems, the matter and energy of a singular event or person are transformed by their entrance into the social space that they, in turn, transform. An online reader's companion is available at http://fredmoten.site.wesleyan.edu.

The fourth collection of poetry from the literary and cultural critic Fred Moten, B Jenkins is named after the poet’s mother, who passed away in 2000. It is both an elegy and an inquiry into many of the themes that Moten has explored throughout his career: language, music, performance, improvisation, and the black radical aesthetic and political tradition. In Moten’s verse, the arts, scholarship, and activism intertwine. Cadences echo from his mother’s Arkansas home through African American history and avant-garde jazz riffs. Formal innovations suggest the ways that words, sounds, and music give way to one another.The first and last poems in the collection are explicitly devoted to Moten’s mother; the others relate more obliquely to her life and legacy. They invoke performers, writers, artists, and thinkers including not only James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Frederick Douglass, Billie Holiday, Audre Lorde, Charlie Parker, and Cecil Taylor, but also contemporary scholars of race, affect, and queer theory. The book concludes with an interview conducted by Charles Henry Rowell, the editor of the journal Callaloo. Rowell elicits Moten’s thoughts on the relation of his poetry to theory, music, and African American vernacular culture.

B Jenkins (Refiguring American Music)

Duke University Press Books

Since September 11, public discourse has often been framed in terms of absolutes: an age of innocence gives way to a present under siege, while the United States and its allies face off against the Axis of Evil. This special issue of Social Text aims to move beyond these binaries toward thoughtful analysis. The editors argue that the challenge for the Left is to develop an antiterrorism stance that acknowledges the legacy of U.S. trade and foreign policy as well as the diversity of the Muslim faith and the dangers presented by fundamentalism of all kinds.Examining the strengths and shortcomings of area, race, and gender studies in the search for understanding, this issue considers cross-cultural feminism as a means of combating terrorism; racial profiling of Muslims in the context of other racist logics; and the homogenization of dissent. The issue includes poetry, photographic work, and an article by Judith Butler on the discursive space surrounding the attacks of September 11. This impressive range of contributions questions the meaning and implications of the events of September 11 and their aftermath.Contributors. Muneer Ahmad, Meena Alexander, Lopamudra Basu, Judith Butler, Zillah Eisenstein, Stefano Harney, Randy Martin, Rosalind C. Morris, Fred Moten, Sandrine Nicoletta, Yigal Nizri, Jasbir K. Puar, Amit S. Rai, Ella Shohat, Ban Wang

911: A Public Emergency (Social Text 72) (Volume 20)

History

Mitchell, Timothy

Shohat, Ella

Edwards, Brent Hayes

Martin, Randy

Harney, Stefano

Americas

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

"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.

History & Criticism

Stolen Life (consent not to be a single being)

"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 Stolen Life—the second volume in his landmark trilogy consent not to be a single being—Fred Moten undertakes an expansive exploration of blackness as it relates to black life and the collective refusal of social death. The essays resist categorization, moving from Moten's opening meditation on Kant, Olaudah Equiano, and the conditions of black thought through discussions of academic freedom, writing and pedagogy, non-neurotypicality, and uncritical notions of freedom. Moten also models black study as a form of social life through an engagement with Fanon, Hartman, and Spillers and plumbs the distinction between blackness and black people in readings of Du Bois and Nahum Chandler. The force and creativity of Moten's criticism resonate throughout, reminding us not only of his importance as a thinker, but of the continued necessity of interrogating blackness as a form of sociality.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Moten, Fred. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Moten, Fred

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Moten, Fred. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition

In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition

The Little Edges (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

The Little Edges

The Little Edges (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

B Jenkins (Refiguring American Music)

911: A Public Emergency (Social Text 72) (Volume 20)

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

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

Stolen Life (consent not to be a single being)