Black and Blur

Written by Fred Moten

Narrated by Leon Nixon

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 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Feb 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781666106503

Fred Moten

Fred Moten examines black studies through the lenses of performance, poetry, and critical theory. He is the author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Hughson's Tavern, The Feel Trio, and consent not to be a single being, among others. His most recent book, The Little Edges, was published by Wesleyan in December 2015, and The Feel Trio was shortlisted for the 2014 National Book Award. His essays and poems have appeared in publications like the South Atlantic Quarterly, Experimental Sound and Radio, and Hambone, as well as several anthologies and collections. He has spoken and performed for audiences around the globe. Moten is currently an English professor at University of California, Riverside, and teaches at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. He is also a member of the writing faculty at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.