Black and Blur

Consent Not to Be a Single Being, Book 1

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.

©2017 Duke University Press (P)2022 Tantor

Fantastic

A brilliant book, brilliantly read. The poetic complexity of Moten’s thought weaves through philosophy, music, and politics with an urgency for upending the sterile formation of life that cages us in presumptions of individuality.

shakespeare called and wants their title as poet god back

Need a season long reading group for every sentence. Moten is a funkophonic instrument of a theory in groove we all already move to when we lose ourself/cell.