num_pages: 360
description: 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 Jos Esteban Muoz 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
title: Black and Blur
publisher: Duke University Press Books