Books by Fred Moten

In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition

by Fred Moten

Investigates the connections between jazz, sexual identity, and radical black politics

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-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 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 the politicized 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

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

by Fred Moten

"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.

All That Beauty

by Fred Moten

Poetry. African & African American Studies. Art. A pathbreaking new volume of poems from Fred Moten, ALL THAT BEAUTY combine's Moten's penchant for lyrical prosody, radical thought, and African American theory to produce writing unlike any other poetry in the world: "What is it to reside without settling? Is that is or is that ain't like being stuck in sweetness, held in life?"

Endless Shout

by Fred Moten

Endless Shout asks how, why and where performance and improvisation can take place inside a museum. The book documents a six-month series of experimental performances organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, where five participants―Raúl de Nieves, Danielle Goldman, George Lewis, The Otolith Group and taisha paggett―collectively led a series of improvisation experiments. These include Miya Masaoka’s A Line Becomes a Circle, which pays tribute to Shiki Masaoka, a subversive Japanese haiku writer; jumatatu m. poe and Jerome “Donte” Beacham’s Let ‘im Move You, addressing the history of J-Sette, a dance form popularized at historically black colleges; and A Recital for Terry Admins by composer George Lewis. The book includes an essay by curator Anthony Elms, conversations with Jennie C. Jones and Wadada Leo Smith on themes of rhythm, rehearsal and improvisation, plus new works created specifically for the book, such as a script by The Otolith Group on blackness and digital color correction.

Stolen Life

by Fred Moten

"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.

The Universal Machine

by Fred Moten

"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 The Universal Machine—the concluding volume to his landmark trilogy consent not to be a single being—Fred Moten presents a suite of three essays on Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, and Frantz Fanon, in which he explores questions of freedom, capture, and selfhood. In trademark style, Moten considers these thinkers alongside artists and musicians such as William Kentridge and Curtis Mayfield while interrogating the relation between blackness and phenomenology. Whether using Levinas's idea of escape in unintended ways, examining Arendt's antiblackness through Mayfield's virtuosic falsetto and Anthony Braxton's musical language, or showing how Fanon's form of phenomenology enables black social life, Moten formulates blackness as a way of being in the world that evades regulation. Throughout The Universal Machine—and the trilogy as a whole—Moten's theorizations of blackness will have a lasting and profound impact.

The Feel Trio

by Fred Moten

Divided into three sections shares a collection of poems grounded in jazz and African American history National Award finalist Robert Scott Thayer brings a wonderful childrens tale about a Florida manatee who ventures to Cape Cod but needs to get home before winter or hell die from the cold On his journey south he meets a lost seahorse and a hermit crab Will they get home safely This beautifully illustrated childrens educational picture book is for parents grandparents children teachers and librarians who want a captivating adventure that can be enjoyed again and again Children and adults alike will enjoy this captivating book about Dallas Texas The words combined with the colorful illustrations by Lisa Carrington Voight give a deeper look inside the citys rich culture museums sports teams and historical landmarks Goodnight Dallas entertains the youngest readers while the nostalgia will charm the more mature Dallas enthusiasts Whether you are from Dallas or just visiting this is the bo

The Little Edges (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

by Fred Moten

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)

by Fred Moten

Poems that play in the sonic texture of discourses

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.

Hughson's Tavern

by Fred Moten

Poetry. African American Studies. "HUGHSON'S TAVERN is a sly, rowdy, big-eared book, lining out and sounding out, filled with desperado aplomb. Big-footed as well (reminding one of Olson's reminder that a foot is to kick with), it plies a 'boot-heel music' given to offhand acuity, tonic reprisal, declarative elan: Butch Morris meets Howlin' Wolf. As elsewhere in Moten's work, in HUGHSON'S TAVERN the wounded rally"--Nathaniel Mackey. Moten is the author of ARKANSAS, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, and I Ran from It but Was Still in It. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.

The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study

by Fred Moten, Stefano Harney

Literary Nonfiction. African American Studies. Politics. Philosophy & Critical Theory. Introduction by Jack Halberstam. In this series of essays, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, inspires, and extends contemporary social and political thought and aesthetic critique. Today the general wealth of social life finds itself confronted by mutations in the mechanisms of control: the proliferation of capitalist logistics, governance by credit, and the management of pedagogy. Working from and within the social poesis of life in THE UNDERCOMMONS, Moten and Harney develop and expand an array of concepts: study, debt, surround, planning, and the shipped. On the fugitive path of an historical and global blackness, the essays in this volume unsettle and invite the reader to the self-organised ensembles of social life that are launched every day and every night amid the general antagonism of THE UNDERCOMMONS.

"This is a powerful book, made of words and sounds, crisscrossed by subversion and love, written and studied 'with and for,' as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten put it. The roar of the battle is never distant while reading THE UNDERCOMMONS. The London riots and occupy, practices of refusal, marronage and flight, slave revolts and anti-colonial uprisings frame a challenging rethinking of concepts such as policy and planning, debt and credit, governance and logistics. THE UNDERCOMMONS is a homage to the black radical tradition, to its generative and constituent power before the task of imagining 'dispossessed feelings in common' as the basis of a renewed communism."—Sandro Mezzadra

"What kind of intervention can cut through neoliberal configuration of today's university, which betrays its own liberal commitment to bring about emancipation? THE UNDERCOMMONS is a powerful and necessary intervention that invites us to imagine and realise social life otherwise. In this intimate and intense example of affected writing—writing which is always already other, with an other—Harney and Moten dare us to fall. Following, feeling, an other possible manner living together, or as one may say with Glissant—to be 'born into the world,' which is the fate and gift of blackness. Otherwise living, as in the quilombos created by Brazilian slaves, is the promise that is escape!"—Denise Ferreira da Silva

David Hammons Is on Our Mind (CC WATTIS ICA)

by Fred Moten, Tongo Eisen-Martin, David Hammons

The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, an exhibition space and research institute in San Francisco, dedicates year-long seasons of discussions and public events to a single artist. In 2016–17, the American artist David Hammons (born 1943) was "on our mind." The book begins with the previously unpublished transcript of a rare artist talk given by Hammons in 1994 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, on the occasion of his exhibition there. It then introduces a series of photographs the artist sent to the Wattis Institute in 2017, interspersed with texts by the Bay Area poet Tongo Eisen-Martin and the writer and critic Fred Moten. Much like Hammons’ work, this publication raises more questions than it answers. Rather than functioning as a comprehensive introduction to the artist, David Hammons Is on Our Mind offers visual and textual elements that relate obliquely to the enigmatic artist’s oeuvre.

B Jenkins (Refiguring American Music)

by Fred Moten

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.

The Service Porch

by Fred Moten

Poetry. African & African American Studies. The third and final volume of Fred Moten's poetic trilogy (including THE FEEL TRIO and The Little Edges), THE SERVICE PORCH is an expansive meditation on black life, love, violence, and the adventure of making art. National Book Award-Finalist, Moten returns here to reinvent some of his earliest poetic visions and strikes up a conversation with many of the most brilliant African American visual artists through a series of epistolary and ekphrastic poems. By turns mournful, tender, ferocious, and heart-breakingly honest, THE SERVICE PORCH is an open letter, a play list, and a hive of prayer and joy.

Carrie Mae Weems "a Great Turn in the Possible"

by Fred Moten, Carrie Mae Weems, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Iris Dressler

The most comprehensive survey of Weems' genre-defying oeuvre yet published

One of the most influential American artists working today, Carrie Mae Weems has investigated narratives around family, race, gender, sexism, class and the consequences of power for more than 40 years. Her complex oeuvre--always ahead of its time, and profoundly formative for younger generations of artists--has employed photography (for which she is best known), fabric, text, audio, digital images, installation and video. Writing in the New York Times, Holland Cotter succinctly described Weems as "a superb image maker and a moral force, focused and irrepressible."

This volume, spanning four decades of work, is the most thorough survey yet published. It includes Weems' earliest series, such as Family Pictures and Stories, for which she photographed her relatives and close friends; the legendary Kitchen Table Series, in which she posed in a domestic setting; and other critically acclaimed works and series such as Ain't Jokin', Colored People, From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, Not Manet's Type, The Jefferson Suite, Monuments, Roaming, Museums, Constructing History (A Class Ponders the Future), Slow Fade to Black and the Obama Project, among many others. Contextualizing these pieces are essays by LaCharles Ward and Fred Moten and a chronology by Raul Muñoz. The book also includes a visual essay by Weems that presents a personal selection of her own works from the artist's perspective. The accompanying exhibition is organized by Fundación MAPFRE in collaboration with Fundación Foto Colectania, Barcelona and Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, where the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems. The Evidence Of Things Not Seen took place from April 2 through July 10, 2022.

Carrie Mae Weems (born 1953) has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships, and is represented in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Weems lives in Brooklyn and Syracuse, New York.

Shahzia Sikander Collective Behavior

by Fred Moten, Bhanu Kapil, Aruna Dsouza, Victoria Sung, Rosalind Morris

The definitive publication on internationally acclaimed artist Shahzia Sikander, one of the most influential feminist artists working today

Born in Pakistan and active in New York since the 1990s, Shahzia Sikander navigates the interplay of multiple identities, encompassing a range of artistic disciplines in her work and critically reinterpreting South Asian material history. Sikander's distinctly feminist iconography focuses on the narratives of immigrant women to challenge Eurocentric art histories and counter Orientalist scholarship. This volume, published to coincide with a major mid-career retrospective that premiered during the Biennale Art in Venice and will be held concurrently at the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art, is the first comprehensive exploration of Sikander's ideas and art. With hundreds of images, many presented as a full page or an entire spread, the richly illustrated book immerses readers in Sikander's vibrant and subversive art.