In the break : the aesthetics of the Black radical tradition / Fred Moten

Object Details

author

Moten, Fred

Contents

Resistance of the object: Aunt Hester's scream -- The sentimental avant-garde. Duke Ellington's sound of love ; Voices/forces ; Sounds in florescence (Cecil Taylor Floating Garden) ; Praying with Eric -- In the break. Tragedy, elegy ; The dark lady and the sexual cut ; German inversion ; 'Round the five spot -- Visible music. Baldwin's Baraka, his mirror stage, the sound of his gaze ; Black mo'nin' in the sound of the photograph ; Tonality of totality -- Resistance of the object : Adrian Piper's theatricality

Summary

"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." -- Publisher's description

2003

Type

Books

Physical description

xii, 315 pages ; 24 cm

Place

United States

Smithsonian Libraries

Topic

African Americans--Intellectual life

African Americans--Politics and government

Radicalism

African American aesthetics

African American arts

Arts--Political aspects

Record ID

siris_sil_1110104

Metadata Usage (text)

CC0