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  • Black Art As Unmappable Dissent
  • Michael Gallope (bio)
BLACK AND BLUR
BY fred moten
Duke University Press, 2017

Have we sensed the significance of the black avant-garde? Have we grasped its fracturing and multiplicative powers, its dissenting sublimity, and its peculiar ability to recast traditional conceptions of the aesthetic? And have we understood this in the context of a history of aesthetics that has continued to venerate the powers of the white subject over the resistant fugitivity of the alienated object? Fred Moten's essay collection Black and Blur invites sustained mediation on these questions. It contains a wide range of Moten's prose writings since 2003, from journal articles and catalog essays to liner notes and experimental prose. The essays cover a range of media; many focus on music and visual art, but there are also discussions of literature, poetry, and criticism. The collection was the first installment in Moten's trilogy, consent not to be a single being, which stretches to two further volumes: Stolen Life (2018) and The Universal Machine (2018). Moten's essays stage a rebellion against the perennial consent granted to the a priori whiteness of Euro-Western modernism; in the process, he incarnates a black praxis of utopian dissent. Black music, black sound, and the black voice—and the reorientation of listening he enjoins—are recurring focuses.

When I read Moten, it feels as though I am being asked to think with a living philosopher. This seems like glowing scholarly praise, but that is not my primary aim in saying this; I mean it as an earnest claim about genre. Why write a traditional review when one can hear—in prose—a breathing, syncopating, and meditative philosopher who is [End Page 193] asking to be heard? With this in mind, my aims here are primarily exegetical. I will try to show how I read Moten and why I have found his work inspiring for the past seventeen years, since I came across his first book, In the Break (2003). In my own writings, I have quoted Moten, appealed to his sensibility, asked him to speak, but often with only minimal context or explanation. So I want to take this opportunity to build upon the thinking I hear (and have heard) in Moten's writings. I know I am running the risk of running afoul of Moten's method by watering down the poetic negativity of his writing. His essays invite slow work, and important slow work. Without wanting to forestall the often formidable challenges his meditations pose, I will here try to press ahead and offer an account of recurring themes and questions in his writing, thus showing readers the kinds of things I have come to hear.

Central to Moten's work is a vision of the historicity of black aesthetics. He emphasizes the roots of black aesthetics in the history of enslaved Afro-descendants (both in the United States and in the Caribbean) who were expropriated, dehumanized, and silenced in order to provide the material basis for modern capitalism and democracy. Moten's writings take as an axiom that the dissenting power of black art is linked to the economy of trans-Atlantic violence and racial subjugation, both historical and ongoing. His approach challenges any ready-to-hand aesthetics regarding the powers of the enlightened, white, Euro-Western subject—with all of its assumptions of agency, autonomy, sovereignty, and privileged capacities for dissent. For Moten, normative conceptions of artistic style, of modernism, of various avant-garde protests and refusals, remain dependent upon a racist marginalizing and silencing of black sociality and black aesthetics.

This is a leitmotif of Moten's materialism; the historicity of modernist forms is conditioned by the racial subjugation inherent to the historicity of capitalism. This materialism is also central to Moten's reading of Frederick Douglass's Autobiography of a Slave (1845) featured in the introduction to his first book, In the Break. Moten follows the work of the critic Saidiya Hartman and positions Douglass's description of his Aunt Hester's beating as a brutal spectacle—what Moten describes as a "primal scene"—that is endlessly restaged and reheard throughout the history of the black avant...

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