Black and Blur 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 analysisBrent Hayes Edwards, author of Epistrophies Jazz and the Literary Imagination In Black and Blurthe first volume in his sublime and compelling trilogy consent not to be a single beingFred 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 musiciansincluding 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