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 ldquo;The Burton Greene Affair;rdquo; 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 performancemdash;culture; politics; sexuality; identity; and blackness itselfmdash;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; Motenrsquo;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; Motenrsquo;s wide-ranging discussion embraces a variety of disciplinesmdash;semiotics; deconstruction; genre theory; social history; and psychoanalysismdash;to understand the politicized sexuality; particularly homoeroticism; underpinning black radicalism. In the Break is the inaugural volume in Motenrsquo;s ambitious intellectual project-to establish an aesthetic genealogy of the black radical tradition.
2010-09-06 2010-09-06File Name: B0042FZY7I
Review
