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
General
Imprint: |
University of Minnesota Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
April 2003 |
First published: |
April 2003 |
Authors: |
Fred Moten
|
Dimensions: |
229 x 148 x 19mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback
|
Pages: |
315 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-8166-4100-0 |
Categories: |
Books >
Arts & Architecture >
The arts: general issues >
General
|
LSN: |
0-8166-4100-5 |
Barcode: |
9780816641000 |
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