"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 analysis."-Brent Hayes Edwards, author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary ImaginationIn Black and Blur-the first volume in his sublime and compelling trilogy consent not to be a single being-Fred 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 José Esteban Muñoz and artists and musicians including 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.

Preface  vii Acknowledgments  xv 1. Not In Between  1 2. Interpolation and Interpellation  28 3. Magic of Objects  34 4. Sonata Quasi Una Fantasia  40 5. Taste Dissonance Flavor Escape (Preface to a Solo by Miles Davis)  66 6. The New International of Rhythmic Feel/ings  86 7. The Phonographic Mise-en Scène  118 8. Line Notes for Lick Piece  134 9. Rough Americana  147 10. Nothing, Everything  152 11. Nowhere, Everywhere  158 12. Nobody, Everybody  168 13. Remind  170 14. Amuse-Bouche  174 15. Collective Head  184 16. Cornered, Taken, Made to Leave  198 17. Enjoy All Monsters  206 18. Some Extrasubtitles for Wildness  212 19. To Feel, to Feel More, to Feel More Than  215 20. Irruptions and Incoherences for Jimmie Durham  219 21. Black and Blue on White. In and And Space  226 22. Blue Vespers  230 23. The Blur and Breathe Books  245 24. Entanglement and Virtuosity  270 25. Bobby Lee's Hands  280 Notes  285 Works Cited  317 Index  329