Fred Moten’s Radical Critique of the Present

May 2, 2018 10:09 AM

For Moten, blackness is something “fugitive,” as he puts it—an ongoing refusal of standards imposed from elsewhere. In “Stolen Life,” he writes, “Fugitivity, then, is a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed. It’s a desire for the outside, for a playing or being outside, an outlaw edge proper to the now always already improper voice or instrument.” In this spirit, Moten works to connect subjects that our preconceptions may have led us to think had little relation.
posted by standardasparagus (5 comments total)

Another long piece on him in Harvard Magazine

An interview at LitHub

The Undercommons, available for free download

A few poems available online
posted by praemunire at 10:34 AM on May 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

The stuff Moten does with anagrams/homophones/homonyms in poetry is seriously breathtaking - as if the words are evolving on the page while you read them.

A great example is quoted in TFA:

"taken to bridges from lula to lela to lena to eula to ayler to tala to tore up

but untorn and bend

like fenders breathe, felder’s or fielder’s, that family, man, that recess.

so much more than air and world and time."
posted by eustacescrubb at 1:02 PM on May 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

I had the privilege of taking several courses from Moten in college (one on Shakespeare, another on slave narratives) and they were really great classes. I think of him whenever I see a grove of trees. One day in class, he said that college should be like that—all of the professors should have their tree and students could sit under it to learn.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 1:43 PM on May 2, 2018 [4 favorites]

I have had the pleasure of a conversation with Fred. It was a few years ago, when I was deciding if I was going to attend an MFA program right out of college. I'll never forget what he said. He told me, "Man, that shit's only two years, but it can really fuck you up." I didn't go, ended up meeting my wife, and now I'm on a completely different career path. Thanks, Fred.
posted by lilies.lilies at 5:26 PM on May 2, 2018 [5 favorites]

Fantastic stuff; idiopath recommended I check out this post, and I'm glad I did. I had barely been exposed to Moten before this, and I am, just now, beginning to see how deprived I was.
Thanks, standardasparagus (and also praemunire, those additional links are exceptionally elucidating).
posted by Minus215Cee at 5:21 PM on May 5, 2018