La poesia di Fred Moten si caratterizza per una ricercata opacità e per una musicalità che si ispira al jazz e si spinge al limite del rumore. Nei suoi versi, il significato è «subordinato al suono, subordinato a un certo tipo di sentimento». Moten immagina e mette in essere nuovi modi e nuovi spazi di incontro e di azione collettiva, di resistenza e di critica alle logiche coloniali e di appropriazione capitalista. Questa raccolta ripercorre quindici anni di attività poetica attraverso una selezione dell'autore di poesie tradotte per la prima volta in italiano e riportate con testo a fronte. Un saggio di Brent Hayes Edwards introduce alla sua poetica; infine, una conversazione tra Mackda Ghebremariam Tesfaù e Justin Randolph Thompson offre una riflessione «da questa parte dell'Atlantico» sull'importanza della poesia di Moten e sull'eccedenza della Nerezza come possibilità di rifiuto, autonomia e autodeterminazione.

Una voce perentoria ci richiama in ogni momento a essere responsabili, efficienti, professionali. Anche i beni comuni sono stati colonizzati, l'università è una catena di montaggio e siamo costantemente in debito verso chi ci richiama all'ordine. Alla proliferazione della logistica capitalista e alle mutazioni odierne del controllo sociale, Stefano Harney e Fred Moten rispondono con questa raccolta di saggi che ci invita a sperimentare nuove forme di socialità nell'antagonismo generale. Attraversando le teorie e le pratiche della tradizione radicale nera e del post-operaismo, gli autori propongono un ampliamento dello spettro del pensiero socio-politico contemporaneo e della critica estetica, negli Stati Uniti e non solo. Undercommons è un manifesto d'amore, sospeso tra teoria e poesia, musica e sovversione, per la fondazione di una nuova società.

Poetry. African American Studies. Music. California Interest. THE FEEL TRIO is Cecil Taylor, Tony Oxley and William Parker. Or is it that THE FEEL TRIO are Cecil Taylor, Tony Oxley and William Parker? See, that's the amazing problem and chance, right there! In the wake and air and light of THE FEEL TRIO, what it bears and what propels them, which is everything in particular, THE FEEL TRIO tries to put some things together. Alabama runs through those things like nobody's business. I kept trying to visit the uncounted space James Brown forms around the one. To celebrate the varieties of black devotion. But coalition can't be too easy; it's in our nature not to come naturally lyrically, beautifully violently. The organizing principles, in our extramusical tailor's retrofit of fitting, sharp as a tack from the tone worlds of east by southeast of Sheffield, the Bronx's compassionate project/s and fly, flaired, flared Corona: listen to everything, relax the shape, approach with love, be worthy of a lovely t!

Literary Nonfiction. African American Studies. Politics. Philosophy & Critical Theory. Introduction by Jack Halberstam. In this series of essays, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, inspires, and extends contemporary social and political thought and aesthetic critique. Today the general wealth of social life finds itself confronted by mutations in the mechanisms of control: the proliferation of capitalist logistics, governance by credit, and the management of pedagogy. Working from and within the social poesis of life in THE UNDERCOMMONS, Moten and Harney develop and expand an array of concepts: study, debt, surround, planning, and the shipped. On the fugitive path of an historical and global blackness, the essays in this volume unsettle and invite the reader to the self-organised ensembles of social life that are launched every day and every night amid the general antagonism of THE UNDERCOMMONS.

'This is a powerful book, made of words and sounds, crisscrossed by subversion and love, written and studied 'with and for,' as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten put it. The roar of the battle is never distant while reading THE UNDERCOMMONS. The London riots and occupy, practices of refusal, marronage and flight, slave revolts and anti-colonial uprisings frame a challenging rethinking of concepts such as policy and planning, debt and credit, governance and logistics. THE UNDERCOMMONS is a homage to the black radical tradition, to its generative and constituent power before the task of imagining 'dispossessed feelings in common' as the basis of a renewed communism.'—Sandro Mezzadra

'What kind of intervention can cut through neoliberal configuration of today's university, which betrays its own liberal commitment to bring about emancipation? THE UNDERCOMMONS is a powerful and necessary intervention that invites us to imagine and realise social life otherwise. In this intimate and intense example of affected writing—writing which is always already other, with an other—Harney and Moten dare us to fall. Following, feeling, an other possible manner living together, or as one may say with Glissant—to be 'born into the world,' which is the fate and gift of blackness. Otherwise living, as in the quilombos created by Brazilian slaves, is the promise that is escape!'—Denise Ferreira da Silva

Poetry. African American Studies. 'HUGHSON'S TAVERN is a sly, rowdy, big-eared book, lining out and sounding out, filled with desperado aplomb. Big-footed as well (reminding one of Olson's reminder that a foot is to kick with), it plies a 'boot-heel music' given to offhand acuity, tonic reprisal, declarative elan: Butch Morris meets Howlin' Wolf. As elsewhere in Moten's work, in HUGHSON'S TAVERN the wounded rally'--Nathaniel Mackey. Moten is the author of ARKANSAS, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, and I Ran from It but Was Still in It. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.