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In the Break The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition
open our order pageFred Moten
University of Minnesota, 2003
Paperback. 327pp
£19.99

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.

CONTENTS:
Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester's Scream
1 The Sentimental Avant-Garde
Duke Ellington' Sound of Love; Voices/Forces; Sound In Florescence (Cecil Taylor Floating Garden); Praying With Eric
2 In The Break
Tragedy, Elegy; The Dark Lady & the Sexual Cut; German Inversion; 'Round the Five Spot
3 Visible Music
Baldwin's Baraka, His Mirror Stage, the Sound of His Gaze; Black Mo'nin' In the Sound of the Photograph; Tonality of Totality
Resistance of the Object: Adrian Piper's Theatricality

FRED MOTEN is Associate Professor of African-American Studies and Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

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