A review by ralowe
In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition by Fred Moten

5.0

this text is a site of ever-deepening exploration. this is one of those companions that continually returns guiding, challenging, mesmerizing. but i'll have to come back yet again. what was my impulse to review, beset by a thousand hesitations, is that moten asserts that the question of blackness is at the psychic center of every last institution of our ongoing enlightenment west. blackness is the archimedian point for everything: consciousness, the human, all of it. focusing on cultural producers and their productions, the common theme is seeking to fully understand blackness, which moten suggests is both performance and essence. moten is noted for an interest in what is productive of this necessarily painful and traumatizing historic situation from which blackness emerges. he is perhaps the only person who can bring the type of attention required to inhabit history responsibly in all its inescapable complexity. so that's it. i'll try to add more but really, honestly, that's it. read this already.