Fred Moten
In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition.
University of Minnesota Press, 2003. First printing. 0816641005 xii/315 pages.
Softcover volume, measuring approximately 6.25" x 9.25", displays light shelfwear. Binding is sound. Pages are clean and bright.
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.