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Fred Moten, In the Break: The, Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2003. 305 pages.
Fred Moten's In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition offers a searching theory of performance that performs the space of its possibility, performs the possibility of the opening of an acoustic space in which the "phonic substance" that launches his project can be heard. Or rather, following the demand of this work, In the Break opens a space in which the cry that initiates and constitutes this book is made visible. It establishes a poetic that makes possible a semantics of the anguished cry. Moten's book opens with a cry, that cry, which cannot be reduced to one cry, any one cry in particular, although there are many particular cries-memorial, historical, and indelible-that reverberate throughout his work. The cry remains instead an ensemble of cries-one after another and through one another-that erupts from the depths of two "peculiar institutions" (slavery and literature) and opens onto the history and catastrophe of slavery in America. But the result of Moten's work is always more than a performance, more than the aggregate of gestures that falls within the valorized space of performative writing: In the Break marks an event according to the terms with which Moten describes it-encounter, ensemble, improvisation, and the invocation of the "knowledge of freedom." Moten thinks the performance and performativity of "blackness," aligning himself with a tradition that he simultaneously locates and creates, performs as an encounter with black culture and its phonic traces. "Blackness," he writes, "is an ongoing performance of encounter: rupture, collision, and passionate response." Moten's work is a singularly remarkable achievement, one that establishes new possibilities of thinking history, literature, theory, philosophy, aurality, and an experience of blackness in America that cannot be separated from the materiality and (immateriality of black performances.
In the Break consists of three sections-"The Sentimental Avant-Garde," "In the Break," and "Visible Music"-and is framed by two sections titled "Resistance of the Object"; the first subtitled "Aunt Hester's Scream," the second "Adrian Piper's Theatricality." The first "Resistance of the Object" establishes a set of theoretical provocations regarding the voice, the cry, the crisis of irrepressible "phonic substances"-irreducible to meaning and language-that constitute...