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Fred Moten. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003. 315 pp. $54.95 cloth/ $19.95 paper.
Fred Moten's In the Break takes as its subject matter both black performance and black radicalism, ultimately arguing that the two concepts are, if not one and the same, then mutually constitutive to the point of being nearly impossible to separate. Drawing upon and complicating a Marxist analysis of commodity and value, Moten suggests in his introduction that the "freedom drive," a kind of formal resistance to objectification, is "the essence of black performance." More riskily, he intimates that such resistance is actually the "essence" of blackness itself, and that this blackness -or, perhaps, this particular performance of blackness -is something that must not only be seen but heard if it is to be understood. The resistant sound of black performance is at the center of Moten's analysis, not only because "black radicalism is (like) black music," but because even that which can be understood as an insistently visual black moment (such as, for example, the now-infamous 1955 photograph of Emmett Till's body, which Moten discusses at length in his third chapter) bears an unavoidable trace of the materiality of black voice.
For this reason,...