Stolen Life

Fred Moten

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780822370581, 9780822370437
• eBook ISBN: 9780822372028
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

"Taken as a trilogy, consent not to be a single being is a monumental accomplishment: a brilliant theoretical intervention that might be best described as a powerful case for blackness as a category of analysis."—Brent Hayes Edwards, author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination

In Stolen Life—the second volume in his landmark trilogy consent not to be a single being—Fred Moten undertakes an expansive exploration of blackness as it relates to black life and the collective refusal of social death. The essays resist categorization, moving from Moten's opening meditation on Kant, Olaudah Equiano, and the conditions of black thought through discussions of academic freedom, writing and pedagogy, non-neurotypicality, and uncritical notions of freedom. Moten also models black study as a form of social life through an engagement with Fanon, Hartman, and Spillers and plumbs the distinction between blackness and black people in readings of Du Bois and Nahum Chandler. The force and creativity of Moten's criticism resonate throughout, reminding us not only of his importance as a thinker, but of the continued necessity of interrogating blackness as a form of sociality.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1. Knowledge of Freedom
• 2. Gestural Critique of Judgment
• 3. Uplift and Criminality
• 4. The New International of Decent Feelings
• 5. Rilya Wilson. Precious Doe. Buried Angel
• 6. Black Op
• 7. The Touring Machine (Flesh Thought Inside Out)
• 8. Seeing Things
• 9. Air Shaft, Rent Party
• 10. Notes on Passage
• 11. Here, There, and Everywhere
• 12. Anassignment Letters
• 13. The Animaternalizing Call
• 14. Erotics of Fugitivity
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index