Fred Moten: Note on a Blue Note in The Gospel of Barbecue

Fred Moten, a 2020 MacArthur Fellow, discussed a poem called "On Listening to the Two-Headed Lady Blow Her Horn," which is from Honorée Fanonne Jeffers's extraordinary collection, "The Gospel of Barbecue."

He talked—in the wake and under the influence of Manolo Callahan, J. Kameron Carter, Ruby Sales and Frank Stewart—about how the disruption of the metaphysics of sovereignty which the physics of the barbecue undertakes is held, and held open, and released in Jeffers's rich musicality. After failing properly to analyze a musicality that defies analysis, he invited participants to join him in trying to join Jeffers in the incalculable rhythm she lays down, which blurs the line between blur and blue, intoned time and pitch, in the interest of a general, insovereign insurgency.

In October 2020, Moten was named a MacArthur Fellow. This year there were 21 winners of the "genius awards" given by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. MacArthur Fellows receive a sum of $625,000 each to use any way they choose. "Moten's diverse body of work coheres around a relentless exploration of sound and its importance as a medium of Black resistance and creativity," reads his MacArthur Fellow profile.

Fred Moten teaches in the Department of Performance Studies in the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. His fields are black studies, poetics and critical theory and his special concern is the entanglement of social movement and aesthetic experiment. His latest book, written with Stefano Harney, is All Incomplete (Minor Compositions / Autonomedia, 2020).

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