The texts of consent not to be a single being, ever difficult to classify, their criticism taking on objects spanning a range of media across time, write a record of and a testament to the interdisciplinary nature of black studies. In some ways a continuation and revision of In the Break, Moten’s trilogy thinks blackness through “the sexual cut” in painting, music, photography, cinema, novels, poetry, philosophy, and politics. In the attempt at a particular kind of failure, of chanting an open set of sentences of the kind blackness is x that come to be the same as subjectless predication, Moten’s texts gather under the name of blackness or black studies—which he defines differently across his oeuvre as relating to antiblackness, as, via Cedric Robinson, the critique of Western Civilization—a set of (mis)transmissions. He fills volumes, conjuring contexts across the diaspora, on black art and the predication of blackness, thinking and saying again and again, in even sometimes contradictory ways, what can never be pinned down. The texts themselves are comprised of essays that resist the strictures of academic writing or literary criticism, that written poetically, musically, performing what they say—through a style at once improvisatory and like montage—as much as saying what they mean. An interdisciplinary scholar teaching in performance studies, his work performs interdisciplinarity in and beyond the interdisciplinarity of its subject. Reading his theory and (later) his poetry in relation to each other, we will consider the constraints and possibilities the different genres generate on their own and together. 

SPRING SEMESTER SCHEDULE
 

2/8 Stolen Life: “The Touring Machine (Flesh Thought Inside Out)” to “Erotics of Fugitivity” (pp. 161-268) 

3/7 Universal Machine: “There is No Racism Intended” (pp. 1-64) 

4/4: Universal Machine: “Refuge, Refuse, Refrain” (pp. 65-140)

4/25: Universal Machine: “Chromatic Saturation” (pp. 140-246)

FALL SEMESTER SCHEDULE
 

9/14: Black and Blur: “Not in Between” to “Rough Americana” (pp. 1-151)

9/28: Black and Blur: “Nothing, Everything” to “Cornered, Taken, Made to Leave” (pp. 152-205)

10/12: Black and Blur: “Enjoy All Monsters” to “Bobby Lee’s Hands” (pp. 206-284)

11/9: Stolen Life: "Knowledge of Freedom" (pp. 1-95)

12/7: Stolen Life:  “Gestural Critique of Judgment” to “Black Op” (pp. 96-160)