Fred Moten - Department of Performance Studies, New York University

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.Today’s conversation is with Fred Moten, who teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. He is the author of a number of volumes of poetry, including most recently All That Beauty (2019) and perennial fashion, presence falling (2023), and multiple critical books that include In the Break (2003), the trilogy Consent Not to be a Single Being published in 2017 and 2018, and with Stefano Harney The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013). In this conversation, we discuss the nature of the field of Black Studies, what lessons it has for thinking politically in the present moment, and how Black study transforms notions of liberation struggle, Black life, and expressive culture.