"Wildcat The Totality" - Fred Moten And Stefano Harney Revisit The Undercommons In A Time Of Pandemic And Rebellion (Part 1)

This is part one of a two-part conversation with Fred Moten and Stefano Harney.  Fred Moten is the author of In The Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, multiple volumes of poetry, and most recently the trilogy consent not to be a single being. Stefano Harney is the author of Nationalism and Identity: Culture and the Imagination in a Caribbean Diaspora. He also co-authored The Liberal Arts and Management Education: A Global Agenda for Change with Howard Thomas, and State Work: Public Administration and Mass Intellectuality. In 2013, Moten and Harney collaborated on The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study a text that has been influential to both Josh and myself.  They graciously accepted the invitation to revisit this work, and their thinking in this time of pandemic and rebellion.  In this first portion of our conversation, we begin a discussion of the undercommons, the Academy, the general antagonism, solidarity, empathy, whiteness, politics, citizenship, Blackness, and patriarchy. We hope you enjoy part one of this discussion as much as we did, and we will be releasing part 2 next week.