I'm really glad to hear that! I'm happy that we get this chance to talk face to face. Your participation in and speaking to the debate community has been so active, and I'm really glad that we get this time to talk. I am very excited to get into the meat of our interview today, but I wanted to take a moment to talk about how much I enjoyed reading this book — in large part because you are an excellent writer, and also because the book is organized in a very compelling way. It is written as a memoir, and the narrative is the heart
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Quinn Andrew Hughes – Who are some contemporary artists who you are listening to/reading/watching?
Fred Moten – Jennie C. Jones, Kevin Beasley, Moodyman, Taylor Johnson, Klein, Kimberly Alidio, Daniel Carter, Nicole Mitchell…
QH – If there is one album that you would say all black people must listen to, what would it be?
FM – The more I listen, the clearer it seems to me that there is no such thing as one. There is no one album, which is not even the same thing as saying it’s all one big album. It’s all about how attentively and carefully you listen in any given minute to any of the infinite and infinitely beautiful things there are to listen to.
QH – If there is one book you would tell all black people to read, what would it be? Why?
FM – The same as above. There’s too much beautiful stuff. Just start somewhere good and pay attention to how you pay attention
QH – What does black art, as a phrase and as a praxis, mean to you?
FM – Black art tends toward a general, socio-aesthetic resistance to art and its metaphysical and politico-economic underpinnings. In the first instance, or, more precisely, even before that, it is fugitive to itself. That fugitivity, our social aesthetic, our aesthetic sociality, as my friend and comrade and co-conspirator Laura Harris puts it, is a gathering of modes of gathering, and a disbursal of the wealth that comes in and with that gathering. It’s sharing against ownership and authorship; and generosity and generativity against the myth of individual genius. It looks back on the wreck of our terror-driven history and moves forward in and with and towards all the beauty that we are
QH – In a previous interview, you talk about your archive being your mother’s record collection. What did this archive give you? What did you learn from it?
FM – I am still learning how beautiful black music is, and how various, and how, in the end, it’s not even really about the music as such unless you broaden that term out past every formal and sensual boundary. I am still learning about my mother and about how who and what she is, even in her absent presence, goes so far past the boundary of her person and into what my friend, the great critic Terrion Williamson, calls the maternal ecology as it bends against the strain and duress that, as our greatest critic, Hortense Spillers, teaches, has made individual black motherhood impossible. My mom’s records are an archive of sharing.
QH – Frequently Black archives are found within record collections, cook books, photo albums and other found places. Because of the violence of space, there is a degree of absence intrinsic to the archive (we lack the narrative of a female slave who survived the middle passage, for example). You, and others in the field of Black studies, specifically Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe, write about mourning and memory in relation to Blackness. What does archival and memorial work look like and mean to you? What can we do to improve this process and make archival a part of daily life?
FM – We carry the archive with us in the way we walk and the work we do. Spillers speaks of “flesh memory” and Manolo Callahan speaks of “flesh work” and their ideas, along with Sharpe’s notion of “wake work” and Hartman’s mode of “critical fabulation” give us an array of approaches to the history that we bear and share. Of course, there are many approaches—so that each record in my mom’s archive is, itself, an archive. As we begin to broaden our conception of what the archive is, and as, especially, we think of it not only as place but as approach and as practice, as Brent Edwards—who is, somehow, our greatest critic, too—has long been instructing us to do, we innovate and radicalize memory, adding social force to mourning, as our ancestors, who are with us, did in their time and turn.
QH – In your essay “Black Mo’nin’” you discuss the “phonic substance” that animates the photo of Emmitt Till as a way of thinking about, listening to, and caring for the Black social life that exists around these images of suffering. Recently the video circulation of imagery of Black suffering, specifically at the hands of law enforcement, has become a fixture of the news media. Not only this, but social media has organised these images in a way that makes them easy to circulate, share, and consume. This phenomenon creates a saturation of imagery of Black suffering. What are we to do with all of these surplus images of Black death? How can we think about them, or hold them differently?
FM – It doesn’t strike me that images of black suffering have ever been in short supply or low circulation. The various techniques and platforms of and for this ubiquity change but I think it is inaccurate to consider that this ubiquity is new or newly problematic. Those who have rightly called for a renewed and more rigorous attention to and attendance upon black suffering are also rightly outraged by the way this ubiquity impoverishes that attention and attendance. Paradoxes arise and they are intense. Should attention remain intramural, so that we can attempt to ensure respect? But shouldn’t the authors of such suffering be made to pay attention, too? What happens when our suffering becomes commodity and financial instrument even in its righteous representations of the history of our becoming commodities and financial instruments? Does anybody, even the most committed black artist, have the right to capitalize on our suffering or to assume that their art and their sincerity is outside that structure and practice of capitalization? This set of problems is part of the reason that questions concerning art and its morality and its necessity are so vexed and why they must be examined with renewed vigor, in the interest of renewing the vigor of our tradition’s preference for life over death.
QH – You write that images have a phonic substance. How did you come to this realization? How does this change the way that we think about images and mourn? You write that the phonic substance of the image functions as a challenge to semiotics and animates the image with a “powerful resistance” what does this resistance look like, what are the politics of this resistance?
FM – If the resistance looks like anything, it’s because it sounds like something, too. It sounds like the breath we share, our ongoing low-class conspiracy, to invoke Callahan again, in tandem with David Murray’n’em. The phonic substance infuses the image while also being that in which the image is immersed, subjecting inside and outside to a double blur of flavor. The realization of this general and all but nonsensical sensuality is common, I think. You just have to feel, as thoughtfully as possible, what you’ve been sensing all along. We keep making mobile, temporary labs for that—little joints and chapels of haptic turbulence. That’s what Khalil El’Zabar calls the “renaissance of the resistance.” That’s how we do. That’s how we have survived.
QH – You write extensively about both the scream of Aunt Hester and the image of Emmett Till’s body, but you also write extensively about black music and scenes of celebration. What have you found in these scenes? What is the importance in investigating these scenes? What do they have in common? In both of these scenes there seems to be a degree of spectacularization, the spectacle of the broken body, the spectacle of the Black artist. How do you interpret this spectacle?
FM – What’s important is that black life and black death, black celebration and black suffering, are inseparable, hence the necessity of our preferences, which are given, finally, in our practices.
QH – In the beginning of In the Break, you talk about defamiliarizing the familiar inorder to “illuminate the terror of the mundane quotidian rather than exploit the shocking spectacle”. I am wondering if you would be able to speak to what you mean by the shocking spectacle, in addition to what you think it means to defamiliarize the familiar?
FM – The shocking spectacle refers to those scenes of spectacular suffering that Saidiya Hartman invokes and teaches us to beware in her indispensable book, Scenes of Subjection: Slavery, Terror and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Rather than try to rehearse her argument, I invite your readers to become hers. Earlier, I said there is no one book that everyone should read; but if you wanna get started on all the books you should read, you couldn’t pick a better book with which to begin.
QH – You write about moanin as the phonic content of the photograph, all that the photograph refuses to hold within it. The blackened space of moanin, exists within the white space of the image of the broken body. You also describe moanin as a fugitive praxis. Fugitivity and marriage can be seen as a space entangled with whiteness and blackness together. For example, Harriet Jacobs hidden in her Grandmother’s Home, or The hide-a-ways in the Great Dismal Swamp. I am wondering if you would be able to talk for a bit about the transformation of space as you invision fugitivity? What does Black fugitivity mean to you?
FM – Blackness is fugitivity, as far as I know. What it means is that meaning ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. Neither is space, for that matter. Fugitivity is making place in and out of displacement. The places we make are musical. They bear the unbearable. They bear releasement. They bear movement, which is good and bad. They bear a general disruption and dispossession, which we have to learn to love insofar as it is all we have. I’m talking, or trying to talk, about what Amiri Baraka calls “The place and place/meant of black people.” Fugitivity is the vicious modernism we share. It’s always subject to, and also always given in, our removal. It’s the (re)source of our capacity to refuse, which is not only directed towards them, whoever and whatever they are, but also to and for us, whoever and whatever we are, identity now having been put in severe question in our practices, refusal having found sharing through opposition and objection.
QH – Many places in your work you write either directly with, or tangentially to, the work of Saidiya Hartman. She has worked for many years as a historian and as a philosopher (as if there is any distinction between the two), which gives her work a genius nuance and perspective in Black studies. What is it like working with her?
FM – I can’t be so presumptuous as to say that I work with Professor Hartman, but I am very happy to have been in the general neighborhood of her influence. As I said above, I don’t want to believe in the reality or the desirability of genius but it’s impossible not to acknowledge and be thankful for hers.
QH – You wrote an essay titled “Bobby Lee’s Hands’ ‘ that is about Black Panthers in Chicago organizing with poor white people moving to the city from Appalachia. Now, there seems to be a degree of urgency thinking about organizing and material resistance to the violences of capitalism, anti-blackness and their intersections. I am interested in what you think about black organising, specifically organizing with/within white spaces. What does Black organising mean to you?
FM – I’m interested in the ongoing organizing of black social life, its ongoing insurgency and constant(ly changing) structure. I don’t know if this means that there can be black places in white spaces. I think it implies, rather, that black organizing is topographic practice that puts abstractions of space in trouble. I tend to be kind of fundamentalist in my resistance to the geographico-political, as such, though. And most of the time I feel funny about that. How could I not be going overboard? On these questions, you’re much better off listening to more rigorous thinkers than me: check out Mary Pat Brady, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Katherine McKittrick, Abdoumaliq Simone and the late, great Clyde Woods
QH – Black organizing, specifically the organising done by the panthers in the mid-to-late 20th century was centered on an idea of moving towards a Black future. But not only the future in the abstract, but a future of freedom, in a very material sense. A freedom at the level of the physical, a world without police violence, mass incarceration, capital, etc, but also a freedom at the level of ontology. What does freedom look like to you? What does the future look like to you?
FM – Freedom doesn’t look like anything to me. Or, it looks like a lie to me. It looks like the United States of America, which is freedom’s land, they say. It looks like it’s entangled with slavery and that this entanglement is congenital, hence the necessity of fugitivity, which freedom, in our experience, has always sought to incarcerate. I think I know, and always want to pay homage, to what we have meant, or have meant to mean, when we utter that word. For me, that homage is paid in the continual investigation of what freedom has been, how it has been lived, what it has imposed. It’s a scary thing to imagine that our future is beyond freedom, or at least on the run from it. I’m not B. F. Skinner and I don’t even like to invoke him and his particular form of terror. Nevertheless, our past, and the physics of our present, indicate to me that what we need, and have always desired, is something both more and less than freedom, which has always, as far as I can tell, been lived as a brutal confinement in a “future metaphysics.” Hasn’t it always been deferred by our arrival at it? Freedom was the condition, Harriet Jacobs recognized, in which her victory was taken from her. Police violence, mass incarceration and capitalism are what freedom looks like. The sooner we come to grips with that the sooner we might begin to see something else.
QH – In a lot of your work, you talk extensively about the politics of interpersonal relationships. In the work of organising is frequently born out of a sense of community and interpersonal relationships. How do you approach, or think about the relational and the communal in your work?
FM – Interpersonal relationships are the structure of the brutality in which we live. Insofar as they are also what it is that we call politics, I am interested in that which is and remains alternative to them. The communal and the relational are not the same thing. Again, I think I know and want to honor what people mean when they speak of the relational as that which we are and that to which we should aspire. I just believe that relationality implies a metaphysics that is the basis of the long duress we and the earth are under. So, I have been trying to think, within a tradition of such thought, outside the box for which those terms are boundaries.
QH – You write “What it would be to have an ontological status, and know it, is what it would be to be a white person” what do you mean by this?
FM – I mean, simply, that ontological status is a fundamental part of the dangerous and materially brutal fantasy called whiteness.
QH – Part of the essay is exploring the relationship between whiteness and blackness within these spaces of collective organising. There is a degree of violence intrinsic in this space, how can Black organisers think about, or negotiate this?
FM – Violence is everywhere. The question is, how do we practice it? Can we practice it with love?
QH –What is the role of scholars who think they are white (which is to say white scholars)?
FM – I see no role in any project I seek to be part of (for lack of more precise terms) for any scholar who thinks they are white. Now, there might be some scholars, who show up as white to someone or other, who are down to do the work the general insurgency entails and requires and thereby to renounce the white mythology. They are my friends and I’ll fight with them and walk with them anywhere.
QH – In the essay, you also actually investigate the act of Bobby Lee physically touching and pulling out the white people who hid themselves within the room. You write; “ What whiteness seeks to separate, blackness blurs by cutting, in touch.” You then go on to describe how it is Bobby Lee’s touch, his hands, that are almost ontological tools, for lack of a better word, that change the relationship between space and relationality in that very room. I am wondering if you can talk about the scene of his hands?
FM – Bobby Lee’s hands refuse space and relationality. In the openness of their touch they try to heal the malady of thinking that one is white, or that one is one. His hands are para-ontological tools, and he is an anti- and ante-ontological instrument who remains as such, in force, in passage, and even in his passing.
QH – What does intergenerational work mean for black folks?
FM – It means trying to be kind and trying to listen.
QH – What does intersections/intercommunal work look like in the 21st century? What is the role of intercommunal activism? How can we improve it?
FM – We can improve it by trying to be kind and trying to listen and trying, as rigorously and violently and lovingly as we can, to criticize an dismantle every concept and assumption and desire and institution that has been imposed on us by the rulers of the world.
QH – What gives you hope?
FM – Nothing gives me hope, but the fact that there are no things in this entanglement we share continues, for me, to be cause for optimism.
QH – Where and how do you find time and space to celebrate the everyday miracle that is Blackness?
FM – Everywhere, all the time, in mourning. I’m always in the second line.
QH – What advice would you give to young black people?
FM – Listen to Baby Suggs and love your flesh.