Fred Moten: November 3, 2013

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The Poetry Center and Small Press Traffic co-present an evening with Fred Moten, speaking on practices of the undercommons and reading from his poetry. Moten's opening talk is occassioned by his having seen a debut screening of the film adaptation of Solomon Northup's historic slave narrative, Twelve Years a Slave, the previous evening — which moves him to a critique of the film. Moten's critique shifts to a reading of "Two Theses on the Undercommons" [that number gets amended], following on earlier writing by him and Stefano Harney (cf. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Minor Compositions, 2013). He follows with a reading of poems, from The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions, 2014), then from, in manuscript, The Little Edges (Wesleyan UP, 2015) and from B Jenkins (Duke UP, 2010). Robin Tremblay-McGaw introduces Moten, after Samantha Giles of Small Press Traffic and Steve Dickison of The Poetry Center welcome the audience, in Timken Hall, on the California College of the Arts campus in San Francisco.

NB: The opening credit mistakenly indicates "November 11" — whereas the actual date of the event is November 3, 2013.

Note: the quality of this digital video from Fall 2013 is compromised due to the loss of master-files from failure of a 'failsafe' set of mirrored hard-drives; fortunately, a compressed video file could be retrieved from DVD backup.

Publisher: American Poetry Archives
Location: Timken Hall, California College of the Arts
Date: 2013-11-03
Event Run Time: 01:23:22
Contributors: Samantha Giles; Steve Dickison; Justin Desmangles; Linda Norton; Robin Tremblay-McGaw
Rights: ©© American Poetry Archives. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For all other uses please email poetry@sfsu.edu.
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Fred Moten (00:55:55)

Description

Fred Moten thanks his hosts and explains his plan for the evening. After talking the prior night at the Bay Area Public School, he'd attended a screening of the movie Twelve Years a Slave with friend Linda Norton. He reads a brief statement posted at Twitter by scholar Tavia Nyong'o regarding the film, then moves into a critique of Black Studies, opposing the academic disciplline to "black study."

The film "allows you to look at the degraded black worker through [Solomon] Northup's eyes" and Northup's "full degradation" occurs in the film when he joins his fellow enslaved people in black song. He "enters into the shame of subjectivity."

Moten then reads "Two Theses on the Undercommons" [subsequently he ammends that number], reflecting on the space he's just exposed.

He follows this with poems from the first part of The Feel Trio, "Block Chapel," and from the final section, "I ran from it but was still in it." He then reads from the manuscipt to The Little Edges, and concludes with several poems, including the title poem, from B Jenkins.

Conversation (00:16:31)

Description

Turning to questions from the audience, Justin Desmangles asks about the possibility for a "public space of mourning" regarding black life. Fred Moten turns in his response to emphasize "this other place, that is also public" and that already exists outside the boundaries of the greater civil society, and which in its practice "transforms normative conceptions of mourning."

Regarding the film Twelve Years a Slave, Moten stresses "how horrifically terrible that film is" in his view. "The vast majority of black workers in that movie...are portrayed as spectators of degradation, except in the moments when they are actually victims of degradation." Instead, he says, "black radicalism emerges precisely from the spaces that film shows as utterly, utterly degrading."

An audience member asks about citation in Moten's work. "Some of it," Moten replies, "is training," and an attempt to enter a dialogue with "the people in your head" in a social way. He tells of visiting Montaigne's house, and seeing where the writer had carved words from other writers into the wood of the beams. As part of "intellectual work and life," Moten says that one is basically "on the edge of what normal people call sanity."