About

Fred Moten is a Professor in the Departments of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University. He teaches courses in black study, poetics, and critical theory, and works with various social and aesthetic study groups including Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, the Black Arts Movement School Modality, Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective, the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy, Moved by the Motion, the Institute of Physical Sociality, and the Harris/Moten Quartet. His academic interests encompass black study and black performance, music, visual culture, and literature. Moten holds a Ph.D. from the University of California - Berkeley and an A.B. from Harvard University. He has received numerous awards and distinctions, including being a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and a United States Artist Rockefeller Fellow. His recent work includes publications such as '11 Jahre | 11 Interviews' co-written with Stefano Harney, 'La sonora reticenza' introduced by Brent Hayes Edwards, and 'Perennial Fashion Presence Falling' published by Wave Books. His contributions to performance studies and critical theory are recognized through his lectures, publications, and participation in various academic and artistic communities.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Art
• Aesthetics
• Humanities
• Meteorology
• Mathematics
• Geography
• Physics
• Gender studies
• History
• Visual arts
• Literature
• Anthropology
• Library science
• Environmental science
• Engineering
• Medicine
• Philosophy
• Food science
• Biology
• Gerontology
• Mechanical engineering
• Art history

Selected publications

• Fred Moten & Brandon López live

  ArODES (HES-SO (https://www.hes-so.ch/)) · 2026-03-25

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Performance publique centrale du projet Parasonic : transmission de pratiques aurales fugitives. Le projet cherche à étudier, déconstruire et échapper aux mécanismes hégémoniques de racialisation qui se jouent dans les pratiques d’écoute en art et en musique. Fred Moten, poète, théoricien culturel, auteur, professeur d’étude de la performance et de littérature comparée à l’Université de New York crée de nouvelles formes conceptuelles de production culturelle, d’esthétique et de vie sociale noire. Il a donné un concert exceptionnel en exclusivité Suisse avec le contrebassiste Brandon López, figure aussi incontournable de la scène d’improvisation new-yorkaise.

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• Magic of Objects

  2025-01-21

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Poet and cultural theorist Fred Moten is Professor of Performance Studies at New York University. His 2003 book In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition used the concept of improvisatory performance to interrogate the relationship between black aesthetics, black radical thought, and phenomenology. Often focusing on sound, rather than image or text, Moten’s work—both his scholarship and his poetry—seeks to create spaces in which the black experience can be more fully expressed and understood. Moten has also been an influential critic of academia’s complicity in maintaining capitalist social structures, as explored in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013), coauthored with Stefano Harvey. In this brief essay from Black and Blur (2017), itself part of a three-volume series collectively titled Consent not to be a single being, Moten draws together both these strands of his work to offer a series of provocations about performance studies as a discipline.

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• Notes on Narrating Humanity

  Critical Ethnic Studies · 2025-02-26

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Blue(s) as Cymbal

  2024-12-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In this chapter, Fred Moten explores the relationship between Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin by way of synesthetic aesthetics: how music and the attempt to listen deeply also means attention to color, and particularly blue, but also green and yellow, in Delaney's painting and Baldwin's writing. Moten considers whether thinking the color blue in Delaney is entangled with the thought of the blues in Baldwin, particularly in Baldwin’s story “Sonny's Blues.” Because that story is so deeply concerned with the social force of the abductive movements (of embrace) that the character Sonny must perform as a pianist, and because those movements extend and echo the movements of the drummer in Black music, the essay also links Baldwin’s story and Delaney’s art with the music of the great drummer Elvin Jones.

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• On Criticism: Studying How We Are Together

  Portable Gray · 2024-09-01

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• The Philosophonic Labor of These Hands

  2023-02-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter offers a penetrating 21st century philosophical treatise theorizing the ways rhythm and sound create, amplify, and illuminate Black cinema through complex systems of interpersonal, international, economic, and spatial relationships; exploring the sign of gender and the politics of form across the Diaspora, this essay serves as an aesthetic organization that employs music and rhythm to enrich the invisible in Black cinema.

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• No business

  Anthropology & Humanism · 2023-06-28

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Summary “No business” is an attempt to find one hundred words to thank Kathleen Stewart for her work. It seeks to refuse the distinction between poetry and criticism and to make descriptive gestures towards what is unique and lasting in her devotion to common and extraordinary practices.

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• Notes on <i>Sentient Flesh</i>

  Comparative Literature Studies · 2023-02-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  It should be clear from the very beginning that this is not a review but an appreciation. R. A. Judy is my friend and mentor. His contribution to my intellectual life and to intellectual life in general over the past thirty-five years is incalculable. His concern with the elemental entanglement of sentience, flesh, and semiosis—which Black thought, Black life, and Black art express and demonstrate in and against the grain of their suppression, incarceration, and regulation, in the interest of a constant and irreducible disturbance of what Cedric Robinson calls “the terms of order” that structure (the) world as politico-philosophical containment of earth—is of the utmost importance. Judy’s philosophical, literary critical, pedagogical, and editorial work uniquely and emphatically announces what the essential strain of and in Black studies has long been—the irruptive, disruptive turning and overturning of the ontological, metaphysical, and epistemological foundations of modernity. Work that extends and renews that project in the current moment cannot be otherwise than challenging to and demanding of its readers. It must be work of great learning, of deep erudition. The erudition must, in turn, be on display and not merely for display. Such work must be read and reread because of its density, beauty, and the pleasures these afford. Those pleasures are given in the deep attention such work pays, in turn, to dense, beautiful things. Those pleasures are given in how they take away certainties and clear away certain illusions of simplicity or conclusion, certain dogmas that tend toward the status of mantras, certain oft repeated but seldom sounded formulations. Because he does this work, and because he does it so well, Judy allows us to begin to read and think again.Like Thomas Windham, my fellow Arkansan and our now deeply considered forbear and anticipatory witness thanks to Judy’s engagement with him in Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiēsis in Black, Judy is concerned with revealing and thinking “the processual nature of the entire order of things,” when density’s breathy dispersion moves, finally, against the grain of thingly, orderly apparition.1 Indeed, Judy and Windham work the field where things aren’t just put on the move but are rendered indeterminate, thereby challenging the standard epistemic drive to separate with a preference for the experimental exercise of common difference. Judy’s assertion of Black intellect-in-action—which is renewed in Sentient Flesh but which carries all the way through his work from Dis-Forming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular to an extraordinary series of essays, prefaces, special editions, and, just as importantly, to the many intellectual gatherings he has regularly offered and provided over the past three decades—resists law, custom, and what has been allowed to pass for science and philosophy, in order to say that Windham has something to say and something to do. Moreover, Judy shows that what Windham, and the polyglottal, polymathic, polygeneric ensemble from which he emanates, in a kind of radical and particular nonbeing for which no ontology could be adequate, say and do—what they do with words, and to words—is not merely self-evident. When all is said and done, their practiced incompleteness is only heard when thought, where thinking is also feeling, materialized in phono-philological digging, held in studious handing, touching the open history of being touched, which demands not only great erudition but also great empathy. The feeling of Sentient Flesh, which does not grasp but rather releases, is given in digressive reach and absorptive vulnerability. This is all hard to read, and it’s supposed to be hard, but in a way that is somehow compatible with its difficulty, this is all also easy to read, and easy to love, as well. We are drawn into what sweeps us away, propelling toward what Sun Ra calls “other planes of there.” Our guide, Ra Judy, says we’ve been here all along.It turns out that such precise disorientation is the characteristic mode of the comparativist. Sentient Flesh is a book of comparative analysis of the very idea of the human. It sounds this interrogative ensemble: Who can speak for the human? Who defines the human? Who guards the human? Who asks after the human? It does so without either making a claim upon the human or disavowing the human differential, thereby continually both approaching and inhabiting the paradisal abyss at the intersection of (the unimportance of) identity and the concept. Having had no plot, in the outskirts of the outskirts of no country, crumpling an unbroken circle, the animaterial gathering of nonlocal practice is what I’ve learned while reading Sentient Flesh and being talked through it by its author. Some simple problematics of shape, contour, and outline are exceeded in its more than simply (Euclidean) literary collation, which initiates topological investigations of so-called national literatures, languages, attitudes, and modes of inquiry. If Judy suspends certain time-worn wars of position and romances of juxtaposition, it’s neither in the interest of an already given peace nor against the interest of some natural attraction. The peace his thinking will have induced won’t be ge(n)ocidally perpetual but will bear, instead, juba’s violently auto-disruptive intermittence; the attraction his thinking bears out is improper, promiscuous, and strange. Comparativism such as this is the métier of the socio-intellectual calling of Black study, though sometimes the academic (inter)disciplinary profession of Black studies remains demure before its imperatives. What happens when philological attention is paid to the tuned drumming of thinking matter as it blurs the boundary between flesh and body? A new kind of critical discourse is born, which Judy delivers. Its beauty is unique. Serrated arabesque is the term that comes to mind. The book’s turns are complex, multiple, and sharp. This is, again, a necessity for which we must be prepared. A significant readership has begun that preparation by reading deeply in the social-intellectual field of which Judy is a particularly important instance of articulation. Readers of W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Wynter, Édouard Glissant, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, AbdouMaliq Simone, Nahum Chandler, Saidiya Hartman, David Marriott, Katherine McKittrick, Jared Sexton, Frank Wilderson, Brent Edwards, Achille Mbembe, and Denise Ferreira da Silva, are already alert to this tradition’s interinanimation of field and work/er, which always also, and most fundamentally requires that analysis of the long and profound arc of insurgent social poiēsis be attuned to the anonymous edges of First World cities and the unnamable centers of Third World villages.Perhaps, the most disturbing and rewarding lesson that Judy opens is this: that if the brutal trick of the interpersonal is that it’s always interracial, then, paradoxically, anti-Blackness is not, in the first instance, either most clearly or most viciously manifest in Black–white relations. It’s foregiven, rather, in the terrible honor of the human game. Nevertheless, there’s an intramural eccentricity where homelessly pantonal imprevision is all but always busting out. Such rupture is the general housequake, the generative dislodging, the open field holler, and/or kitchen table expression that Judy calls para-semiosis, where what Blackness does shows concern for what Blackness does. In this regard, neither Blackness nor its ethics are particular, which becomes really clear, as Judy shows, in the distance between empathy and identity, where empathy, either in terms of its racist refusal or its racist violation, is not best understood, within the frame of Black–white relations, as a (false) problematic of absorption predicated on prior separation and on separation as the modality in which difference is operative. Judy’s terms of disorder joust a logic and its attendant metaphysics with a startling concern that moves neither for nor against but through the desire for the redemption or recovery of Black interiority in the soulful figure of a Black and human body. Neither sentient flesh nor Sentient Flesh accedes to the simply drawn geometry of putatively normative personhood, which is a miracle given that they are constrained to what passes for life within it. Para-semiosis does not seek and is not comfortable with such stringent (in)security. Rather, and corrosively, it asks: What is interiority? What is the relation between territory and interiority? What if the problem is this interplay of identity, interiority, and individuation? What if it’s deeper than what’s supposed to be inside, indicating the semiotic paradox of the displaced and disrespected and disembodied experiences of Black persons? What if it’s really about the serially murderous imposition of (the very idea of) embodied experience? What if torture is a machine for producing interiority? What if selves have neither experience of themselves nor experience of things because selves (insofar as they are things) are indeterminate? What if the experience of indeterminacy is shared? What if para-semiotic indeterminacy is not the collapse but the enlargement of difference, which had heretofore been confined to particular selves “in” particular bodies? What if neither Erfahrung nor Erlebnis is the right word for the ingenious and congenial phenomenon of “us is human flesh.” Was that what Janie heard when “stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze . . .”—the “inaudible voice of it all,” all too human and more?

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• TDR volume 67 issue 2 Cover and Front matter

  TDR/The Drama Review · 2023

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Environmental science

  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

  DOI

• MT/D, or change: An anti-racist musical theatre reading group

  Studies in Musical Theatre · 2022 · 2 citations

  • Sociology
  • Art
  • Aesthetics

  In this roundtable held at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference in 2021, the participants discussed the racialized politics of citation in musical theatre studies. Some of the speakers lifted up anti-racist scholarly pieces that have significantly shaped their work: SAJ considered Douglas Jones Jr’s chapter ‘Slavery, performance, and the design of African American theatre’, Jordan Ealey shared lessons from Matthew D. Morrison’s article ‘The sound(s) of subjection: Constructing American popular music and racial identity through Blacksound’, Masi Asare expanded upon Fred Moten’s essay ‘Taste, dissonance, flavor, escape’ to think through sweeping away and stealing away, Donatella Galella applied Karen Shimakawa’s book National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage to contemporary yellowface, and Hye Won Kim talked about the influence of Celine Parreñas Shimizu’s book The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene on her own work. Morrison, Moten, Shimakawa and Shimizu reflected on why they wrote those pieces of scholarship and how they understand their research years later. Finally, the co-authors spoke to reasons why scholars situated in musical theatre studies have so rarely cited research in fields like Black and Asian American performance studies and imagined radical possibilities beyond a racist citation framework.

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Frequent coauthors

• Rabih Mroué

  85 shared

• Sara Brady

  New York University Press

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• William H. Sun

  John Brown University

  85 shared

• Elise Morrison

  85 shared

• Tracy C. Davis

  Northwestern University

  85 shared

• Sarah Lucie

  85 shared

• Mariellen R. Sandford

  Sanford Broadway Medical Center

  85 shared

• Kimberly Jannarone

  Sanford Broadway Medical Center

  85 shared

Awards & honors

• Corresponding Fellow, The British Academy, 2023
• Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2022
• MacArthur Foundation Fellow, 2020
• Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newt…
• United States Artist Rockefeller Fellow, 2018