About this item
Highlights
- Deeply informed by jazz, Billie's Bent Elbow explores the nonsensical and nonsensuous in black radical thought and expression.
- About the Author: Fumi Okiji is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.
- 196 Pages
- Philosophy, Movements
Description
About the Book
"Deeply informed by jazz as music and sociality, Fumi Okiji explores black movement of thought as marked by a failure to be adequately disturbed by contradiction. The tarrying with the negative so crucial to European critical theory cannot quite account for the exorbitance characteristic of black thought. This is an orientation that allows for an oversubscription of intention, sense, and logic, against the parsimony prized by the dialectical form. Attending to the black immoderation that registers as nonsense or deafening feedback from the perspective of European thought, Okiji tunes in to moments ranging from the Haitian revolutionary forces' singing of "La Marseillaise" to Cecil Taylor's synesthetic poetics to the aporetic mien of the orisha Esu. She brings our attention to a galaxy of intimacies that flash up with such improvisatory and untimely thought. Extending the encounter between black study, Frankfurt School critical theory, and sound studies developed in Jazz as Critique, and drawing Yoruba aesthetics into this cluster, On Black Exorbitance is both a statement of non-citizenry and a preparation for practices of intoxication"--Book Synopsis
Deeply informed by jazz, Billie's Bent Elbow explores the nonsensical and nonsensuous in black radical thought and expression. Extending the encounter between black study, Frankfurt School critical theory, and sound studies staged in her first book, Jazz as Critique, and, crucially, bringing Yoruba aesthetics into the conversation, Okiji attunes to various sites of intemperance and equivocation in thought and music. Billie's Bent Elbow eschews the parsimonious tendencies of the Western philosophical tradition, in its contribution to a shared project of improvised correspondence that finds its criticality in its heterophony of approach and intention. The book ranges from Haitian revolutionaries' rendition of "La Marseillaise," to Cecil Taylor's synesthetic poetics, to the aporetic mien of the orisha Esu, to Billie Holiday's undulating arm. What is more, by way of her intense fascination with these sites of fantastic noise, Okiji brings our attention to a galaxy of intimacies that flash up in her experiments in array and correspondence. The nonsensuous standard Okiji cultivates in this musical and essayistic book, in concert with a host of theorists, musicians and artists, is as much a statement of non-citizenry as it is preparation for intoxicated gathering.
Review Quotes
"In this exorbitantly questioning book, Okiji sings and swoons through a set of classic standards: mimesis, dialectics, art, indeterminacy. She offers up these songs of Black life as if she had the world's ear, and I believe that she will." --Benjamin Piekut, Cornell University
"It's not just that Okiji places study of and in the ongoing cosmological, ecological, topographical, and poethical experiment of The Music on a new footing; she also radicalizes and exacerbates the displacements that make up study's general attitude." --Fred Moten, New York University
"Okiji's generous solo provocatively adds to the chorus that is contemporary Black Thought an intervention in critical theory which, exploring beyond the confines of the practice, dares and excavates its potentially generative gifts." --Denise Ferreira da Silva, New York University
About the Author
Fumi Okiji is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited (Stanford, 2018). She arrived at the academy by way of the London jazz scene and draws on sound practices to inform her writing.