# Fred Moten [Wikipedia Link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Moten) ( 1962 – ) ## Description American poet and critical theorist working across Black studies, performance, and aesthetics; *In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition* (2003) locates a resistant, improvisatory aesthetics in Black performance, and *The Undercommons* (2013, with Stefano Harney) theorizes "fugitive planning" and study outside and against the institution. ## Key Tags #theorist #black-study #poetics ## Essential Works - *In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition* (2003) - central text tracing an improvisatory, resistant aesthetics through Black music, performance, and literature - *The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study* (2013, with Stefano Harney) - theorizes "fugitivity" and study as a mode of refusal within and against the university ## Details Poet as well as theorist, Moten's critical writing is stylistically inseparable from his poetics — dense, improvisatory, and attentive to sound and rhythm as sites of Black social life and resistance. Longtime collaboration with Stefano Harney on the "undercommons" concept has been widely taken up in critical university studies and activist organizing. ### Concepts and Theories - [[Black Studies]] - central figure in the field; "undercommons" and fugitive study are foundational contemporary statements of it ### Creative and Technical Practices %% none yet %% ### Collaborators - [[Zakiyyah Iman Jackson]] - overlapping Black studies discourse on blackness, the human, and the aesthetic ### Institutional Affiliations and Associated Movements %% none yet %% ## References ### Primary Sources Bibliography Moten, Fred. *In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition*. University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Foundational study of resistance and aesthetics in the Black radical tradition. ### Secondary Sources Bibliography Halberstam, Jack. "The Wild Beyond: With and for the Undercommons." Foreword to *The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study*, by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Minor Compositions, 2013, pp. 2–13. Situates "fugitivity" and undercommons thinking within Black study and critical university studies.