Tropicana, Tropicana, Tropicana

Abstract This conversation with the poet, scholar, and theorist Fred Moten begins with the proposition that sound blurs easy distinctions between matter and thought. In this way, sound provides an opening to what Moten calls “moments of disruption, of going off the track, of accident, of rupture, of breakage.” Cacophonous sounds have long served to orient and ground Moten’s analysis of the interplay between power, blackness, and aesthetic practice. Building on this prior work, here Moten approaches sound variously as material, medium, metaphor, and method. The dialogue brings key concepts in sound studies—silence, repetition, voice, rhythm, and so on—into conversation with themes that have long animated Moten’s thought, such as refusal, excess, improvisation, and the Black radical tradition. Topics discussed include the palimpsestic nature of live performance; the metaphysics of voice; the sonic life of labor, racial capitalism, and settler-colonial displacement; Moten’s musical-poetic collaboration with Brandon López and Gerald Cleaver; and works by Édouard Glissant, M. NourbeSe Philip, John Coltrane, and W. E. B. Du Bois, among others.