> KIOSK for Useful Knowledge

Space Control 8:
American Narratives I

Things theory carries home

Avery F. Gordon and Fred Moten in conversation.
Sunday, December 11th, 2005, 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.

A conversation about the possibilities, meanings and complexity of intellectual political commitment today and the necessity of taking sides. Avery F. Gordon and Fred Moten belong to a new generation of theorists who let theory, fiction and fact "speak with each other" in their work, and whose theoretical language verges into the literary. In this conversation, they will discuss the political definition of their work, their relationship to America, the possibility of other stories, as well as the figure of the outlaw, the criminal, the prisoner and the detainee -- and war, immigration and freedom.

Avery F. Gordon is an author of the highly acclaimed book Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination and Keeping Good Times: Reflections on Knowledge, Power and People, a collection of essays on political activism and the radical tradition in the USA today. She is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and moderator of the weekly radio program No Alibi. She is currently writing about arrest, war and utopia. Avery Gordon lives in Paris and Santa Barbara, USA.

Fred Moten was born in Las Vegas and lives now in Los Angeles with his wife, Laura Harris, and their son Lorenzo. He teaches in the Program in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and is the author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) and of two books of poetry, Arkansas (Pressed Wafer Press, 2000) and, with Jim Behrle, Poems (Pressed Wafer Press, 2002). He is currently completing a manuscript on philosophical, aesthetic and political fugitivity in black culture, also to be published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Avery F. Gordon and Fred Moten (Photo by Ines Schaber)

(Photo by Ines Schaber)