Breath and Precarity

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Breath and Precarity

19.99

Poetry. African & African American Studies. “If ‘I can’t breathe’ seems to have become the awful refrain of the age, a repeated corroboration of expendability and helplessness, Mackey reminds us that black culture has long been imbued with a profound sense of the fragility of life. The ‘radical pneumaticism’ of black music—in which saxophonists such as Ben Webster and Sonny Rollins extravagantly foreground the mechanics of their breathing as they play, as though to ‘insist upon and belabor’ the indispensability of respiration—is not only an aesthetics but also a political commentary on social precarity. Compact and muted as it may be, how can Mackey’s lecture be described as anything other than breathtaking, when it forces us to ‘hover,’ to pause, to wonder at the ‘transient boon’ of the next breath we’re about to take?”

SKU: 38359 Category: Tag:
Subtitle:
Author: Mackey, Nathaniel
Year: 2021
ISBN: 9780990945390
Pages: 40
Language: English
Publisher: Small Press Distribution SPD (leverancier van Charles H. Kerr?)
Publisher's city: Berkeley
Publication date:
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