Can our favourite Vegas-born poet of prophetic blackness and a South Central transmuter of social rage into beauty feel through each other?
A poet, playwright and activist, Sanchez emerged as a seminal figure in the 1960s Black Arts Movement, writing in the name of black culture, civil rights and women’s liberation.
How do you know what you want? Should freedom be doing what you ought, not doing what you want? How might a philosopher and artist turn this thinking into an enabling condition in the context of noise and improvisation?
In many ways, this Episode is our attempt to engage with Fred’s incredible writing: with his proposal that all black performance (culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself) is improvisation.
What might Carter and Parker’s collaboration tell us about our own performances of responsibility and liberty, whether individual, social or musical?
African American history, avant-garde jazz riffs and activism intertwine in experimental verse of extraordinary and affecting beauty that has to be heard.
Do art forms like black radical poetry, free jazz and improvisation create a space for the performance of freedom? Did they ever? And can they still do so now?