covering

In a conversation with the writer Hanif Abdurraqib, poet and theorist Fred Moten calls the familiar concept of cultural appropriation into question. “My problem with the various critiques of appropriation,” Moten says, “is that they assume the legitimacy of property. . . . They assume that the aesthetic sociality [that is Black cultural production] is something that can be understood as property.” For Moten, this misapprehension of the nature of Black aesthetic practice has its roots in the transatlantic slave trade. The history of slavery, he points out, is not only a history of theft; it is also one of imposition—including the imposition of the idea of private property. Black cultural production “cannot be owned”; but it “can be stolen”—and the original theft is having “been conceived of in the first place as property.” To refute the ontology of slavery, then, is not to take back what has been stolen, but instead to cultivate the robust return of what has never been fully lost: Black social life. In his poem “covering,” Moten takes up a social practice that disrupts the logic of ownership. Absent a singular origin that can authorize proprietary claims, “black music can’t be / conceived. A music of covers, black music covers.” As the poem unfolds, Moten elaborates the art of being “held / mutual.” The mutuality here is not one of reciprocation between discrete parts, but of what “blurs // in proximity.” Upending the brutal fiction of self-possession that property requires, the ensemble instead makes up a polyvocal community—and wanders freely into the unknown.

– Claire Schwartz