Hanif Abdurraqib & Fred Moten - "Building a Stairway to Get Us Closer to Something Beyond this Place"

This is a dialogue between Hanif Abdurraqib and Fred Moten.

Hanif Abdurraqib has been on the show twice before, but we really have not done a proper episode to honor his work. So we wanted to figure out a unique way to commemorate the release of A Little Devil In America: Notes In Praise of Black Performance. It dawned on us that a lot of Fred Moten’s work was wrestling with many of the same questions explored in Hanif’s. So we invited both of them to join us in a dialogue, and they both graciously accepted.

Due to the improvisational casual nature of the conversation, it did not make sense to edit the episode the way we normally do. Aside from attempting to align the mic levels as much as possible and removing a few minor audio blemishes, what you hear is true to the live discussion. Certainly something is lost in you all not having been there with us, but hopefully something has been found and preserved as well.