Not only a top-tier and hugely influential thinker at the intersection of race, philosophy and aesthetics – thanks in no small part to volumes ranging from 2003’s In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, 2013’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (with Stefano Harney) and 2018’s The Universal Machine – Moten remains one of the most joyfully uncategorisable intellectuals working today. As well as a theorist and professor (at NYU, tellingly in both the Comparative Literature and Performance Studies departments), he performs stylistic freedom of articulation by being also a prolific poet, creative collaborator (with, inter alia, Wu Tsang, the Otolith Group and Arthur Jafa) and musician. Name another figure who, in the same year that they released a jazz-and-poetry album (Revision, with bassist Brandon López, which The Quietus called ‘a revelatory experience’; the duo toured it to Brussels, Geneva and London this spring), could also be found delivering the Hayden V. White Distinguished Annual Lecture at UC Santa Cruz, on the subject of – logically enough – ‘Theory and Practice of Contradiction’.