A new book by Fumi Okiji, Billie’s Bent Elbow: Exorbitance, Intimacy, and a Nonsensuous Standard was published in January 2025 and was featured in a Townsend Center for the Humanities's Berkeley Book Chat recorded on February 12, 2025 with Fumi Okiji in conversation with Stephen Best (English).
From the publisher:
Deeply informed by jazz, Billie’s Bent Elbow explores the nonsensical and nonsensuous in black radical thought and expression. Extending the encounter between black study, Frankfurt School critical theory, and sound studies staged in her first book, Jazz as Critique, and, crucially, bringing Yoruba aesthetics into the conversation, Okiji attunes to various sites of
intemperance and equivocation in thought and music. Billie’s Bent Elbow eschews the parsimonious tendencies of the Western philosophical tradition, in its contribution to a shared project of improvised correspondence that finds its criticality in its heterophony of approach and intention. The book ranges from Haitian revolutionaries’ rendition of “La Marseillaise,” to Cecil Taylor’s synesthetic poetics, to the aporetic mien of the orisha Esu, to Billie Holiday’s undulating arm. What is more, by way of her intense fascination with these sites of fantastic noise, Okiji brings our attention to a galaxy of intimacies that flash up in her experiments in array and correspondence. The nonsensuous standard Okiji cultivates in this musical and essayistic book, in concert with a host of theorists, musicians and artists, is as much a statement of non-citizenry as it is preparation for intoxicated gathering.