hat and beardby Kodwo Eshun (to be published Summer 2007)
The star attraction of the 1967 Legalise Pot Rally was beat patriarch and American sadhu Allen Ginsberg. Astride a stepladder, he is caught on camera delivering his speech to five thousand hippies. Lurking beneath the stepladder, barely visible in the frame, is the pensive face of a man preoccupied with his own thoughts. He, though, is not thinking about legalising marijuana. He is somewhere and someone else entirely: Michael de Freitas, Michael X, Abdul Malik: a figure whose multiple names indicate a predilection for metamorphosis. From this oblique point of departure, Eshun charts an inventory of becomings, a series of moments from an era of embarrassments and enchantments that constituted the dawning of British Black Power. Excavating fragments and poetics from sources that range from Godard’s ‘One Plus One’ to the Congress of the Dialectics of Liberation, from Soft Machine’s ‘Rivmic Melodies’ to the radical newspaper ‘Black Dwarf’, Eshun assembles a constellation of unlikely coincidences, second hand futures and inoperative dystopias that collectively exert a pressure on the certitudes of the present.
Hat and Beard is printed offset in an edition of 1,000 copies.
ISBN 1870699 95 5 — Price TBC
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