Deeply informed by jazz, Billie's Bent Elbow (Stanford, 2025) 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 (2018), and, crucially, bringing Yoruba aesthetics into the conversation, Fumi Okiji (Rhetoric) 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.

She is joined by Stephen Best (English).