Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity
Lindon Barrett (Author), Justin A. Joyce (Edited by), Dwight A. McBride (Edited by), John Carlos Rowe (Edited by)
9780252038006
Hardback, published 23 December 2013
264 pages
23.5 x 15.6 x 2.3 cm, 0.513 kg
"Lindon Barrett was one of our most brilliant intellectuals. His loss was, and remains, incalculable, but what he has left us in the form of Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity is just as incalculable a gift and legacy. A truly magisterial work."
--Fred Moten, author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition
"In addition to deepening our understanding of the genealogy of western racism, this volume promises to effect a revaluation of established representations of African American modernism. A vivid demonstration of the affecting form of thoughtful, indeed crucial, provocation that Barrett added to the world."--Donald E. Pease, coeditor of Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies
The unfinished manuscript of literary and cultural theorist Lindon Barrett, this study offers a genealogy of how the development of racial blackness within the mercantile capitalist system of Euro-American colonial imperialism was constitutive of Western modernity. Masterfully connecting historical systems of racial slavery to post-Enlightenment modernity, this pathbreaking publication shows how Western modernity depended on a particular conception of racism contested by African American writers and intellectuals from the eighteenth century to the Harlem Renaissance.
Cover
Title
Contents
Introduction by John Carlos Rowe
1. The Conceptual Impossibility of Racial Blackness: History, the Commodity, and Diasporic Modernity
2. Making the Flesh Word: Binomial Being and Representational Presence
3. Captivity, Desire, Trade: The Forging of National Form
4. The Intimate Civic: The Disturbance of the Quotidian
5. Modernism and the Affects of Racial Blackness
Epilogue by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride
Notes
Bibliography
Index
