Conditions of the Present collects essays by the late Lindon Barrett, whose scholarship centers African American literature as a site from which to theorize race and liberation in the United States. Barrett confronts critical blind spots within both academic and popular discourse, offering readings of cultural and literary texts that transcend institutional divides and the gulf between academia and the street. Whether analyzing autobiographies by Lucy Delaney or Langston Hughes, hip-hop eulogies, or the formation of U.S. nationalist discourse, Barrett interrogates the mechanisms that shape social and subjective structures and that grant certain people power while withholding it from others. Deploying Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theories, Barrett explicates the interrelationship of desire and subjection to expose the violence and coercion embedded in narratives of "progress." Ultimately, this collection emphasizes Lindon Barrett's vital and enduring contribution to African American studies.
Contributors. Elizabeth Alexander, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Daphne A. Brooks, Linh U. Hua, Janet Neary, Marlon B. Ross, Robyn Wiegman
- Cover
- Contents
- Preface: Contrary to Appearances
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Unruly Knowledges
- I. In the Classroom, In the Academy: Situating African American Literature, Theory, and Culture
- Introduction
- 1. Institutions, Classrooms, Failures: African American Literature and Critical Theory in the Same Small Spaces
- 2. The Experiences of Slave Narratives:
Reading against Authenticity
- 3. Redoubling American Studies: John Carlos Rowe
and Cultural Criticism
- II. Gestures of Inscription: African American Slave Narratives
- Introduction
- 4. African-American Slave Narratives: Literacy, the Body, Authority
- 5. Hand-Writing: Legibility and the White Body in
Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom
- 6. Self-Knowledge, Law, and African American Autobiography:
Lucy A. Delaney’s From the Darkness Cometh the Light
- III. Imagining Collectively: Identity, Individuality, and Other Social Phantasms
- Introduction
- 7. Identities and Identity Studies: Reading Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Hammer Man"
- 8. The Gaze of Langston Hughes: Subjectivity,
Homoeroticism, and the Feminine in The Big Sea
- 9. Black Men in the Mix: Badboys, Heroes, Sequins,
and Dennis Rodman
- 10. Dead Men Printed: Tupac Shakur,
Biggie Smalls, and Hip-Hop Eulogy
- IV. Calculations of Race and Reason: Theorizing the Psychic and the Social
- Introduction
- 11. Presence of Mind: Detection and Racialization in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue"
- 12. Family
Values / Critical Values: “The Chaos of Our Strongest Feelings” and African American Women’s
Writing of the 1890s
- 13. Mercantilism, U.S. Federalism, and the Market within Reason:
The “People” and the Conceptual Impossibility of Racial Blackness
- Afterword: Remembering Lindon Barrett
- Contributors
- Index
- A
- B
- C
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
- L
- M
- N
- O
- P
- Q
- R
- S
- T
- U
- V
- W
- Z
- Credits
Text
Audio
Adobe DRM
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