Conditions of the Present: Selected Essays - Softcover

Barrett, Lindon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822370514 ISBN 13: 9780822370512

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2018

Synopsis

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

About this title

About the Author:

Lindon Barrett (1961–2008) was Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of California, Riverside, and the author of Blackness and Value: Seeing Double and Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity.

Janet Neary is Associate Professor of English at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Fugitive Testimony: On the Visual Logic of Slave Narratives.

Review:

“It is difficult to imagine a more urgent intellectual return, or a more vital work of mourning, than Conditions of the Present. Reading Lindon Barrett is unsettling, because he was a scholar who never settled. This lovingly curated collection is an impossible thank you for his critical wisdom, as well as a demanding provocation to wise up. We are still—or ought still to be—catching up with Lindon Barrett, for his work conditions our ongoing present.” (David Kazanjian, author of The Brink of Freedom: Improvising Life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World)

"This impressive collection of essays by Lindon Barrett, one of the most brilliant theoreticians of his generation, carves a pathway between two discrete fields of discourse and brings them into mutual attraction. African American literary and cultural studies and poststructuralist persuasions in general are customarily thought of as not only disparate intellectual technologies, but widely divergent human and historical orders. Conditions of the Present is having none of it: in Barrett's readings, these textual neighbors powerfully meld to our collective benefit." (Hortense J. Spillers, author of Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture)

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0822370514
• ISBN 13: 9780822370512
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400
• Editor: Neary Janet