Conditions of the Present: Selected Essays

Product Description



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



Review



“
Conditions of the Present validates Lindon Barrett’s brilliant career in African American studies. Recommended.”
-- L. L. Johnson ―
Choice Published On: 2018-09-01


Review



"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 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.