Conditions of the present : selected essays / Lindon Barrett ; edited and with an introduction by Janet Neary ; with contributions by Elizabeth Alexander, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Daphne A. Brooks, Linh U. Hua, Marlon B. Ross, and Robyn Wiegman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Barrett, Lindon, 1961-2008, author.

Contributor:

Neary, Janet, editor, writer of introduction.

Alexander, Elizabeth, 1962- writer of afterword.

Brody, Jennifer DeVere, writer of preface.

Brooks, Daphne, writer of supplementary textual content.

Hua, Linh U., writer of supplementary textual content.

Ross, Marlon Bryan, 1956- writer of supplementary textual content.

Wiegman, Robyn, writer of supplementary textual content.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--African American authors--History and criticism--Theory, etc.

American literature.

American literature--African American authors.

Literature and society--United States--History--20th century.

Literature and society.

United States.

History.

African Americans--Intellectual life--20th century.

African Americans.

African Americans--Intellectual life.

African Americans in literature.

Physical Description:

xvii, 376 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2018.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Preface: Contrary to appearances / Jennifer DeVere Brody

Introduction: Unruly knowledges / Janet Neary

In the classroom, in the academy: situating African American literature, theory, and culture

Institutions, classrooms, failures: African American literature and critical theory in the same small spaces

The experiences of slave narratives: reading against authenticity

Redoubling American studies: John Carlos Rowe and cultural criticism

Gestures of inscription: African American slave narratives

African-American slave narratives: literacy, the body, authority

Hand-writing: legibility and the white body in Running a thousand miles for freedom

Self-knowledge, law, and African American autobiography: Lucy A. Delaney's From the darkness cometh the light

Imagining collectively: identity, individuality, and other social phantasms

Identities and identity studies: reading Toni Cade Bambara's "The hammer man"

The gaze of Langston Hughes: subjectivity, homoeroticism, and the feminine in The big sea

Black men in the mix: badboys, heroes, sequins, and Dennis Rodman

Dead men printed: Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, and hip-hop eulogy

Calculations of race and reason: theorizing the psychic and the social

Presence of mind: detection and racialization in "The murders in the rue morgue"

Family values/critical values: "The chaos of our strongest feelings" and African American women's writing of the 1890s

Mercantilism, U.S. federalism, and the market within reason: the "people" and the conceptual impossibility of racial blackness

Afterword: Remembering Lindon Barrett / Elizabeth Alexander.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Barrett, Lindon, 1961-2008. Conditions of the present.

ISBN:

9780822370321

0822370328

9780822370512

0822370514

OCLC:

987796500