Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity

Lindon Barrett (1961–2008) was a professor of English and African American studies at the University of California, Riverside, and the University of California, Irvine. He was the author of Blackness and Value: Seeing Double and the associate editor of the journal Callaloo from 1997 to 2000. Justin A. Joyce is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University. Dwight McBride is dean of the Graduate School and Associate Provost as well as the Daniel Hale Williams Professor of African American studies and English at Northwestern University. John Carlos Rowe is USC Associates' Professor of the Humanities and professor of English and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

• CoverTitleContentsIntroduction by John Carlos Rowe1. The Conceptual Impossibility of Racial Blackness: History, the Commodity, and Diasporic Modernity2. Making the Flesh Word: Binomial Being and Representational Presence3. Captivity, Desire, Trade: The Forging of National Form4. The Intimate Civic: The Disturbance of the Quotidian5. Modernism and the Affects of Racial BlacknessEpilogue by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBrideNotesBibliographyIndex

"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