Conditions of the Present

Lindon Barrett

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

Preface: Contrary to Appearances / Jennifer DeVere Brody  xi Acknowledgments  xv Introduction: Unruly Knowledges / Janet Neary  1 I. In the Classroom, In the Academy: Situating African American Literature, Theory, and Culture Introduction / Linh U. Hua  25 1. Institutions, Classrooms, Failures: African American Literature and Critical Theory in the Same Small Spaces  31 2. The Experiences of Slave Narratives: Reading against Authenticity  48 3. Redoubling American Studies: John Carlos Rowe and Cultural Criticism  61 II. Gestures of Inscription: African American Slave Narratives Introduction / Daphne A. Brooks  87 4. African-American Slave Narratives: Literacy, the Body, Authority  92 5. Hand-Writing: Legibility and the White Body in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom  119 6. Self-Knowledge, Law, and African American Autobiography: Lucy A. Delaney's From the Darkness Cometh the Light  139 III. Imagining Collectively: Identity, Individuality, and Other Social Phantasms Introduction / Marlon B. Ross  165 7. Identities and Identity Studies: Reading Toni Cade Bambra's "The Hammer Man"  171 8. The Gaze of Langston Hughes: Subjectivity, Homoeroticism, and the Feminine in The Big Sea  193 9. Black Men in the Mix: Badboys, Heroes, Sequins, and Dennis Rodman  212 10. Dead Men Printed: Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, and Hip-Hop Eulogy  237 IV. Calculations of Race and Reason: Theorizing the Psychic and the Social Introduction / Robyn Wiegman  273 11. Presence of Mind: Detection and Racialization in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"  278 12. Family Values/Critical Values: "The Chaos of Our Strongest Feelings" and African American Women's Writings of the 1890s  299 13. Mercantilism, U.S. Federalism, and the Market within Reason: The "People" and the Conceptual Impossibility of Racial Blackness  320 Afterword: Remembering Lindon Barrett / Elizabeth Alexander  353 Contributors  357 Index  361 Credits  375