Conditions of the Present

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.

“Conditions of the Present validates Lindon Barrett’s brilliant career in African American studies. Recommended.” - L. L. Johnson (Choice)

• Preface: Contrary to Appearances / Jennifer DeVere Brody  xiAcknowledgments  xvIntroduction: Unruly Knowledges / Janet Neary  1I. In the Classroom, In the Academy: Situating African American Literature, Theory, and CultureIntroduction / Linh U. Hua  251. Institutions, Classrooms, Failures: African American Literature and Critical Theory in the Same Small Spaces  312. The Experiences of Slave Narratives: Reading against Authenticity  483. Redoubling American Studies: John Carlos Rowe and Cultural Criticism  61II. Gestures of Inscription: African American Slave NarrativesIntroduction / Daphne A. Brooks  874. African-American Slave Narratives: Literacy, the Body, Authority  925. Hand-Writing: Legibility and the White Body in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom  1196. Self-Knowledge, Law, and African American Autobiography: Lucy A. Delaney's From the Darkness Cometh the Light  139III. Imagining Collectively: Identity, Individuality, and Other Social PhantasmsIntroduction / Marlon B. Ross  1657. Identities and Identity Studies: Reading Toni Cade Bambra's "The Hammer Man"  1718. The Gaze of Langston Hughes: Subjectivity, Homoeroticism, and the Feminine in The Big Sea  1939. Black Men in the Mix: Badboys, Heroes, Sequins, and Dennis Rodman  21210. Dead Men Printed: Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, and Hip-Hop Eulogy  237IV. Calculations of Race and Reason: Theorizing the Psychic and the SocialIntroduction / Robyn Wiegman  27311. Presence of Mind: Detection and Racialization in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"  27812. Family Values/Critical Values: "The Chaos of Our Strongest Feelings" and African American Women's Writings of the 1890s  29913. Mercantilism, U.S. Federalism, and the Market within Reason: The "People" and the Conceptual Impossibility of Racial Blackness  320Afterword: Remembering Lindon Barrett / Elizabeth Alexander  353Contributors  357Index  361Credits  375