Description:
The unfinished manuscript of literary and cultural theorist Lindon Barrett, this study offers a genealogy of how the development of racial blackness within the mercantile capitalist system of Euro-American colonial imperialism was constitutive of Western modernity. Masterfully connecting historical systems of racial slavery to post-Enlightenment modernity, this pathbreaking publication shows how Western modernity depended on a particular conception of racism contested by African American writers and intellectuals from the eighteenth century to the Harlem Renaissance.
Review Quotes: "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