CONDITIONS OF THE PRESENT Selected Essays Lindon Barrett With contributions by Elizabeth Alexander, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Daphne A. Brooks, Edited and with an introduction Linh U. Hua, Marlon B. Ross, by Janet Neary and Robyn Wiegman CONDITIONS OF THE PRES ENT CONDITIONS OF THE PRES ENT 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 Duke University Press Durham and London 2018 © 2018 duke university press. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of Amer i ca on acid- free paper ∞ Text design by Courtney Leigh Baker Cover design by Matthew Tauch Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro and Trade Gothic by Westchester Publishing Ser vices Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Barrett, Lindon, 1961–2008, author. | Neary, Janet, editor, writer of introduction. | Alexander, Elizabeth, [date] writer of supplemen- tary textual content. | Brody, Jennifer DeVere, writer of supplementary textual content. | Brooks, Daphne, writer of supplementary textual content. | Hua, Linh U., writer of supplementary textual content. | Ross, Marlon Bryan, [date] writer of supplementary textual content. | Wiegman, Robyn, writer of supplementary textual content. Title: Conditions of the pres ent : 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. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2018. | Includes biblio- graphical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2017036793 (print) lccn 2017056119 (ebook) isbn 9780822372066 (ebook) isbn 9780822370321 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 9780822370512 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: American lit er a ture— African American authors— History and criticism— Theory, etc. | Lit er a ture and society— United States— History—20th century. | African Americans— Intellectual life—20th century. | African Americans in lit er a ture. Classification: lcc ps153.n5 (ebook) | lcc ps153.n5 b297 2018 (print) | ddc 810.9/896073— dc23 lc rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2017036793 Cover art: Hank Willis Thomas, Hang Time Circa 1923, 2008. Inkjet on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. melisma, n. A melody or melodic sequence of notes. Usually spec. (in singing and vocal composition): the prolongation of one syllable over a number of notes; an instance of this. Contents Preface: Contrary to Appearances ​xi jennifer devere brody Acknowl edgments ​xv Introduction: Unruly Knowledges ​1 janet neary I. IN THE CLASSROOM, IN THE ACAD EMY Situating African American Lit er a ture, Theory, and Culture Introduction 25 linh u. hua 1. Institutions, Classrooms, Failures: African American Lit er a ture 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 87 daphne a. brooks 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 165 marlon b. ross 7. Identities and Identity Studies: Reading Toni Cade Bambara’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 viii Contents IV. CALCULATIONS OF RACE AND REASON Theorizing the Psychic and the Social Introduction 273 robyn wiegman 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 Writing of the 1890s ​299 13. Mercantilism, U.S. Federalism, and the Market within Reason: The P“ eople” and the Conceptual Impossibility of Racial Blackness ​320 Afterword: Remembering Lindon Barrett ​353 elizabeth alexander Contributors 357 Index 3 61 Credits 37 5 Contents ix Preface: Contrary to Appearances jennifer devere brody It is a plea sure to open this volume that collects and collates the singular work of the late Professor Lindon Barrett. The essays provide readers with an op- portunity to engage with Barrett’s prescient and probing ideas about lit er a ture, law, theory, criticism, the West, print culture, the Enlightenment, black femi- nisms, material violations, slavery, sexuality, capitalism, corporatism, and, pre- eminently, the conceptual conundrum of racialized blackness that obtains to them all. This collection gives us a better understanding of Professor Barrett’s thinking that emerged over the more than two de cades that he worked in the profession. Lindon’s brand of anarchical argument arrested all of us who knew him. For example, in the conclusion to his brilliant book, Blackness and Value: Seeing Double, he wrote, “What ever certainty race as an index of value would seem to provide is a false certainty dearly bought. The binary of race and the binary of value (which contrary to appearances are at least tripartite) are such compound falsehoods. ​Indeed, one is left to assume— and the irony is profound— that there may be much less than one imagines ‘of value’ in value.”1 This passage suggests Lindon’s quality of mind: his love of language, his complexity, and his commitment to an ethics of everyday existence. Lindon helped us to under- stand the vio lence that underwrites signs and figures of value. His theorizations of the forms and figures of racialized vio lence mark this volume, which can be seen, doubly, as a troubled remainder. Lindon saw how “value remembers itself by dismembering the Other”— and, in the face of such oppositions, Lindon saw double . ​and listened as he looked. The tripartite structure to which he alludes in the conclusion included sexuality—or rather desire— something he witnessed in the excess of the sounds resonating as material traces emanating, even breaking fr ee, from captive (black) bodies. Such significations make waves across space and time and move me to recall his own body now transfigured as ashes scattered among the waves of the Pacific. Lindon and I had forged a friendship as “girls together,” as Lindon liked to say, in gradu ate school at the University of Pennsylvania. I recall our first meeting in Philadelphia in the fall of 1987 outside a restaurant named Le Bus. Both of us w ere doctoral students in the En glish Department and became part of a community of scholars that included Kim Hall, Elizabeth Alexander, Roland Williams, Nicole King, Laura Tanner, and James Krasner. There, in that time and place, Lindon and I became neighbors, colleagues, collaborators. Then, Lindon was a vegetarian who fasted on Tuesdays in solidarity with folks who w ere underfed around the globe. We lived in a food- insecure area on the edge of the ghetto and used to drive miles to the suburbs in his brown Pinto in search of fresh vegetables. Lindon was a devotee of the short story (James Joyce’s “Araby” in Dubliners and Toni Cade Bambara’s “Hammer Man” from her collection Gorilla, My Love were among his favorites); he wrote a creative master’s thesis about the singer Diana Ross and never tired of talking theory. His interest in multiple forms of textuality— exemplified if not epitomized by his work on “singing and signing” in Blackness and Value— was apparent in the first conference he or ga nized after we had graduated from Penn. Titled “Con- testing Bound aries in African- American Textual Analy sis: Period Revisions, Theory, Popu lar Culture,” the 1993 conference was held just after Lindon took a post as assistant professor at University of California, I rvine. It included nine scholars, all of us then ju nior faculty. The interdisciplinary gathering marks a watershed in my own thinking about African American textual analysis . As Lindon wrote in the proposal for the event, “the conference will pres ent re- search arising from a highly expansive and re- definitional period [in which] the substitution of the word ‘textual’ for ‘literary’ attests to far- reaching changes within the field . ​[such that] poststructuralist theories . ​speak to the condi- tions of African American cultural expressivity and social real ity.” I remember the conference included a per for mance by the troupe Pomo Afro Homo. The current volume honors Lindon’s commitment to variou s modes of textuality and to interdisciplinary scholarship. It remains a privilege to be among his interlocutors—to bear witness to his diverse intellectual obsessions that centered on the problematics of value in the wake of the abolition of African slavery in the New World. His unfettered (a word I use explic itly) desire for thinking difference gifted him with a sense of openness and a rigorous commitment to theory. He wrote against prescribed notions of normativity and indeed lived his life according to expansive forms of fellowship. For us, dancing served as a way to solidify our friendship: by danc- xii Preface ing we performed communitas— and we seemed to be dancing all the time—in Philadelphia, DC, Chicago, LA, and San Bernadino. Even as we found sol- ace on the dance floor, we knew that, contrary to appearances, the Southern California where we felt privileged to live and work as assistant professors was a dangerous place. Once, on a midnight r ide in Lindon’s drop- top Saab, we w ere stopped by the police. As we turned around in the driveway of a cheap motel, the squad car, manned by a single officer, pulled us over.