Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity

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.
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 1997-2000. 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.