Conditions of the Present

Reviewed by: Conditions of the Present: Selected Essays by Lindon Barrett Jesse McCarthy Lindon Barrett. Conditions of the Present: Selected Essays. Ed. Janet Neary. Durham: Duke UP, 2018. 400 pp. $27.50. When Lindon Barrett was murdered in 2008, it was a personal tragedy for his family and for the many friends and colleagues who were inspired by his work and loved him dearly. It was also an incalculable loss for black studies, a field whose present contours writ large he did as much (collaboratively) to shape as any scholar since Hortense Spillers, who is incidentally the forebear he most resembles in intellectual range, theoretical acumen, and stylistic flair. The sudden loss of brilliant scholars in our field, including Claudia Tate, Richard Iton, and Jeffrey B. Ferguson, among others, is difficult to bear not only because we think of the work they would have undertaken, but also because of the missed conversations that could have taken place between them: Claudia and Lindon on libidinal desire in the African American short story; Richard and Lindon on the political valence of popular culture; Jeff and Lindon on George Schuyler and the role of satire in racial affect (one of Barrett's last essays revisits the Schuyler-Hughes debate over Negro Art). Filling in this void and picking up where they left off is part of the ongoing work underway as our field continues to redefine itself. But we can't do that work without a clear overview of Lindon Barrett's achievement, the structure and motivation of his argumentation, and the trajectories he laid out. [End Page 207] For those seeking an introduction to Lindon Barrett's thought, and indeed for anyone interested in understanding the orientation of the field today, the aptly titled Conditions of the Present: Selected Essays, edited by Janet Neary, will prove an indispensable volume. For graduate students in black studies and related fields it is essential reading. In a career that spanned just under two decades, Barrett published an influential monograph, Blackness and Value: Seeing Double (1999), in which he introduced a distinction between "singing" and "signing" as modes of authority in black writing and performance, arguably the most significant theoretical revision to the vexed relationship between race and literacy since Valerie Smith's Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (1987). At the time of his death, he was at work on a major study entitled Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity (published posthumously in 2014) that chastens Foucault's account of biopower in the formation of modernity by examining the ways in which various discourses—mercantilist, legalistic, narratological, and scientific—repeatedly elide or fail to come to terms conceptually with racial blackness. The laptop that Barrett was using at the time of his death was stolen, and his friends and colleagues Winston James and John Carlos Rowe had to reconstitute the chapters of the manuscript from hard copies that remained in his apartment in Long Beach, California. While unfinished works always present special difficulties, I have no doubt that this sweeping and profound work will quickly acquire the status of a classic. Conditions of the Present gathers all of Lindon Barrett's writings published in journals or as contributions to edited volumes between 1993 and 2006, as well as two unpublished stand-alone essays discovered by James and Rowe in his archives. This was a remarkably fecund period during most of which Barrett was director of the black studies program at the University of California, Irvine, before leaving for the University of California, Riverside in 2007. Neary, one of Barrett's last doctoral students at UC Irvine, has opted for a thematic approach in assembling these materials. Essays are collated together under four guiding rubrics, each given additional contextualization and a prefatory introduction by leading scholars: Linh U. Hua on pedagogy and cultural studies; Daphne A. Brooks on slave narratives; Marlon B. Ross on imagination and identity; and Robyn Wiegman on racialization and social and psychic practice. In a fitting touch, these intellectual engagements are bookended by the personal reflections of Jennifer DeVere Brody and Elizabeth Alexander, who fill in the portrait by reminding us of the indelible mark Barrett left as

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