Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity2013

"Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity is the unfinished manuscript of Lindon Barrett, who died tragically and unexpectedly in 2008. John Carlos Rowe has assembled the completed chapters, and provides an introduction that offers some background and context for the writings. The project 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. Barrett explores the complex transnational systems of economic transactions and political exchanges foundational to the formation of modern subjectivities. In particular, he traces the embodied and significatory violence involved in the development of modern nations, and characterizes that time of...