Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity

Download or read book Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity written by Lindon Barrett and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2013-12-30 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.