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.