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Crossing Borders: Essays on Literature, Culture, and Society in Honor of Amritjit Singh by ed. Tapan Basu and Tasneem Shahnaaz (review)

in the previously unpublished essays “Family Values/Critical Values: ‘The Chaos of Our Strongest Feelings’ ” and “African American Women’s Writing of the 1890s,” the latter exemplifying his ability to not only resuscitate, but fundamentally reconfigure the terms of a debate (in this case heated arguments surrounding the political and aesthetic valence of sentimentality in Frances Harper, Pauline Hopkins, and their contemporaries). As Daphne Brooks points out in her prefatory remarks, in the area of slave narrative studies alone, Barrett’s interventions represent a watershed, a “before and after,” an advance in methodology that reminds us “of the scholarly and aesthetic moment that Lindon Barrett made possible” (90). Reading the essays in Conditions of the Present, one is struck repeatedly not only by their prescient relevance to the teaching and study of race at the intersection of art, politics, and culture, but the extent to which fundamental disagreements over ontology versus relationality, the essential and the discursive, the adaptability of both coercive and liberating frameworks for regulating desire and designating value, have seeped into the culture at large, looming before us as a generalized terrain of struggle. Barrett didn’t live to see the Obama presidency and its aftermath, yet he mapped out its contours with uncanny accuracy, in “Dead Men Printed: Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, and HipHop Eulogy,” a damning social autopsy of the fungible circulation of images and narratives of black death in the public sphere. The appearance of this volume in tandem with Fred Moten’s trilogy consent not to be a single being is also sure to galvanize debates over Afro-pessimism, the rise of reactionary political formations, and black ecocriticism, among other simmering issues. These timely conjectures confirm what Barrett, with typical subtlety, reminds us not to lose sight of: “that race—and here is the unacknowledged crux—always has been and continues to be foremost an intellectual matter” (35).