From "Movements," Conference in Honor of Lindon Barrett, U.C. Irvine, May 2007

Welcome everyone and thanks so much for attending our celebration of Lindon Barrett’s achievements during his time at UC Irvine and, more significantly, what he has given us as his students, colleagues, and friends. When brainstorming for a title, we threw out the idea of “Movement,” not only to mark the occasion for this event – Lindon’s move from UCI to UC Riverside – but also because it evoked Lindon’s work on the body. To expand on this initial idea, we added an “s” and came up with “Movements,” discovering even more connotations. We thought of the idea of a movement in a musical sense, as a fully developed, self-contained part of a larger composition. In this sense, we are here to commemorate the conclusion of but one movement in Lindon’s scholarly career, a passage that will connect to and develop into new forms and elaborations. But perhaps the meaning of movement that is most apropos of this event is the notion of a collective effort than brings people together in common interests, visions, and hopes. Living up to its title, “Movements” combines the energies of students, faculty, staff, colleagues, and friends.

While we conceived of this event to engage Lindon’s scholarly contributions, our presentations could not help but be inflected by a more personal and immediate tone. Indeed, such a sentiment is fitting, considering that it is Lindon’s sense of caring and attention that makes his intellectual rigor all the more compelling, beyond his many achievements and accomplishments. Speaking as one of Lindon’s advisees, he has taken on my project on as his own, meeting with me for hours at a time and offering enough comments that they could lead to a second book project on their own. As his teaching assistant, I have witnessed how he is able to challenge and prompt undergraduates to begin thinking critically about race. For me, I can trace back my intellectual development to the very beginning of my graduate school career in Lindon’s seminar on the African American novel. During the first class session, Lindon offered his concise definition of race as a protocol regulating social contact and sex, which I rushed to copy down, but failed to completely transcribe: As he defines it, “Race might be thought of as a series of prohibitions on social desire and sexual practice, prohibitions intent on stabilizing and ensuring the transmission of identifying phenotypical (or cultural) traits from generation to generation.” As a new graduate student, it was a notion that took me time and effort to work through – in part because I was never sure that I copied it down correctly – and it generated more and more leading questions about race as a denaturalized social formation. In fact, trying to apply this idea to the novels we read in the class led to a disastrous final exam, forcing me to beg Lindon for an incomplete!

But I still carry these initial experiences with me, because they helped me to understand that working on race leads to very few pat or easy resolutions. Lindon’s definition avoids the oversimplified logic that presumes race is not real if it is not essentialist or biologically determined, and only underscores the reality and force of racial categories in their social dimensions. Concise though it may be, this definition captures just how intricately complex the relationships between race, gender, sex, and genealogy are, as mutually constitutive terms and not simply interchangeable and serial elements of identity. While Lindon has always stressed the importance of context and specificity, his ideas also have a heuristic quality about them that makes them provocative and productively speculative. On a more conceptual level, Lindon and his ideas have taught me not to seek out easy conclusions and forced readings, but rather to pursue the possibilities that occur in tackling complexity and contradiction

Arnold Pan
Ph.D., UC Irvine
***
Lindon Barrett writes in many ways about how pleasure and desire are conscripted in the service of power and normativity. He writes of desire and the violent irrationality of its suppression. Whether about literature, rap, or basketball stars, his work documents systematically the ways in which dominant structures of race, sexuality and class are leveraged in order to withhold pleasure from certain bodies. In his “The Gaze of Langston Hughes: Subjectivity, Homoeroticism, and the Feminine in The Big Sea” for example, Lindon argues forcefully and succinctly that “Open-ended desire in any form is always a prime target of subjection. Within the most ideal terms of the recuperation of desire, libidinal energies, as well as energies of labor and consumption, would be ruled strictly by a managerial ethos, so that each would mimic the other in its sparing rationalizations. Both would consort with pleasure, distraction, and self-fashioning only to secure them for extremely circumscribed ends.” In this sense, Lindon’s theorization of pleasure maps out the ways in which forces of racialization and capital, often in the service of regulatory modes of sexuality, constantly threaten to erode the possibilities of human sociality. Yet, on some level, his work is, most profoundly, about recognizing and rescuing a space for precisely those most vulnerable of pleasures amidst the most powerful social and cultural threats to them.

Along similar lines to his argument about pleasure, Lindon also asks us to reconsider the ways in which value is imagined in popular discourse. In Blackness and Value he writes “Despite the frequency and confidence with which the term ‘value’ is used in the sound-byte rhetoric of contemporary U.S. politics, the problematics of value remain increasingly intricate and arresting in a century heir to the consequences of the abolition of chattel slavery. The release of African Americans from the muteness and illegality of chattel slavery—however partial, intermittent and hard-won—marks the (re)emergent visibility of an excessive and residual otherness long essential to the normative enterprises and the dominant orders of the U.S. landscape.” Against the notion of value as that which can be violently extracted in the service of dominant normativity, whether racial, sexual, or economic, Lindon asks us to think about other possibilities of constructing value. For, as he argues, value, as it is currently imagined, must always be articulated against an other, as a violent suppression of value in its earnest sense. As much as his work is about making space for pleasure, it is about re-valuing in earnest the suffering, the pain, the laughter, the dance, the joy, of blackness.

Many of us write about and study the operations of power and oppression. But from Lindon I have learned more than anything else, that to think about these things respectfully, one must also think deeply and generously about the politics of pleasure, and what it means to have pleasure and have it withheld. But Lindon does more than write and think about a politics of pleasure. As his student I have been nurtured, both intellectually and personally, by Lindon’s most sincere commitment to fostering a genuine atmosphere of pleasure and respect. I have learned so much from Lindon. He has taught me how to think critically, how to speak my mind, and most importantly, how to take pleasure in it all. I would like to express my most deep and profound gratitude to him here. My sincere hope is that he takes with him as he leaves some of the pleasure he has given to all of us here.

Leila Neti, Occidental College
***

One of the things that Lindon and I have often talked about is how to make the semantic and syntactic truths of music articulate themselves in critical discourse, how to make the political, ontological, and temporal insights articulated in the African American music tradition speak to and speak against established discourses. – So, when I started to think about how I might be able to gesture towards the immense and almost inexpressible value of Lindon Barret's work and intellectual presence I thought not primarily of the way his work is sometimes work about music and other extra-linguistic practices, but of the way his work manages to productively straddle the divide between the linguistic and the extra-linguistic and to absorb into itself the power and insight of the music.

Amiri Baraka wrote the following of a late John Coltrane album:
"This music contains a lot of strange and wonderful things. If you listen carefully, you might actually become one of them."
The same is true of Lindon's writing and speaking: if you listen closely you can hear things in it that transform your vision of the world and your sense of possibility.

II.

I'd like to highlight two moments from Lindon's discourse that I always try and keep in my intellectual ear, and that I think are essential for any productive form of cultural criticism.
The first is from Blackness and Value:
"No matter how open or mediated, a disqualification or pathological bracketing of dark-skinned Others remains an invariable premise of both popular and learned traditions of Euro-American thought."

What Lindon gives us here is an imperative to rigorously think through the presuppositions of our critical tools, and to examine the ways in which contentless, and seemingly neutral, intellectual protocols are often complicit with exclusionary or racist practices. He highlights the way questions of literary form are always inseparable from the often violent forces that constitute the realm of the sayable in the academy and in the social world we inhabit.
This is a crucial thing to hear, but when you hear it, it makes your work harder. It becomes more relevant, but harder. Harder, because you are forced to account for the vectors that attempt to push your work down the path of least resistance, and, therefore into alignment with the rituals confirming the legitimacy of the illegitimate social forms that surround us. So, I curse Lindon for making my work harder, but I thank him for making it sharper and more relevant.

The second moment is also from Blackness and Value:
"To interpose no alternative value in the theoretically neutral moment of calling value into question remains equivalent to strengthening and reincarnating reified, dominant value."
Here Lindon gives us an imperative to not only demystify or to push existing discourse of values to their collapsing point, but to make them yield their place of privilege to other discourses of value, discourses that don't speak themselves in a language easily translatable into the academy. These discourses come from what Lindon refers to in Blackness and Value as "the street", the outside of academic values. In this realm we find extra-linguistic practices like dance and music, practices that don't confine intellectuality to one particular part of the body. Lindon's assumption that all practices have their own logic and their own rationality, that the worlds of the somatic and the nonverbal are not without their own form of eloquence and intellectuality

III.

I had an epiphany on this campus (this very Irvine campus that will so soon sadly be without Lindon) in which I could see the other realms of value and other suppressed possibilities that Lindon is always pushing us to see. I was walking across campus and was suddenly struck by the rich variety of movements and rhythms surrounding me. I had been thinking and writing about the possibility of non-coercive form of rhythmic or temporal coordination, and I could suddenly see it.

I could see the suppressed possibilities animating everyday movements – a proto-utopian rhythmic community whose mark of existence was the value invested in the way that each articulation of buttocks, hips and belts spoke or suggested a somatic ratio. A ratio, that like all ratios, is both a rhythm and an incipient rationality.

So, in the richly dissonant ratios of hips to asses and buttocks to legs, there was present the possibility of an other form of social coordination. Possible, but not realized. These students, who could not possibly walk the way they do without being somatically informed by a long tradition of African American music and danced response to this music, were in thrall to the structures of discourse validated by society and the academy, and thus were blind or indifferent to the value of Otherness, or the ass, or of racial and sexual difference. Without Lindon's vision they could not see or feel the value of the bodily ratios present in their own everyday existence. With Lindon's vision, these everyday possibilities become visible, and one can see the way social vectors can penetrate the body, investing it with formulations not articulable in other forms of discourse.

This is the kind of sharp epistemology of the social contained in Lindon's work, an ability to see and think otherwise and to meditate upon the disputatious worlds of value contained in inappropriate words like "ass" and in the undervalued movements of what this word names.

IV.

The novelist Leon Forrest has a way of describing Billie Holiday's singing that helps me sum up the value of Lindon's thought. Forrest writes that Bilie Holiday made "dissonance blossom".
This making dissonance blossom is not a resolving of dissonance, nor a moving through it. It is not the modernist idea of dissonance as a spur to discovery, but something more like a dwelling in dissonance, an attempt to intellectually inhabit dissonance itself and to think the inherently disputatious nature of social existence.

Lindon's work makes dissonance blossom. It never takes its attention off of the violent discrepancies that motivate our thought and practices, but it also never lets this attentiveness blind us to the alternative systems of value that his work constantly draws to our attention, other forms of thought and practice that his work constantly proposes.

Bruce Barnhart, Wake Forest University

***

"when lindon barrett and i met our first day of graduate school, his
eyes were literally shining with excitement, possibility, and what i
can only call brilliance. he brought that focus, fervor, and heart to
all he did, in friendship and in work. the path he has blazed in
african-american studies has been singular. his investigations of value
brought together bodies of writing and thought that had not previously
been in conversation with each other, and no one has matched his
philisophical exploration in that area.

when lindon convened a group of young black scholars, all
neo-african-americanists of one stripe or another, to irvine for a
conference in the early nineties, little did we know that he would be
providing an occasion for most of us to present work that would be
among the most important we would undertake. that is because lindon
understood that in the company of respectful friends, the mind could be
free. he knew that together our space was not contested, that we were
not under seige. and so we would think, talk, write, and explore, and
challenge each other, and, as always, dance with abandon: the only
logical thing to do along with all that thinking.

i wish i could be there to celebrate this beautiful career. i am proud
to have been a partner to lindon when so much was beginning for us. i
look forward to his blooming in the next space. i send love."

elizabeth alexander
yale university
***
Because superlatives are tossed off so casually these days, it is wise to be stingy with them lest they grow empty and meaningless from overuse. And yet for certain people, only superlatives will do. Lindon Barrett is such a person. I met Lindon about fifteen years ago--can it be that long ago?--and in the course of one short evening in the lobby of some MLA hotel, I concluded that he would become one of the most brilliant, and engaging minds of his generation. I was not wrong. In a steady stream of work on subjects from the slave narratives to Langston Hughes; from Ann Petry to Billie Holiday; from Dennis Rodman to hip-hop, Lindon has sparked new conversations, transformed old ones (or simply established their irrelevance), always with grace and rigor.
Throughout his prodigious career, he has extended the reach of his work beyond the pages of books and articles, leaving his marks on the day-to-day unglamorous, but necessary work of defining curricula, nurturing students, and fighting for institutional change. That he has carried out much of this work during periods of retrenchment--both real and manufactured--is all the more exemplary.
Lindon, my dear, I can think of no one more thoroughly deserving than you of the tribute being paid to you today. I send you my love and my deepest respect for the example of your scholarship, for the example of your very being.
CONGRATULATIONS.
Debbie McDowell, University of Virginia
***
It's hard to imagine what race theory and African American literary study
would be like without Lindon's contributions. I find myself returning to
"Blackness and Value" at every corner and recommending it to students in so
many different intellectual contexts. Occasionally, we come across books
that so clarify and complicate our thinking that they elicit a sort of
book-envy, where we say to ourselves, "I wish I'd written that." I often
find myself saying this about Lindon's work. Whether he's theorizing hip hop
eulogy through Deleuze and Guattari, unpacking the moral imaginary of Dennis
Rodman's self-marketing, or rethinking American landlordship through an
eye-opening analysis of Petry's "The Street," Lindon has the talent for
keeping one finger on the pulse of popular culture and the other on the pulse
of high theory. Congratulations to him on his new position. I know his
colleagues at Irvine will miss him, but because he's not moving too far,
perhaps they can -- as I have done from across the continent -- still claim
him as a colleague.

Best wishes, Marlon Ross, University of Virginia
***
I wish that I could be here in person to join everyone in thanking Lindon for how
much he has contributed to the intellectual community at Irvine and for the support that
he gave me as a student in English and has given, since. Lindon was the only person on
my dissertation committee who was not my director, yet he was consistently willing to sit
down with me, talk on the telephone, and engage with my project. I always seemed to
come away from our discussions having reconceived of the very terms of my project.
Working with him taught me about how to keep coming back to a project with a renewed
critical perspective. And it gave me a sense of myself as a professional whose thoughts
and writing – somehow – mattered.

In a moment of the corporatization of the university, I admire Lindon for how he practices
our profession by holding onto his own humanity. He did this often precisely by
conducting himself as an intellectual, resisting becoming a cog in the heavy wheels of an
institution that, as many of us know, sometimes prefers cogs to people.

At the same time, I would be remiss if I were not to mention Lindon’s amazing gift of
infusing intellectual endeavors with a particular mixture of fun and humor, graveness,
and rigor. The level of responsiveness to the texture of literature, to material conditions,
to theory and its stakes, and to contemporary urgencies all showed me that professorship
needn’t look like this to be real.

Graduate courses with lindon changed my life: in my quest to understand American
literature and culture, I became disoriented, relinquishing loyalties I never recognized I’d
had to understand, explain, and teach about the work that literature does.

I wish I could be here in person to acknowledge the space that Lindon Barrett has held
open at Irvine for engagement with critical cultural studies and literature, and for
conversations about race, in its intersections with sexuality, gender and the economic, as
constitutive of modernity. Tribute, of course, comes from tribulum, for contribution –
wealth one party gives to another as a sign of respect. I can only say how incredibly
indebted I am to lindon for the wealth of knowledge, as well as time and energy, that he
has devoted to me and others at this University.

Naomi Greyser, University of Iowa
***