Radio Tribute (Monday, July 21 2008)

John Carlos Rowe
Chair, American Studies and Ethnicity
USC Associates' Professor of the Humanities
Professor Emeritus, University of California, Irvine

Lindon Barrett was one of my closest friends and one of the intellectuals for whom I have the greatest respect. We knew each other for twenty years and worked together to diversify the educational curricula at the University of California, Irvine, as well as in the broader profession. We did much of this work as faculty in English and then in African American Studies, the academic program Lindon founded with Thelma Foote in 1994, and which has since become one of the most innovative and intellectually exciting African American Studies programs in the U.S.

Lindon taught me a great deal about intellectual matters and even more about life. I learned from him that African Americans have represented themselves in ways that include but also exceed considerably the printed books so respected in contemporary academic circles. Music, dance, oral folklore, parades, cooking, clubbing, talking, loving, singing are as important, sometimes more important, than what is tidily arranged in the Library. Learning that has brought me new wisdom and great joy, as did Lindon Barrett.
***
Donna Iliescu
Manager of African American Studies
UC Irvine

I, Donna Iliescu, Manager of African American Studies, and more importantly friend of Lindon, would like everyone to know that for me, Lindon was beyond special, beyond brilliant, beyond dedicated. He was the most unique and inspirational person I have ever known, and my life has been enriched by knowing him and having him become a part of my family. He helped me get through Thelma Foote's passing last year, and ironically I will try to embrace and live the advice he gave me then to get through this horrific tragedy. A vast void is now present in African American Studies, and in my and my family's life, but I'll try hard to keep Lindon's zest for life alive so that hopefully I might begin to know some of the joy that Llindon lived in his short life. My sadness cannot be measured. Lindon, I love you, and I miss you. Thank you for being you.
***
R. Radhakrishnan
Professor of Asian American Studies and English
UC Irvine

It cannot be that Lindon Barrett is no more. It is as absurd as saying Life is no more. How can Lindon not be? How does one sum up the intense and inexhaustible humanity of Lindon? Here is a feeble attempt: a daring and original thinker, brilliant and complex theorist who had found a way to align abstract thought with the visceral profundity of affect, passionte teacher wo inspired and enabled innumerable students, total activist on behalf of life and its every pulsating moment, indefatigable champion of jusitce, love, compassion and the heterology of the every day, fearless leader and visionary unafraid to take on challenges wherever they sprang from, and a dear and priceless friend and colleague with whom i have thought, felt, laughed, cried, sang, and danced these last 4 years. Thank you Lindon for all that you have been and all that you have done. I and we will miss you forever more. With libations and all, here is to you Lindon! You hear what I am saying.
***
Bridget R. Cooks, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Art History
University of California, Irvine

In 2006, I joined the faculty at UCI in the Program of African American Studies and Art History. Lindon was very supportive of my work and welcomed my contribution to the Program. He met me often with kind words. He took the time to give me spirited and encouraging feedback on my work. He was inspiring!! He was a scholar whose philosophies about discourses of race, economics, and justice were head and shoulders above most anyone who claimed to contribute to the field. The faculty in African American Studies was a compelling reason for me to leave my previous professorship and join this prestigious crew. It will be difficult for all of us to really realize this disturbing and unfathomable moment of Lindon being taken away. In addition to the profound personal loss that will continue to impact so many of us who knew him, losing Lindon is a loss to the entire field of critical race theory, modernism, and ontology. We can all continue to remember him and make his work manifest by digging into the words that he left for the world through his fearless writings.

Lindon was an exceptional person. He worked hard and played hard. He liked to dance and he liked the oldies.
***
Emory Elliott
University Professor
University of California, Riverside

I have known Lindon and enjoyed his friendship for eighteen years. I had the chance to read much of his superb scholarship when I was asked to write a report for his promotion and tenure in 1996. I was most impressed with the striking originality of his thinking and his analytical powers. He soon became recognized in the United States and abroad as a leader in his fields of American Studies, African American literature and culture, and literary theory. After many years at UC Irvine, UCR was able to persuade him to move to our English Department where he was warmly welcomed as a bright star on the campus. As a teacher and colleague, he was greatly admired and liked. His passing is an enormous loss to our department and the campus. I will miss not only his powerful, brilliant work but will also miss his warmth, wit, and cheerful presence among us.
***
Susan Zieger
Associate Professor of English
University of California, Riverside

In the short time that I was Lindon’s colleague, I saw enough of his generous spirit and capacious intellect to sense how great a loss his passing really is. There is a hole in my future where a vibrant interlocutor and friend might have been.
***
John W. Roberts (Lindon’s PhD advisor)
Dean, Colleges of the Arts and Humanities
The Ohio State University

Although I write this from a distance, I want all who hear these words to know that I am with you in spirit and mind. For as we celebrate Lindon’s life on this occasion, I share with all of you grief in his passing as well as joy in having known an individual who brought so much hope and promise into the lives of those who had the pleasure of knowing him. While I think he would have been pleased by the sentiment represented by this occasion, he would have been at the same time charmingly dismissive of the sentimentality that it represents. For one of his charms was his penchant for looking at life as a realist and living it as a wide-eyed optimist. It was his optimism, his belief in the inevitability of bringing unflinching clarity to the murky business of intellectual endeavors and the messy tangles of friendships that made his flight through our lives feel like a cool breeze off the Caribbean Sea.
I will always remember Lindon as a young man who had the courage to look beneath the surface of things, the curiosity to probe them deeply, and the intellect to examine them critically. He was never content with simply knowing; he wanted to understand, not beyond reason, but rather in a reasonable way. From my first meeting with him early in his career as a graduate student to the completion of his dissertation at Penn, he never ceased to amaze me with his willingness to expand his grasp of the intellectual terrain that he wanted to cover. Though a Canadian by residence, he demonstrated constantly the tough minded, hard working West Indian temperament and ethic that he inherited from his devoted parents and of which he remained very proud. Perhaps this is why he worked so hard to bring new understandings, to develop new approaches and to instill respect for what it has meant and continues to mean to be of African heritage in what we call the New World. His devotion to this work was not merely an academic exercise; it was an act of love for family and community of nurture—a giving back for all he had been given.
However, what I will remember most about Lindon was his infectious smile and seemingly good humor in approaching not only his work as a scholar but also his life as a human being. He had an incredible capacity to devote equal care to the large intellectual questions that he chose to address in his scholarly work and the everyday concerns that animated the world around him. His commitment to exploring it all often seemed to overwhelm him and sometimes manifested itself in a seemingly non-stop conversational style. During his days as a student, I recall meetings with him that often seemed like they started in the hallway or, at least, before he actually entered my office. It was not that he did not offer warm greetings always, but rather that his need to make the most of every second that we had together caused introductions and substantive conversation to blend in a seamless way. In our bountiful conversations, his enthusiasm for whatever the topic often threatened to overwhelm, while his clarity of mind and presentation always delighted.
Although distance reduced our lively interactions during the last few years, I will always remember Lindon as a young man who came into my life full of hope and promise and brought joy and delight. While I cannot know that which cannot be known, I want to believe with all my heart that, in his all too short time with us, he realized the dreams that he came into this world to make real-- that he made the difference in our lives that mattered to him. As we say good-by to him, I want him and all of you to know that, in his passing, he took with him my affection and my unfailing admiration. And for the gift of friendship that we shared, I am grateful. I will hide it away in my heart as a small treasure to be cherished, and as a precious memory that I will recall when I need to smile.
***
James Lee (has known Lindon from when he was an undergraduate at Penn)
Associate Professor of Asian American Studies and English
UC Santa Barbara

“I was a 2nd year undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania when I met Lindon. On the top floor of Bennett Hall, there was a room of "writing tutors," with a list of graduate students and their respective areas of expertise. Next to Lindon's name was "critical theory." So one day, I walked in, plopped myself down in front of him, and asked him, "So what is deconstruction?" Lindon took a breath, smiled, and proceeded to jot down some books for me to read. I can't remember the entire list now, though for some reason Foucault's language, counter-memory, practice comes to mind. I checked out a couple of these books and proceeded to understand not a word. I went back, and asked Lindon, "What the hell is this?"

Later that year, we'd joke about that initial encounter. Lindon had just secured the job at UC Irvine: he printed out the final version of his dissertation, which again I proceeded not to understand at all, while I was finishing up a class on, wait for it, deconstruction.

Five years later, we met again in a graduate seminar at UCLA. Lindon was still Lindon, with slightly longer hair than what I'd remembered. I wrote a paper for him, an early version of what would become a central chapter in my book. I can't remember the exact wording of his comments when he handed back the seminar paper, but I do remember the feeling: here was a teacher who read my work, took it seriously, and unequivocally voiced his delight. This time, I understood a bit better what he was saying, and what he was writing, but what remained the same always was Lindon's willing to push, to push with the promise that as I struggled into the unknown he'd be there with me.”
***
Daphne A. Brooks
Associate Professor of English and African American Studies
Princeton University

As a scholar, his worked modeled for me the meaning of freedom, the resolute, gorgeous and urgent beauty of black song, the genius of black flight that we can trace back to captivity. As a mentor, he showed me the courage of laying it on the line for institutional change, shepherding the next generation of black studies scholars, and caring for students. As a person, he radiated warmth and joy and showed me the importance of passing warmth and joy on to others personally as well as professionally. He leaves behind a hole in our hearts.
***
Jason King
Artistic Director and Associate Professor
The Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music, NYU

I am deeply saddened by the senseless loss of my colleague Lindon Barrett. Long before I knew Lindon personally, I was a graduate student at NYU. After taking classes with Fred Moten and May Joseph and hearing them praise Lindon's writing, I was intrigued. So I borrowed his book Blackness and Value from the library. That was the last time, for a long time, that the NYU library saw Blackness and Value on its shelves. Riveted by its content, I kept Lindon's book hidden away in my apartment long past its return date, surely to the chagrin of other NYU students who might have wanted to borrow it. Lindon's rich, complex work on the intersections of so many subjects - race, gender and sexuality, commerce, aesthetics, modernity - had a huge impact on my academic development and my own understanding of who I was and am as a human being. Simply put, Lindon was deep. He understood the human condition and could articulate it. I cited Lindon's work in writing my own dissertation. And I was secretly envious of my NYU professors who claimed to know him or have worked with him.

Well, I did get to know Lindon years later when I worked with Carolyn Dinshaw to fly him out to NYU to attend a two-day conference we produced on late disco artist Sylvester. He gave a touching and powerful paper called "Sylvester: A Place Out of Place". The next year, when I happened to be giving a lecture in sunny California, Lindon went out of his way to invite me to come speak at UC Irvine. He battled bureaucratic structure to generously find money to host my talk. The money wasn't the issue; I would have done it for absolutely nothing. I was just glad to be on his radar, to be in his community, honored in fact to have become someone he considered his colleague. Funny, I have kept his emails from years ago in my inbox, and I'm sure I won't delete them.

One thing I learned about Lindon only much later was that he too was also a fellow Western Canadian (he was from Winnipeg, I was from Edmonton). Somehow, some way, he made his way, like I did, to the United States to pursue higher knowledge. I guess we were just busy academics, forever conferencing and advising students and thinking about the larger picture: we never did get to break bread and compare our respective journeys. He will forever be missed.
***
Amy Kim
UCI, Class of 2004

“I met Lindon during my junior year at UCI in 2002 in my literary criticism/theory course and was immediately struck by his brilliance, passion, and candor in class. I took 3 or 4 of his courses and asked him to be my thesis advisor and mentor during my senior year. I met with Lindon weekly to discuss different texts from the Harlem Renaissance and count it as a great privilege and honor to have studied under him. I remember always calling him “doctor” or “Professor Barrett,” to which he would always respond, “Please, call me Lindon.” He was so far from pretentious and intimidating, and was always kind, generous, and gracious towards me. He encouraged my scholarship and taught me so much. News of his death was horrifying and came as a shock to me and has brought much sadness. I know Lindon touched and inspired so many, and I think tributes like this where we can remember and share stories about him can help bring a little bit of solace in light of the terrible circumstances.”
***
Tessa Winkelmann
UCI, Class of 2004

“Professor Barrett's classes were a singular experience for me. They were the kind of classes that you would actually try to get there on time for so that you could grab a good seat, so as not to miss any of the brilliant, poignant, and hilarious things that Professor Barrett would say. Lindon's classes and lectures heavily inspired my own pursuit of academia for social change, but aside from being a devastatingly brilliant scholar, Lindon was also a mentor and friend.
During a particularly sad point in my undergraduate career, while commiserating with Lindon, he told me something that i never forgot...he said that the love a person has for another is never wasted and doesnt simply disappears should a relationship end. Rather, he said that the love a person gives is a testament to what they are capable of generating, and a testament to the love they have inside of them. I find myself repeating this consolation throughout the years to many of my friends, and now i think it is fitting to pass this consolation on to all of the people Lindon has touched. In true reflection of his life's work, it is with this spirit that I will remember him.”
***
Etienne Balibar
Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Paris-X
Distinguished Professor of Humanities, UC Irvine

From very far away, I want to add my thoughts to your mourning. My encounters with Lindon were scarce and too short, although we had a good exchange in Riverside last winter after a talk I gave there. We had planned to continue on more regular bases. I was impressed by his originality, his bold use of words and concepts, and realized how important his contribution to the education of students and the conversation of scholars at UC had become.