CHASS

Message from Chancellor-designate Timothy P. White

Campus Community:

I regret to announce the death of Lindon Barrett, Professor of English.

Professor Barrett had joined the UCR faculty only a year ago, after many years as a faculty member at UC Irvine. He embraced his new position in the English department with passion, good humor, and a vision for the future of the study of African American literature and culture at UCR.  He was an ideal colleague who quickly established himself as a supportive mentor to junior faculty and a thoughtful presence in department discussions of even the most difficult topics and critical concerns. He was quick to offer to read colleagues' publications or work-in-progress, and his comments were constructive and rigorous as only the most valued colleagues can offer. His quick wit and probing conversation brightened social gatherings. The English Department at UCR saw him as a bright beacon of the future in a department that prides itself on openness and diversity. His loss at the age of 46 is devastating to the department and to the campus as a whole.

Lindon Barrett's published work was distinguished by its thorough research, breadth of literary reference, and incisive interventions in major critical debates regarding race, value, and identity. Professor Barrett's first book, Blackness and Value: Seeing Double, was published in 1999 by Cambridge University Press, one of the most prestigious publishers of literary criticism in the world.  By foregrounding the question of “value,” Professor Barrett offered a critical study of key concepts, including authenticity, voice, vernacular, and otherness, which structure African American literary studies and its relation to the broader canons of English and American literature.

Professor Barrett was just completing his second book, Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity, which extends the focus on twentieth-century black expressive culture in his first book to the historical and philosophical origins of the slave trade in the 18th century. One of the major essays Professor Barrett published from this research carried the resonant title: “Mercantilism, Federalism, and the Market Within Reasoning:  The ‘People' and the Conceptual Impossibility of Racial Blackness,” and traced the evolution of modernity and slavery as conjoined historical and philosophical events.

Professor Barrett's published articles trace the breadth of his influence in African American literary studies, Critical Theory, American literature, and Gay studies.  His articles cover topics from the slave narrative and theories of autobiography, to homoeroticism in Langston Hughes and Dennis Rodman, to the interdependence of the development of mercantilism and slavery.  These essays have appeared in major scholarly journals and edited collections, including Callaloo, American Literature, Cultural Critique, and The Yale Journal of Criticism.

The College of Humanities , Arts, and Social Sciences, along with the English department, will be planning a memorial event in the Fall.

Sincerely,

Timothy P. White
Chancellor-designate