In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have worked on this book off and on for the better part of a decade, and over the years I have managed to incur quite a few debts. I certainly owe special thanks to the friends and colleagues who have read and commented on drafts of various portions of the project, including Paul Apostolidis, Banu Bargu, Michael Bray, Lewis Hinchman, Shannon Mariotti, Dean Mathiowetz , Melvin Rogers, Greta Snyder, and Antonio Vázquez-Arroyo. I likewise owe special thanks to some dear teachers and mentors who have inspired and nurtured my work at my various institutional homes: Marianne Constable, Frederick Dolan, Robyn Marasco, and Nancy Weston at Berkeley; Joshua Dienstag, Allan Megill, Corey Walker, and Denise Walsh at the University of Virginia; Philip Dynia, Luis Miron, and Roger White at Loyola University New Orleans; and Gregory Hall and Preston King at Morehouse College. Justin Rose has been like a brother to me, and certainly this book owes much to his friendship. And I am incredibly fortunate to have come into contact with two outstanding graduate mentors at the University of Virginia; both Lawrie Balfour and Stephen White have nurtured this project from its inception and have exhibited just a remarkable sense of grace and generosity. Of course none of this—the book, the career, the education—could have been possible without the loving support of my father, Edward, for whom I am forever grateful. Alternative versions of three chapters have appeared elsewhere. An earlier version of chapter 3 was published as “In a Milieu of Scarcity: Sartre and the Limits of Political Imagination,” Contemporary Political Theory 10, 3 (August 2011), 354–371, an earlier version of chapter 4 was published as “Democratic Darkness and Adorno’s Redemptive Criticism,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 36, 7 (September 2010), 819–836, and an alternative version of chapter 5 was published as “C.L.R. James and the Struggle for Humanism ,” Constellations 20, 1 (March 2013), 85–101. I thank the editors of these journals for their contributions and for allowing me to reprint this material. I also thank Andrew Kenyon, Dennis Schmidt, and the editorial team at State University of New York Press, as well as two anonymous reviewers, both of whom read the manuscript with great care and put forth a range of suggestions that have improved the book tremendously. vii Revisions to the original manuscript were rather significant, and in a rather wondrous way, these revisions did not really take off until my daughter was born, or until my time was pressed like never before, indeed until I learned to manage my time, and my work, for the sake of what really matters. For this reason, among many others, I dedicate this book to three women in my life who really matter: my late mother, Kay; my dear wife, Marcie; and my lovely daughter, Juliana. viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...

Share