The Death-Bound-Subject

"Abdul JanMohamed reworks the concept of 'social death' to read Richard Wright in comprehensive and provocative ways. At the same time, he offers a new account of slavery, rewriting Hegel and psychoanalysis along the way to rethink 'lordship and bondage' as the 'death contract' and to discern the precise and various ways in which autonomy and freedom are asserted. This book is enormously impressive in its sweep, its detailed consideration of Wright's corpus, its theoretical ambitions, and the new and compelling paradigms it offers for rethinking slavery, death, and resistance."--Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor at the University of California, Berkeley