Bruce Evan Barnhart
Academic Interests
African American literature, Theories of temporality, Jazz, 20th C. American literature, Frankfurt school aesthetics, Critical Race Theory
Teaching
Higher education and employment history
Ph.D. University of California, Irvine. Department of English and Comparative Literature.
B.A. Cornish College of the Arts. Department of Music.
Tags:
English,
American literature,
African American literature,
Literary Theory,
Temporality,
Chronopolitics,
Jazz,
Critical Race Theory,
Modernism,
Harlem Renaissance,
20th Century,
Reggae
Publications
Books:
Jazz in the Time of the Novel: The Temporal Politics of American Race and Culture. University of Alabama Press, 2013.
( Winner: 2012 Elizabeth Agee Prize in American Literature )
Current Manuscript:
Trading on Racial Futures: Financial Speculation, the American Novel, and the Construction of a Usable Future.
Articles:
“Dead Ambitions and Repeated Interruptions: Economies of Race and Temporality in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” – Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man at 100, University of Georgia Press, 2017.
"Carolina Shout: James P. Johnson and the Performance of Temporality” - Summer 2010 (33.3), Callaloo
"Prolepsis and Parabasis: Jazz and the Novel" – Summer 2009 (42.2), Novel.
“Between Immanence and Transcendence: Theorizing the Time of a Transformative Politics” - New Essays on the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Ed. Alfred Drake. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008.
“Chronopolitics, Race, and Sublimation: Ragtime and Symphonic Time in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” – Fall 2006 (40.3), African American Review
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Barnhart, Bruce Evan
(2023).
Rhythm: Or, How King Tubby Teaches Us to Love Non-Being.
In Grøtta, Marit & Barnhart, Bruce Evan (Ed.),
Temporal Experiments: Seven Ways of Configuring Time in Art and Literature.
Routledge.
ISSN 9781032350240.
p. 89–105.
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Barnhart, Bruce
(2020).
LeRoi Jones, Jazz, and the Resonance of Class.
In Peddie, Ian (Eds.),
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class.
Bloomsbury Academic.
ISSN 978-1-5013-4536-4.
p. 335–352.
doi:
10.5040/9781501345395.
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Barnhart, Bruce
(2020).
National Time, Literary Form, and Exclusion: The United States in the 1920s.
In Luccarelli, Mark; Forlenza, Rosario & Colatrella, Steven (Ed.),
Bringing the Nation Back In: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and the Struggle to Define a New Politics.
SUNY Press.
ISSN 9781438477732.
p. 107–126.
Show summary
Argues that concern with the nation and national community will be a key factor in redefining twenty-first-century politics.
Bringing the Nation Back In takes as its starting point a series of developments that shaped politics in the United States and Europe over the past thirty years: the end of the Cold War, the rise of financial and economic globalization, the creation of the European Union, and the development of the postnational. This book contends we are now witnessing a break with the post-1945 world order and with modern politics. Two competing ideas have arisen—global cosmopolitanism and populist nationalism. Contributors argue this polarization of social ethos between cosmopolitanism and nationalism is a sign of a deeper political crisis, which they explore from different perspectives. Rather than taking sides, the aim is to diagnose the origins of the current impasse and to “bring the nation back in” by expanding what we mean by “nation” and national identity and by respecting the localizing processes that have led to national traditions and struggles.
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Barnhart, Bruce
(2017).
"Dead Ambitions and Repeated Interruptions: Economies of Race and Temporality in 'Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man'".
In Morissette, Noelle (Eds.),
New Perspectives on James Weldon Johnson's "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man".
University of Georgia Press.
ISSN 978-0820350974.
doi:
10.2307/j.ctt1g2kmgz.10.
View all works in Cristin
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Grøtta, Marit & Barnhart, Bruce Evan
(2023).
Temporal Experiments: Seven Ways of Configuring Time in Art and Literature.
Routledge.
ISBN 9781032350240.
172 p.
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Barnhart, Bruce
(2013).
Jazz in the Time of the Novel: The Temporal Politics of American Race and Culture.
University of Alabama Press.
ISBN 978-0-8173-1804-8.
246 p.
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Barnhart, Bruce Evan & Grøtta, Marit
(2023).
Introduction: Aesthetic Approaches to Time.
In Grøtta, Marit & Barnhart, Bruce Evan (Ed.),
Temporal Experiments: Seven Ways of Configuring Time in Art and Literature.
Routledge.
ISSN 9781032350240.
p. 1–12.
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Barnhart, Bruce
(2017).
"Temporality and Xenophobia: The Trump Administration, Hannah Arendt, and _The Great Gatsby_" - Keynote Presentation.
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Published
Mar. 11, 2014 1:42 PM
- Last modified
Oct. 29, 2019 2:47 PM
Research Profile:
Bruce Barnhart is Associate Professor of American literature and co-director (with Tina Skouen) of the project Literature, Rights, and Imagined Communities. He is also co-director (with Marit Grøtta) of the Temporal Experiments research group.
His research interests are wide-ranging, including African American literature, 20th century American literature, critical theory, and the connections between music and literature. His research consistently interrogates the role that temporality plays in cultural, intellectual, and aesthetic formations. His work draws on methodologies derived from Critical Race Studies, the Frankfurt school, and postructuralism in order to interrogate and critique the centrality of race as a formative principle in American literature and culture.
Barnhart’s engagement with the question of rights comes primarily from his interest in the connection(s) between property rights and racialized notions of personhood. In his book, Jazz and the Time of the Novel, he investigates the connections between the temporality of different aesthetic forms and the dependence of traditional forms of property rights on the temporality of expectation and exclusion. He continues to pursue his investigation of different literary and musical practices as both critiques of existing forms of temporality, personhood, and rights, and as models of alternative social and intellectual forms.
Barnhart has published work on the Harlem Renaissance, the temporality of the novel, jazz, and the early civil rights figure James Weldon Johnson. He is currently at work on a book entitled Trading on Racial Futures, an examination of the ways in which American novels and economic practices construct different versions of a usable future. The book focuses on the temporality of racial and cultural politics, and on the ways in which the logic of financialization creates proprietary rights in future holdings that stand in the way of more substantive conceptions of civil and economic rights.