"[A]t sake originally as the 'modern' is the animation of a conceptual form-the commodity-as the principle of economic (and general) rationality, in the face of the already fully animate individual and collection forms-in human proportions-of racial blackness. The perplexity is, at once, phantasmatic, geo-political, economic, and racial, because the impossibility of racial blackness seeming to lie within the limits of the economic fundament of the modern West as well as the limits of modern social and psychic rudiments belies the signal importance of the emergent circumstances of the concept of racial blackness: the rise of the Atlantic system of trade on which the articulation of the modern depends."
-Lindon Barrett, "Mercantilism, Federalism, and the Market Within Reason", in Accelerating Possession: Global Futures of Property and Personhood, eds. Bill Maurer and Gabriele Schwab (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006, forthcoming)

"Finally, while Do The Right Thing is not overtly about music or musicians, it is Spike Lee's most thoroughly musical film--a film which posits rap music and rap style as commercially embraceable by the mainstream although inherently politically oppositional. For Lee, black musical production reflects black history and black politics--through popular musical and aesthetic styles--which can be produced, marketed, and sold to a mass audience through cinema."
-Vicky Johnson, "Polyphony and Cultural Expression: Interpreting Musical Traditions in Do The Right Thing," Film Quarterly 42.2 (Winter 1993-94): 18-29; and Spike Lee's 'Do The Right Thing,'ed. Mark A. Reid

"I have always thought of theory in its broadest, 'universal' meaning as being both worldly and out of sync with the world. Theory can be legitimately worldly only if it states and elaborates the conditions of its non-acceptance of the world. To put it differently, theory cannot be an acquiescence in the status quo. With one foot in and one foot out, theory has to straddle the punishing and rippling givenness of the world and the utopian-transcendent urge to image otherwise."
-Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, Theory in an Uneven World

"The ethos of slavery admits no legitimate black self-defense, recognizes no legitimate assertions of black self-possession, privacy, or autonomy. A permanent state of theft, seizure, and abduction orders the affairs of the captive community and its progeny. Structural vulnerability to appropriation, perpetual and involuntary openness, including all the wanton uses of the body, should be understood as the paradigmatic conditions of black existence in the Americas, the defining characteristics of New World
anti-blackness."
-Jared Sexton, "Racial Profiling and the Societies of Control" in Terror in the Household of the American Archipelago, ed. Joy James

"Republicanism [the point of view that Americans are not ruthless individualists but an organic whole collectively engaged in the pursuit of the common good]
presents a problem to African Americans since their race precluded them from membership in the community as it was founded." 
Katherine Tate , Black Faces in the Mirror, African Americans and Their Representatives in the U.S. Congress (Princeton Univ. Press, 2003), p. 132.