Overview

In Black Madness :: Mad Blackness Theri Alyce Pickens rethinks the relationship between Blackness and disability, unsettling the common theorization that they are mutually constitutive. Pickens shows how Black speculative and science fiction authors such as Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Tananarive Due craft new worlds that reimagine the intersection of Blackness and madness. These creative writer-theorists formulate new parameters for thinking through Blackness and madness. Pickens considers Butler's Fledgling as an archive of Black madness that demonstrates how race and ability shape subjectivity while constructing the building blocks for antiracist and anti-ableist futures. She examines how Hopkinson's Midnight Robber theorizes mad Blackness and how Due's African Immortals series contests dominant definitions of the human. The theorizations of race and disability that emerge from these works, Pickens demonstrates, challenge the paradigms of subjectivity that white supremacy and ableism enforce, thereby pointing to the potential for new forms of radical politics.

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9781478004042

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Reviews

This book presents a valuable contribution to several disciplines. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. -- T. N. Allen * Choice *

Pickens's Black Madness :: Mad Blackness invites the reader to think about race and disability in Black American literature.... [It] invite[s] us to enter into what Pickens calls a 'politics of curiosity,' one that moves beyond dominant forms of mythmaking or the living nightmares of the carceral state, and to see the constellation of Black life, the impulse to rectify freedom and break the confines of mass incarceration. -- Edna Bonhomme * Public Books * Black Madness :: Mad Blackness is what happens when you get to take the road less traveled with a professional driver or go deep into the weeds with an expert botanist. You may feel out of your depth, but you're assured by the fact that your traveling companion is extremely knowledgeable. . . . Pickens has called us all outside to play, to think deeply and without eventuality, to consider Blackness and madness - dare I say -irreverently, and we are all the better for it. -- Moya Bailey * Black Perspectives * This book presents a valuable contribution to several disciplines. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. -- T. N. Allen * Choice *

This book presents a valuable contribution to several disciplines. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. -- T. N. Allen * Choice * Black Madness :: Mad Blackness is what happens when you get to take the road less traveled with a professional driver or go deep into the weeds with an expert botanist. You may feel out of your depth, but you're assured by the fact that your traveling companion is extremely knowledgeable. . . . Pickens has called us all outside to play, to think deeply and without eventuality, to consider Blackness and madness - dare I say -irreverently, and we are all the better for it. -- Moya Bailey * Black Perspectives * Pickens's Black Madness :: Mad Blackness invites the reader to think about race and disability in Black American literature.... [It] invite[s] us to enter into what Pickens calls a 'politics of curiosity,' one that moves beyond dominant forms of mythmaking or the living nightmares of the carceral state, and to see the constellation of Black life, the impulse to rectify freedom and break the confines of mass incarceration. -- Edna Bonhomme * Public Books * A timely reimagination of how we read the intersection of Blackness and disability, opening up further possibilities for anti-ableist and anti-racist futures. -- Rhya Moffitt Brooke * MELUS *

Author Information

TherÍ Alyce Pickens is the author of New Body Politics: Narrating Arab and Black Identity in the Contemporary United States, and editor of Arab American Aesthetics: Literature, Material Culture, Film, and Theatre.

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