Black Madness :: Mad Blackness

Description

In Black Madness :: Mad Blackness Therí 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. Cover......Page 1 Contents......Page 8 Preface or About Face, Giving Face......Page 10 Introduction. What’s Good?......Page 18 Conversation 1. Making Black Madness......Page 40 Conversation 2. A Mad Black Thang......Page 67 Conversation 3. Abandoning the Human?......Page 91 Conversation 4. Not Making Meaning, Not Making Since (The End of Time)......Page 112 Notes......Page 132 Bibliography......Page 152 B......Page 166 C......Page 167 E......Page 168 J......Page 169 M......Page 170 S......Page 171 Z......Page 172