Black Madness :: Mad Blackness

“In Black Madness :: Mad Blackness, Therí Alyce Pickens offers a compelling provocation: we must begin to read 'more madly, more Blackly,' and we can find strategies for doing so in the work of Black speculative fiction. Pickens persuasively argues for the importance of new interpretive strategies in approaching race and disability, ones that trouble linearity, visibility, and the expectation of meaning and resistance. An important development in the folds of Black studies, disability studies, and literary criticism, Black Madness :: Mad Blackness demands reading practices that account for, are accountable to, and originate within Black madness and mad Blackness.” — Alison Kafer, author of Feminist, Queer, Crip

“This book delivers on its promise. It opens disability studies and black studies to one another with generosity, humor, and the sharpest of wits. We have so relied upon certain quotidian paradigms that to challenge them in any way seems like an impossibility, but with rich readings of speculative fiction Therí Alyce Pickens reminds us that it is possible to find new theories for being together. Disability studies lost a fierce advocate for blackness when we lost Christopher Bell—it is clear that Pickens has continued that tradition of bold and insightful dialogue and even elevated it here.” — Sharon Patricia Holland, author of The Erotic Life of Racism