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

"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

"As a theoretical intervention, Pickens weaves between the intersections of Blackness and madness to open a much-needed conversation."  - Dana Francisco Miranda, Philosophy and Global Affairs

"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

"Black Madness :: Mad Blackness . . . open[s] generative connections between Black studies and disability studies and to trouble assumptions within both fields." - Stephen Knadler, American Literature