I. Augustus Durham examines melancholy and genius in black culture, letters, popular music, and media from the nineteenth century to the contemporary moment.

In Stay Black and Die, I. Augustus Durham examines melancholy and genius in black culture, letters, and media from the nineteenth century to the contemporary moment. Drawing on psychoanalysis, affect theory, and black studies, Durham explores the black mother as both a lost object and a found subject often obscured when constituting a cultural legacy of genius across history. He analyzes the works of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, Marvin Gaye, Octavia E. Butler, and Kendrick Lamar to show how black cultural practices and aesthetics abstract and reveal the lost mother through performance. Whether attributing Douglass’s intellect to his matrilineage, reading Gaye’s falsetto singing voice as a move to interpolate black female vocality, or examining the women in Ellison’s life who encouraged his aesthetic interests, Durham demonstrates that melancholy becomes the catalyst for genius and genius in turn is a signifier of the maternal. Using psychoanalysis to develop a theory of racial melancholy while “playing” with affect theory to investigate racial aesthetics, Durham theorizes the role of the feminine, especially the black maternal, in the production of black masculinist genius.

I. Augustus Durham is an assistant professor of English at Lehman College, CUNY. His work has been published in Syndicate, Black Camera: An International Film Journal, Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, and Journal of Religion and Health; and an essay on the film Moonlight for an edited collection on the work of Tarell Alvin McCraney. Prior to his appointment at Lehman, Durham was the President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in English at the University of Maryland, College Park.

GerShun Avilez an associate dean in the College of Arts & Humanities and a professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. He specializes in African American and Black Diasporic literatures and visual cultures. He is the author of two books: Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism (2016) and Black Queer Freedom: Spaces of Injury and Paths of Desire (2020). He is also the co-editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature: 1945-Present, 10^th Edition (2022). He is working on a new book on art and health advocacy.

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