Author I. Augustus Durham is joined in conversation by Kinohi Nishikawa, to discuss his new book, "Stay Black and Die: On Melancholy and Genius."
I. Augustus Durham, assistant professor of English at Lehman College, CUNY, is joined in conversation by Kinohi Nishikawa, associate professor of English and African American studies at Princeton University, to discuss Durham's "Stay Black and Die: On Melancholy and Genius," an analysis of black masculinist genius as dependent upon the black maternal. Book signing to follow. For in-person attendance registration through the link provided by the Princeton Theological Seminary is requested. Virtual attendance via Zoom can be arranged for this livestreamed event through the registration process as well.
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.
“What haunts and inspires black creativity in an antiblack world? In Stay Black and Die, I. Augustus Durham offers a gendered vernacular psychoanalytic reading of this question, which is to say that he offers a lush blues of genius’s complicated sustenance and insistence. And right there in this blues is the centrality of black femaleness—the maternal—that dapples the engagement with the object that is and is not lost. This richly researched book showcases genius as a notion traced through its motherline and, as such, Durham’s brilliance is a stay in every sense of the word: a hold, a refusal, a plea, and an inhabitance, a longing in which one can linger.” — Kevin Quashie, author of "Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being"
“I. Augustus Durham adds a fundamentally new and truly insightful spin to studies in blackness and melancholy. Bringing melancholy into the realm of nonromanticized genius, he moves seamlessly between the study of literature and the study of music. His analysis of music videos also makes his approach to black melancholy and genius a deep study of affect that refuses any boundaries between the literary, the sonic, and the visual. I am certain that Durham’s theorization of melancholic genius will become a portable, widely cited idea.” — Margo Natalie Crawford, author of "Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics"
In Conversation:
I. Augustus Durham is an assistant professor of English at Lehman College, CUNY, and his research focuses on black study from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. His work has been published in "Black Camera: An International Film Journal," "Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International," and "Journal of Religion and Health." Previously he was the President's Postdoctoral Fellow in English at the University of Maryland, College Park.
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Kinohi Nishikawa specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American literature, book history, and popular culture. His first book, "Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground," was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018. His major work in progress is "Black Paratext," a study of how book design has influenced the production and reception of African American literature from the rise of the modern paperback in the 1940s to the contemporary book arts scene. Nishikawa has published widely on modern African American print culture, with a particular emphasis on newspapers, magazines, and independent presses.
Presented in partnership with the Princeton Theological Seminary's Betsey Stockton Center for Black Church Studies and with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this programming do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.