Re-Reading Madness and Blackness in Black Women’s

Fiction
aaihs.org/re-reading-madness-and-blackness-in-black-womens-fiction/

By Anna Hinton March 10, 2020

*This post is part of our online roundtable on Therí A. Pickens’s Black Madness :: Mad
Blackness

Cover of Black Madness :: Mad Blackness by Therí A. Pickens (Duke

University Press, 2019)

Black Madness :: Mad Blackness is Therí Alyce Pickens’s brilliantly “wayward” second book
that challenges us to “think about how we think when we think about Blackness and
madness” (xi). Over the course of an introduction and four “conversations” around Octavia
Butler’s Fledgling (2006), Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber (2000), Tananarive Due’s
African Immortals series, and Mat Johnson’s satirical novels as a set of theoretical texts,
Pickens reveals how prevailing ideas about Blackness and madness specifically, and race
and disability broadly, prove inadequate at capturing what she identifies as a “complex
constellation of relationships” that “are constituted within the fissures, breaks, and gaps in
critical and literary texts” (3). Black Madness :: Mad Blackness challenges accepted
understandings of race and disability through her simultaneously rigorous yet “messy”
consideration of Blackness and madness.

Though Black Madness :: Mad Blackness makes strident interventions in critical race
studies, disability studies, critical mad studies, and Black feminist studies — to name only a
few — it makes few, if any, hard arguments. Instead it masterfully “open[s] up two fields to
each other” (x). As such, it eschews linearity and narratives of progression in form and

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content. For example, rather than having chapters that build up to or unfold a central
argument, the book is arranged according to conversations that overlap, diverge, and
converge. Pickens’s analysis often is as robust — and shadier — in the endnotes as it is in
the main text. While most of the book focuses on Black women’s speculative fiction, the last
conversation examines the Black satirical novel. What initially appears as an outlier,
however, proves to be a bridge that allows us to “[…] think about what Black novels do writ
large” (22). There is no conclusion as such because, as Pickens writes, “No one can end a
discussion about intertwined Blackness and madness neatly, if at all” (x). In fact, Pickens
includes an alternative front cover at the end of the book. In this self-proclaimed “mad Black
book,” there are only gestures toward endings but many more potentials for new beginnings.
Though compact, Pickens’s book is rich, complex, and provocative from the front cover (both
of them) to the notes.

In what follows is a necessarily reductive overview. Each “conversation” in Black Madness ::

Mad Blackness is multifaceted, touching on several key conversations in both critical race
studies and disability studies. Yet, following Pickens through her constellation of ideas is
never unwieldy or confusing thanks to her craft and control over her structure and prose. In
“Conversation 1: Making Black Madness,” Pickens turns to Octavia Butler’s vampire novel,
Fledgling (2006), to outline the contours of what she calls Black madness. She begins this
chapter by putting pressure on the largely accepted idea that race and disability are mutually
constitutive. Pickens writes, “Notwithstanding the utility of mutual constitution as a
historicizing tool, it cannot — as a methodology — fully account for how race and disability
interact on a body or between bodies” (27). Mutual constitution, as in idea, “only leaves room
for recuperative historical or emancipatory projects,” neither of which are adequate nor
capacious enough to capture the complex experiences the Black mad, particularly in
intimate, interracial encounters (20-21). Historical projects that recuperate the Black mad
presence rely on linear narratives of progression that are inherently incapable of and
antithetical to holding Black mad subjectivity. As Pickens reminds us, “Blackness is not
meant to be part of history but rather its object,” and the “Black mad” are “removed from
space” to make room for “the more recognizable [white] subject,” abled and disabled alike
(29). “To be mutually constituted,” as Pickens illuminates, “implies a reciprocity of creation”
(27). Yet this is rarely the case. Revising her own arguments that rely on mutual constitution
as a guiding principle, Pickens “find[s] that we not only lack a critical vocabulary for
describing Blackness and madness simultaneously, but it is also assumed that one must take
priority over the other” (34). This is a particularly startling observation for critical race
scholars who critiqued the once rampant use of analogy to discuss race and disability for this
very reason. Within an interracial dynamic, one identity will be more prominent, more
impactful than the other (28). On the other hand, reclamation projects attempt to locate and
celebrate agency where there is none or only restrictively so. Pickens sees these projects
resting in claims that Black mad transform people or systems. In other words, like
historicizing projects, the Black mad exist in service to others. Like historicist projects, these,
too, rely on linear narratives of progression from conflict to resolution that the Black mad
frustrate.

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“Conversation 2: A Mad Black Thang” turns to the worlds of Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight
Robber to consider madness within the context of Black spaces. The change in context
requires a change in interpretive strategies that result in the undoing of the Black mad
subject of “Conversation 1” as it transforms into the mad Black. Pickens posits mad
Blackness as an alternative to the historicizing and reclamation projects as “mad Blackness
refuses linear temporality, invaginate space, deposes ocular for sonic knowledge, embraces
silence, pursues control, and relinquishes power, all at the same time” (71). In “Conversation
3: Abandoning the Human?” Pickens understands Tananarive Due’s African Immortal series
as a heuristic that allows Pickens to “consider three major concerns: how or whether the
human has purchase when one desires Blackness (forever); how the ideology of ability
functions; and, finally, what happens if/when the modes of analysis that privilege the human
fall apart for those it was designed to protect” (83-84). In the final segment, “Conversation 4:
Not Making Meaning, Not Making Since,” Pickens asks, “if the value of Black madness and
mad Blackness increases, do Black madness and/or mad Blackness retain the same
meanings?” (96). More specifically, she is interested in “how does a shift away from abjection
as a primary meaning of Blackness and madness transform the value of each?” (99).
Significantly, over the course of the conversation, Pickens reveals the difficulty and perhaps
undesirability of untethering abjection from Blackness and madness. “Abjection, then, is not
the incomplete truth the Black novel tradition needs to or seeks to avoid. Instead, it becomes
part of — not primarily or exclusively — the creating and the theorizing” (111).

As I read Black Madness :: Mad Blackness, I kept returning to Gayl Jones’s Eva’s Man
(1976). Based on the current body of criticism on Jones’s novel, it seems nearly impossible
to critically engage Eva’s Man without postulating some version of the argument that the
novel is either subversive or disgustingly stereotypical when neither reading adequately
captures the complex yoking of Blackness and madness in the book. In the story, Eva
Medina Canada is incarcerated in a psychiatric prison after poisoning and (attempting) to
castrate her lover with her teeth. The novel, organized as Eva’s first-person rendering of her
story, slowly upends generic expectations of time, characterization, and plot as Eva jumps
back and forth through time, collapses and conflates characters, and confuses and
contradicts details of her story. For some critics, the novel ceases to make sense. Even
Jones, herself, in an interview with Claudia Tate admits that it can be difficult to talk
“intellectually” about Eva’s Man.1 Eva’s Man is a mad Black novel; it “refuses linear
temporality, invaginate[s] space, deposes ocular for sonic knowledge, embraces silence,
pursues control, and relinquishes power, all at the same time,” to return to and reiterate
Pickens’s definition (71). Even more frustrating than the formal elements of the novel is Eva
herself. As a Black mad and mad Black character, she frustrates efforts to historicize and
reclaim her. Written at the tail-end of the Black Power movement, Eva’s Man reveals the
limitations desiring Blackness as her Black madness fails to do the political work of
countering negative stereotypes of Black womanhood. It fails to make positive meaning as it
seems to tether Blackness to utter abjection. Though Eva bitingly dissuades readers from
analyzing her with her cries of, “Don’t you explain me,” 2 as Pickens argues of Mat Johnson’s
satirical fiction, the novel, loops readers into that very act as it “forces readers to participate

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through their interpretation” (100). Eva’s Man, as a mad Black novel, seems impossibly
contradictory. Yet Pickens’s revelations offered, to me at least, a heretofore unknown critical
clarity, even as it demanded I sit within the discomfort of open-endedness that such a mode
of reading demands. Yet, herein lies the power, beauty, and significance of Therí Pickens’s
much needed intervention. Mad Black folks are not here to comfort or stir us. They do not
exist in service of whatever social, political, or cultural agenda in which we seek to mobilize
them. In exhorting that we accept this, Pickens’s frees us from the constraint of having to
rebuke, recoup, or reclaim, opening up critical possibilities.

1. Claudia C. Tate, “An Interview with Gayl Jones,” Black American Literature Forum 13,
no. 4 (1979): 146. ↩
2. Gayl Jones, Eva’s Man, Reprint edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 168. ↩

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