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.

Founded in 1943, Negro Digest (later “Black World”) was the publication that launched Johnson Publishing. During the most turbulent years of the civil rights movement, Negro Digest/Black World served as a critical vehicle for political thought for supporters of the movement.

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Comprising seven different chapters, the collection Men in Color attempts to analyze, and revisit, the representation of ethnic masculinities, both white and non-white, in and through contemporary U.S. literature and cinema. If most of the existing studies on masculinity and race have centered on one specific model of racialized masculinities, Men in Color attempts to provide an introductory perspective on different racialized masculinities simultaneously, including African American, Asian American, Chicano, Arab American, and also white masculinity, which is analyzed as another ethnic and gendered construct, rather than as a paradigm of normalcy and “universality.” By exploring several ethnic masculinities in relation to each other, the present volume aims to highlight both the differences and the similarities between different patterns of masculinity, showing how, even as gender is inflected by race, certain aspects or features of masculinity remain unchanged across the ethnic board. Ultimately, the volume as a whole illustrates both the changing nature of masculinities as well as the recurrence of certain stereotypes, such as the hypersexualization and/or the feminization of ethnic males, which recur in and across several ethnicities. The constant tension and intersection between gender and race is the subject of this book, which hopes to contribute some notes and reflections on ethnic masculinities to the much more complex and larger discussion about gender and racial identities in our increasingly multicultural and globalized 21st-century world.