Colloquium 12.6.24 Stay Black and Die: On Melancholy and Genius

Stay Black and Die: On Melancholy and Genius; or, Notes After Coming in from the Cold

Presented by

I. Augustus Durham, PhD

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With the publication of Stay Black and Die: On Melancholy and Genius in December 2023, events preceding and subsequent to its debut engender a new perspective on the work. This talk will be an opportunity to both outline what the book argues, and provide examples, and pivot to the personal, theoretical, and practical developments that have surfaced as the book nears the year mark of its arrival.  

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I. Augustus Durham is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto. A former President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in English at the University of Maryland, College Park, he worked in New York prior to his arrival at Toronto. His research interests span numerous centuries to account for the emergence, presence, and meaning of blackness in modernity. Durham’s first monograph, Stay Black and Die: On Melancholy and Genius (Duke University Press), takes up such ideas to examine the relationship between black mothers and sons whereby through abstraction, the black feminine/maternal maintains a psychoanalytic and affective role in the making of melancholy and genius in the black masculine. He has published work in Syndicate, Black Camera: An International Film Journal, Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, the Journal of Religion and Health; and an essay on the film Moonlight for an edited collection on Tarell Alvin McCraney. Durham is currently working on three new projects regarding a singer, a calendar year, and (re)invention.

Host or Publisher Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis