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

“Tyler Evans was a beloved best friend, grandson, mentor, and (almost) husband.” “Tyler Evans was a young Black man killed by a police officer.” Goodnight, Tyler is the ghost-love story of Tyler Evans, a dead Black man who wants to be remembered for who he was rather than how he died. Only able to speak with his childhood best friend, Davis, Tyler demands his “legacy” be protected. He wants to make peace before he leaves behind Chelsea, his fiancée; Drew, his college buddy; and his grandmother, Fannie (all of whom consider themselves Tyler’s “favorite”). When Shana, a local college student, shows up at the house with an old jacket of his, Tyler quickly loses control over the narrative of his life. His loved ones fight over his affection, his best friend spirals into deep denial, his student doesn’t understand why he hangs around so many white people. Now left behind, these five people struggle to learn how to love each other. In a story about loss, intimacy, fear, and white supremacy, Tyler comes face-to-face with the reality of whose grief matters and whose lives matter most.

This fascinating bibliography of source materials clearly demonstrates the significant roles blacks have played in the history and culture of Canada from its beginnings as well as their 400-year fight for equity and justice. Organized by area of endeavor and by province, the source materials detailed here reveal that blacks in Canada have created a rich, diverse, and complex legacy. This volume lists resources that point to blacks' history as soldiers, prospectors, educators, cowboys, homesteaders, entertainers, legislators, athletes, artists, servants, and writers. The most comprehensive bibliography about blacks in Canada that has been published, it is well organized to facilitate locating specific topics or people spanning black history. Also included are newspapers and videos that add their own unique contribution. Academicians, researchers, students, and interested lay people will find an organized compilation of a vast number of primary and secondary sources about blacks in Canada.

The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek offers a synoptic overview of Star Trek, its history, its influence, and the scholarly response to the franchise, as well as possibilities for further study. This volume aims to bridge the fields of science fiction and (trans)media studies, bringing together the many ways in which Star Trek franchising, fandom, storytelling, politics, history, and society have been represented. Seeking to propel further scholarly engagement, this Handbook offers new critical insights into the vast range of Star Trek texts, narrative strategies, audience responses, and theoretical themes and issues. This compilation includes both established and emerging scholars to foster a spirit of communal, trans-generational growth in the field and to present diversity to a traditional realm of science fiction studies.

In the midst of spiraling ecological devastation, multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants. She eschews referring to our current epoch as the Anthropocene, preferring to conceptualize it as what she calls the Chthulucene, as it more aptly and fully describes our epoch as one in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices. The Chthulucene, Haraway explains, requires sym-poiesis, or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis, or self-making. Learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the means to building more livable futures. Theoretically and methodologically driven by the signifier SF—string figures, science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, so far—Staying with the Trouble further cements Haraway's reputation as one of the most daring and original thinkers of our time.