“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)
