| "National Maladies: Narratives of Race and Madness in Modern America" is an interdisciplinary, trans-historical project that examines the trope of "the Negro" in both nineteenth- and twentieth-century American fiction and drama. I show how the disciplines of anthropology, medicine, and psychiatry have fostered connections between "blackness" and "madness," and I consider how such a confluence of ideas has shaped the literary writings of Herman Melville, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Adrienne Kennedy, among others. I argue that the alignment of black subjects with the stigmas of disease and insanity is central to understanding the anxieties of the nation and the often catastrophic underpinnings of American democracy. Much scholarly work has been conducted on historical periods of madness, on thematic concerns such as gender and hysteria, and on the theoretical interplay of creativity and psychosis. But little attention has been devoted specifically to the conceptualization of race and madness in American cultural life. |
