Megan Finch

Black Women Unhinged argues that at the meeting of Enlightenment theory and chattel slavery practices two figures co-constitute irremediable political and social exclusion: the idiot and the Black slave. While contemporary theory has focused attention on madness as the unreasonable figure positioned to critique modernity, this work turns to Black feminist theorists’ engagement with the structural similarities of “idiocy” and blackness— irrational because “incapable” of self-possession—to provide an account of what lies beyond Reason.