What Editing Does

Therí Pickens

In discussions about madness and Blackness, we often focus on how the ideas take shape, how analyses come to be. While it is crucial to understand and reframe our suppositions and assumptions, it is also just as crucial to examine the containers of our thought. Much of the work on Blackness and madness, indeed race and disability is largely done in monographs and edited collections. When the rest of the academy is slow to understand new work, tenured scholars tend to take on the work of announcing new fields with edited volumes. As an editor of three volumes, I plan to lay out a blueprint for how seasoned scholars can assist in bringing this new work to the fore. This talk desires to make practical and feasible the hard work of foregrounding new voices and changing the field. After all, if the malevolent has found its way into the details, it is only because the beneficent has preceded it.