Conclusion: Moving Beyond Psychic Ruptures

Abstract

This chapter provides a concluding look at the volume, arguing that to trace madness through Black women’s fiction, to map the Diaspora via explorations of psychic distress and dis-ease, is to create a cartography that displaces the normalizing once imposed by Europeans who explored territories to them unknown and uninhabitable. The authors and texts discussed in this volume invite us to envision the “undared” and to invent new geographies that spring from madness and imagination. The insanity is both toxin and cure, an illness that possesses within it the potential to heal. The diaspora born of a mad desire to take possession of people and of places, to colonize and to enslave, paradoxically nurtures an insanity that resists domination and reclaims selfhood. As Dionne Brand says, the “fiction” may have been created by imperial powers, but it also inspires “self-creation.” This chapter also draws on Sylvia Wynter’s ongoing project to unsettle and disrupt the colonial enterprise. The conclusion also notes that of necessity and practicality, this collection of essays offers a beginning point, not a definitive or delimiting set of authors and texts addressing madness in Black women’s diasporic fiction.