How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity

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"Hold tight. The way to go mad without losing your mind is sometimes unruly." So begins La Marr Jurelle Bruce's urgent provocation and poignant meditation on madness in black radical art. Bruce theorizes four overlapping meanings of madness: the lived experience of an unruly mind, the psychiatric category of serious mental illness, the emotional state also known as "rage," and any drastic deviation from psychosocial norms. With care and verve, he explores the mad in the literature of Amiri Baraka, Gayl Jones, and Ntozake Shange; in the jazz repertoires of Buddy Bolden, Sun Ra, and Charles Mingus; in the comedic performances of Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle; in the protest music of Nina Simone, Lauryn Hill, and Kendrick Lamar, and beyond. These artists activate madness as content, form, aesthetic, strategy, philosophy, and energy in an enduring black radical tradition. Joining this tradition, Bruce mobilizes a set of interpretive practices, affective dispositions, political principles, and existential orientations that he calls "mad methodology." Ultimately, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind is both a study and an act of critical, ethical, radical madness.
Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781478010876

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Duke University Press

Publication Date: 06-18-2021

Pages: 360

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d)

Series: Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study

About the Author

La Marr Jurelle Bruce is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.

What People are Saying

What People are Saying About This

Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration - Nicole R. Fleetwood

“Innovative, evocative, and beautifully written, this book is a brilliant theorization and investigation of madness in the black radical tradition. La Marr Jurelle Bruce offers exquisite close readings, important archival interventions, deft theoretical pivots, and sophisticated engagement with black cultural practices in a study that will change the fields of black studies, American studies, performance studies, and disability studies. Bruce's book is a gift to us all as we try to make a way in this ever maddening world of antiblackness.”

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix
1. Mad Is a Place 1
2. "He Blew His Brains Out through the Trumpet": Buddy Bolden and the Impossible Sound of Madness 36
Interlude. "No Wiggles in the Dark of Her Soul": Black Madness, Metaphor, and "Murder!" 71
3. The Blood-Stained Bed 79
4. A Portrait of the Artist as a Mad Black Woman 110
5. "The People inside My Head, Too": Ms. Lauryn Hill Sings Truth to Power in the Key of Madness 139
6. The Joker's Wild but That Nigga's Crazy: Dave Chappelle Laughs until It Hurts 172
7. Songs in Madtime: Black Music, Madness, and Metaphysical Syncopation 201
Afterword. The Nutty Professor (A Confession) 231
Notes 239
Bibliography 303
Index 333

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