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

by La Marr Jurelle Bruce

Overview

“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
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	06/18/2021
Series:	Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

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

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

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.”

Editorial Reviews

This lyrical and profound tour de force explores the intersection of race and derailment, or ‘madness as methodology.’ We know that the traumatic discordance of slavery's enduring legacy manifests as both private sorrow and public health emergency. Yet that unyielding stress is sometimes also the forge of a radical black creativity vividly exceeding the shapeshifting states of un-Reason into which raced and nonnormative bodies are too relentlessly imagined and compressed. La Marr Jurelle Bruce has given a gift in this powerful recontextualization of black creative ‘madness’ as liberatory demand for expressive life—to wit, an aesthetic practice by which, ultimately, ‘what is stolen is returned, and what is unwritten is at last inscribed.’

Patricia J. Williams

"With a Walt Whitman-style expansiveness, Bruce wraps his arms around a multitude of creative genres and Black artists and then pulls us into his project of 'radical compassion' with mad subjects. Bruce’s writing is both critical and compelling, analytical and yet intimate. . . . How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind invites readers to sit with madness for a while, to explore its radical liberatory potential, and to become mad methodologists with radical compassion. Hold tight. Let go. And let this book take you there.

Disability Studies Quarterly - Elizabeth Donaldson

"If we imagine Black studies to be a space of creativity where Black scholars break from disciplinary strictures and form, then this text is an exemplary practice...The writing is evocative and accessible for any of us who have felt searing rage and those whose waking hours are haunted by madness."

The Black Scholar - Hugo ka Canham

How to Go Mad will undoubtedly influence conversations in black studies, science and technology studies, disability studies, and other fields. It is a lyrical, nuanced model of how radical care produces new approaches beyond the rehearsal of pathology.

Catalyst - Jacob Hood

"The sheer range of academic discourses that Bruce engages—from disability studies and psychoanalysis to affect theory and black studies—is impressive enough. What Bruce does within their intersections, however, is create a kind of poetics of black madness—a way of looking that is itself a way a making; or maybe it’s the converse—a way of making that is itself a way of looking. . . I can’t predict the future, but it’s so obvious to me that scholars will long be grateful for Bruce’s expansive imagination and the careful attention paid to radical black creativity in this wildly astute and socially and emotionally conscious work."

4Columns - Dawn Lundy Martin

"How to Go Mad is a love story, a potent reflection on a few of the many Black creative minds who have innovated art forms and fashioned the trajectory of history, while having their 'sanity' called into question by normative, white, anti-Black, anti-Mad audiences and institutions."

Lateral - Liz Miller

"One cannot read this work without also assembling its madness with the mad blue notes of Buddy Bolden, the crazy blues of Bessie Smith, the 'good at' madness of Ntozake Shange’s Hyacinthe, the maddening black genius of Ms. Lauryn Hill, the unruly madness of Kanye West, or the 'mad real world' of Dave Chappelle. Bruce is not simply using these creative artists as case studies of madness dipped in black, but is presenting a terrain where the expanse of madness and blackness can only be read together—in this push and push, the fracture of Reason is revealed."

Blog of the APA - Dana Francisco Miranda

"A paradigm-shaping book for future scholarship around mental difference. Bruce’s book not only helps announce the emergence of [mad studies] but significantly advances the analytic, cultural, historical, and theoretical sophistication of mad scholarship...As a result, How to Go Mad is a must-read for those of us engaged in the intersectional politics and scholarship of difference."

Journal of Medical Humanities - Bradley E. Lewis

"Bruce’s deft and thoughtful touch invites readers to dream loudly among a compendium of radical Black artists that few others would think about collectively. With subjects that range from early-twentieth-century jazz cornet player Buddy Bolden to contemporary rapper and composer Lauryn Hill (and many in between), Bruce’s archive reflects the mindful mayhem at the center of his methodology. . . . Bruce’s work closes with [this] imperative direction: 'Now let go.' But letting go of a book that feels both so present and so prescient may prove impossible."

Bookforum - Omari Weekes

"This melodic volume explores relationships between the surreal, impossible conditions (and conditions of impossibility) experienced by Black people and our radical, imaginative 'mad Black creativity.' Showing us 'lessons [we can] learn from those who make homeland in wasteland' as blueprints for freedom dreaming, Bruce picks apart the self-obscuring cultural and political forces that shape understandings of madness to disempower, disenfranchise, and control Black life and Being...It is ratchet. It is unruly. It is gorgeous."

Nonprofit Quarterly - Kia Darling-Hammond

"In La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind, we find ourselves in a dance with the mad. . . .  [The] book is an analysis of praxis, a snap, a click, a break, an opening, a closing, the middle, the beyond, the here, the now, the then, and the there."

E3W Review of Books - Michael Cordov

"How to Go Mad is a meticulous and marvelous meditation on madness and the Black radical imagination. Bruce implores us to understand madness as capacious, as signifying on multifarious experiences—not just that of utter abjection. . . . Most important, [the book] compels us to practice radical compassion."

African American Review - Anna Hinton

"Bruce articulates understandings of madness that encompass the lived experiences of Black, queer, and disabled people, putting forth a 'mad methodology' that capsizes dominant notions of social, political, economic normalcy, and ethics, and invites, for me, a new possibility of Afrofuturistic imagining. . . . [A] dynamic critical analysis of madcrazyBlackness that spans genre, medium, and epoch." 

Electric Literature - Victoria R. Collins