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

Summary

Winner of the Modern Language Association First Book Prize

Winner of the 2022 Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award, presented by the Caribbean Philosophical Association

"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; and in the protest music of Nina Simone, Lauryn Hill, and Kendrick Lamar, among others. These artists activate madness as content, form, aesthetic, strategy, philosophy, and energy in an enduring black radical tradition. Joining this tradition, Bruce mobilizes what he calls "mad methodology"—where madness informs and animates ways of reading, thinking, feeling, telling, being, and life. How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind is both a study and an act of critical, ethical, radical madness.