How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity (Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study)

"La Marr Jurelle Bruce ponders the presence of "madness" in black literature, music, and performance since the early twentieth century, showing how artist ranging from Kendrick Lamar and Lauryn Hill to Nina Simone and Dave Chappelle activate madness as content, form, aesthetic, strategy, philosophy, and energy in an enduring black radical tradition."-- Provided by publisher "HOW TO GO MAD WITHOUT LOSING YOUR MIND questions long-standing Eurocentric accounts of psychopathology and describes the way art and madness connect in Black life. La Marr Jurelle Bruce uses a method of radical compassion, or radical care, to read the actions of Black artists and creatives. He seeks to understand their motives not simply as individual pathology but as sociocultural event and effect which makes itself evident as Black radical creativity. He recognizes them as oppressed people who are able to transmute what they experience into a radical act. Chapter 1 introduces madness as a methodology. Bruce categorizes madness into four categories: anger, phenomenal, medicalized, and psychosocial. He notes the conjunction of madness and creativity and notes that "to snap" is also to "click into place." Chapter 2 is about Black New Orleans jazz musician Buddy Bolden, who was confined to a rural Louisiana insane asylum after he suffered a breakdown playing the trumpet in a parade. Bruce describes his mad methodology and the way he became a mythical figure for creators who remember him. Chapter 3 extends radical compassion to the protagonist of Gayl Jones's Eva's Man and the ways she utilizes narrative agency to maintain her freedom. Chapter 4 is about Ntozake Shange's protagonist in Liliane, a Black painter, sculptor, lover, and existential feminist who is considered mad, but transmutes this into art even in failed attempts. Chapters 5 and 6 analyze Lauryn Hill and Dave Chappelle. Bruce reads Lauryn Hill's "breakdown" three years after her hit album as a "click into place" that allowed her to find a model of getting free, insisting on distancing herself from her earlier persona. Dave Chappelle loses his mind in order to save it, talking "crazy" to speak truth to power before going to Africa on a performance hiatus. Chapter 7 stages four sections based on different temporal modes of psychopathology: restless time of mania, sorrowful time of depression, the now of schizophrenia, and the now and then of melancholia. Bruce uses a nontraditional and nonlinear method of explanation to weave the work of Amiri Baraka, Nina Simone, Bessie Smith, and contemporary artists like Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar. The book ends with Bruce's description of his personal stake in mad study, describing the work as a confession, an effort to explain himself as well as to undermine antiblackness. The book describes how various actors lost their minds through making radical changes and acting in non-normative ways in order to maintain their agency, sense of self, and sanity, although it was rarely understood by the outside world. This work will be read by scholars in Black studies, American studies, popular music, and cultural studies"-- Provided by publisher “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.