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How to go mad without losing your mind : madness and Black radical creativity / La Marr Jurelle Bruce.

by Bruce, La Marr Jurelle, 1981- author.

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Durham : Duke University Press, 2021.

African American artists.

African Americans in the performing arts.

Racism -- United States -- Psychological aspects.

Racism and the arts -- United States.

Racism in popular culture -- United States.

Eurocentrism -- Psychological aspects.

Creative ability -- Psychological aspects.

9781478010876 (paperback)

1478010878 (paperback)

Black outdoors.

xiii, 345 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Prelude. The slave ship tows the ship of fools -- Mad is a place -- "He blew his brains out through the trumpet" : Buddy Bolden and the impossible sound of madness -- Interlude. "No wiggles in the dark of her soul" : Black neurosis, art, murder -- The blood-stained bed -- A portrait of the artist as a mad Black woman -- "The people inside my head, too" : madness, Black womanhood, and the radical performance of Lauryn Hill -- The joker's wild but that nigga's crazy : Dave Chappelle laughs until it hurts -- Songs in madtime : madness, Black music, and metaphysical syncopation -- Afterword. The nutty professor (A confession).

"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 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.

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