How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity - LaMarr Jurelle Bruce

Written by LaMarr Jurelle Bruce
Read by Leon Nixon
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 128 Kbps
Unabridged

Length: 13 hrs and 58 mins
Release date: 06-10-25

“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.