BLACK STUDIES / CULTURAL STUDIES / DISABILITY STUDIES

“Hold tight. The way to go mad without losing your mind LA MARR
JURELLE
is sometimes unruly.” So begins La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s urgent provocation BRUCE
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

HOW
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

TO GO MAD WITHOUT
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.

“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 ex-
quisite close readings, important archival interventions, deft theoretical pivots, and sophis-
ticated 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.”

LOSING YOUR MIND

—Nicole R. Fleetwood, author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration

“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 shape-
shifting states of un-Reason into which raced and nonnormative bodies are too relentlessly
imagined and compressed. La Marr Jurelle Bruce has given us a gift in this powerful recon-
textualization 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 MADNESS LA MARR
is at last inscribed.’”—Patricia J. Williams, author of The Alchemy of Race and Rights: AND BLACK JURELLE
Diary of a Law Professor and columnist for “Diary of a Mad Law Professor” in the Nation. RADICAL BRUCE
CREATIVITY
La Marr Jurelle Bruce is Associate Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics
Professor of American Studies at the of Study A series edited by J. Kameron Carter
University of Maryland, College Park. and Sarah Jane Cervenak

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cover art: Alexis Peskine, Inner.

DUKE
2014. © Alexis Peskine. Courtesy
WWW.DUKEUPRESS.EDU of the artist, October Gallery.

Bruce_pbk_cover.indd 1 4/1/2021 11:33:53 AM

HOW TO GO MAD
WITHOUT LOSING
YOUR MIND
BLACK OUTDOORS INNOVATIONS
IN THE POETICS OF STUDY A SERIES
EDITED BY J. KAMERON CAR­TER
AND SARAH JANE CERVENAK

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

DURHAM AND LONDON ​2021
 LA MARR
JURELLE
BRUCE

HOW
TO GO
MAD
WITHOUT
LOSING
YOUR
MIND
MADNESS
AND BLACK
RADICAL
CREATIVITY
 © 2021 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca

on acid-­free paper ∞

Cover design by Courtney Leigh Richardson

Text design by Aimee C. Harrison

Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro

and Helvetica Neue LT Std by
Westchester Publishing Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Names: Bruce, La Marr Jurelle, [date] author.
Title: How to go mad without losing your mind:
­madness and Black radical creativity / La Marr
Jurelle Bruce.
Other titles: Black outdoors.
Description: Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. |
Series: Black outdoors | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019051658 (print) |
LCCN 2019051659 (ebook)
ISBN 9781478009832 (hardcover)
ISBN 9781478010876 (paperback)
ISBN 9781478012429 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: 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.
Classification: LCC NX512.3. A35 B78 2020 (print) |
LCC NX512.3. A 35 (ebook) | DDC 709.2/396073—dc23
LC record available at https: //lccn.loc.gov/2019051658
LC ebook record available at https: //lccn.loc.gov/2019051659

Cover art: Inner. 2014. © Alexis Peskine. Courtesy of

Alexis Peskine, October Gallery.
  For

Eleanor Joyce Bruce (1941–2018)

and

David Anthony Hughes (1979–2020)

In love and madness, words fail—­but I keep trying.

CONTENTS

Acknowl­edgments  ix One ​Mad Is a Place  1

Two ​“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 Three ​The Blood-­Stained
Bed  79

Four ​A Portrait of the

Artist as a Mad Black ­
Woman  110

Five ​“The ­People inside

My Head, Too”: Ms. Lauryn
Hill Sings Truth to Power in
the Key of Madness  139

Six ​The Joker’s Wild,

but That Nigga’s Crazy:
Dave Chappelle Laughs
­until It Hurts  172

Seven ​Songs in Madtime:
Black ­Music, Madness,
and Metaphysical
Afterword The Nutty Professor Syncopation  201
(A Confession)  231

Notes  239  Bibliography 303    Index 333
ACKNOWL­EDGMENTS

I am made of love. Held by love. Covered in love. Brimming with love—­and

praise and thanks to my ­family. To my niece, who is also my goddaughter,
Kimberly Maria Bruce; to my ­mother, Kim C. Bruce; to my late grand­mother,
Eleanor Joyce Bruce; and to my late great-­grandmother, Magnolia “Lathy”
Bruce, thank you all for lifting me up, pulling me through, and carry­ing me
over. I owe this proj­ect and my life to a mighty cohort of Bruce ­mothers and
­daughters. Thank you, also and always, to my ­brothers Aaron and Chazz; my
aunts Carla and Cherie; my great-­aunts Sissy and Betty; my great-­uncle Gerald;
my cousins Stacey, Carrington, Ciela, and Cassidy; my nephews Alexander
and Ethan; and Rodney, who is my ­father.
I owe endless gratitude to my ancestors whose names I’ll never know—­and
to my as-­yet-­unconceived ­children whose names I ­don’t yet know: I already
love you, though I’ve never met you; I already miss you, though I ­haven’t left
you; I ­don’t even know you, but I ­can’t forget you. Amen and amen.
Cheers to my editor, Ken Wissoker, and to the editorial staff at Duke
­University Press, especially Olivia Polk, Nina Foster, and Joshua Gutterman
Tranen. I appreciate your excitement about my work, your stewardship through
this pro­cess, and the kindness ­you’ve extended to me. I am also grateful to
Susan Albury, proj­ect editor at Duke, who managed my many, many revisions
late in the pro­cess. I am humbled and honored to publish How to Go Mad as
part of the Black Outdoors book series, edited by J. Kameron Car­ter and Sarah
Cervenak. Why long for a seat at the t­ able when you can carry your meal out-
side? I like it out ­here, ­under open sky.
How to Go Mad originated while I was a gradu­ate student in African
American Studies and American Studies at Yale University. I am grateful to
faculty mentors Elizabeth Alexander, Daphne Brooks, Joseph Roach, and
Laura Wexler for their brilliance, patience, and gracious guidance. Other Yale
faculty ­were crucial to my education, especially Emilie Townes, Robert Stepto,
Matthew Jacobson, Joanne Meyerowtiz, Jafari Sinclaire Allen, and Lisa Lowe.
Shout-­out to fellow students who enriched my life and learning at Yale, par-
ticularly Stephanie Greenlea, Carlos Miranda, Sara Hudson, Madison Moore,
Gamal Palmer, Ana-­Maurine Lara, Elizabeth Son, Calvin Warren, Charlie
Veric, Brandon Terry, Deborah March, Jennifer Leath, Petra Richterova, Sarah
Lewis, Darian Parker, and Karilyn Crockett.
I finished my degree while in residence at the University of V ­ irginia as a
Car­ter G. Woodson Predoctoral Fellow. For journeying beside me as I crossed
that threshold: Thank you to uva faculty members Deborah McDowell, Lawrie
Balfour, Marlon Ross, Lisa Shutt, Eric Lott, Claudrena Harold, Sylvia Chong,
and Lisa Woolfork, as well as Woodson Fellows including Z’etoile Imma, Kwame
Holmes, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Alexandra Moffet-­Bateau, and Barbara Boswell.
Many thanks to the many friends I’ve made through the Mellon Mays
Undergraduate Fellowship, the Black Per­for­mance Theory Working Group,
Interdisciplinary Per­for­mance Studies at Yale University, the Ford Foundation
Fellowship, and the Summer Institute on Tenure and Professional Advance-
ment at Duke University.
What a blessing it was to land a job at the University of Mary­land, College
Park. I am grateful for the indispensable support of my colleagues in umd’s
Department of American Studies, especially Psyche Williams-­Forson, Nancy
Mirabal, Mary Sies, Sheri Parks, Jason Farman, Bayley Marquez, Jan Padios,
Julia John, Dana Persaud, Asim Ali, and Betsy Yuen. The broader umd fac-
ulty community has been fabulous to me, especially Julius Fleming Jr., Tabitha
Chester, Aleia Brown, Jasmón Bailey, GerShun Avilez, Chad Infante, Faedra
Carpenter, Alexis Lothian, Iván Ramos, Caitlin Marshall, Zita Nunes, I. Augustus
Durham, Melissa Blanco-­Borelli, Daryle Williams, and Bonnie Thornton-­Dill.
I’ve had the precious plea­sure and ­great honor of working with current and
former students at Mary­land who have impacted my thinking: Tony Perry,
Terrance Wooten, Ilyas Abukar, Robert Jiles, Izetta Mobley, David Chavannes,
Emelia Gold, Kalima Young, Hazim Abdullah-­Smith, Mark Lockwood, Dallas
Donnell, Devon Betts, Nat Baldino, Sarah Scriven, Danielle Laplace, Damien
Hagan, Les Gray, Otis Ramsey-­Zoe, and Tara Demmy are among them.
No ­matter how often I receive invitations to pre­sent my research, they
always fill me with giddy gratitude. I feel both wonderfully affirmed and deeply
humbled when someone requests my presence on their campus (or virtual forum).
Aimee Cox and Darnell Moore invited me to deliver my first ever keynote at
the “Ruminations on Blackness” symposium at Rutgers University, Newark,
in 2011. Curlee Holton brought me on board to pre­sent at the David Driskell
Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and
Acknowl­edgments
x
the African Diaspora at umd in 2015. Margo Crawford and C. Riley Snorton
invited me to participate in “The Flesh of the ­Matter: A Hortense Spillers Sym-
posium” at Cornell University in 2016. Terrell Taylor and the Department of
En­glish at Vanderbilt University appointed me as the 2018 Stirling Lecturer
and hosted me for a series of wonderful events on campus. Farah Jasmine Griffin,
Kellie Jones, and Shawn Mendoza welcomed me back to my undergraduate
alma mater, Columbia University, for “­Free to Be Anywhere in the Universe:
An International Conference on New Directions in the Study of the African
Diaspora” in 2018. Also in 2018, Eddie Bruce-­Jones and Monish Bhatia beck-
oned me across the Atlantic to deliver a keynote for “Race, M ­ ental Health,
and State Vio­lence: A Two-­Day Symposium” at Birkbeck College, University of
London. In 2019, Hannah Rosen and Joseph Lawless brought me to William &
Mary College to participate in “On Surviving as the Object of Property: Con-
versations with Patricia J. Williams—­A Symposium in Cele­bration of a Trans-
formative Intellectual Agenda,” where I met Patricia, who has since become a
dear friend. In 2020, Johanna Braun and Jennifer Devere Brody invited me to
“#masshysteria: Politics, Affect, and Per­for­mance Strategies,” a virtual sympo-
sium hosted by Stanford University. Thunderous thanks to you all. In 2020,
I was also scheduled to pre­sent with the African American Studies Speaker
Series at Georgetown University and the Per­for­mance Studies Working Group
at Yale University; though t­ hese talks ­were postponed ­because of campus clo-
sures, I am thankful for the invitations.
I have also presented material from this book before enthusiastic ­audiences
in the Department of En­glish at Cornell University, the Departments of ­En­glish
and American Studies at Brown University, the Department of En­g lish at
Tulane University, the Department of Africana Studies at Rutgers University,
New Brunswick, and the Department of En­glish at the University of Mas­sa­
chu­setts, Amherst. Additionally, I received excellent feedback on this research
at conferences of the American Society for Theatre Research, the American
Studies Association, the Black Per­for­mance Theory Working Group, the Mod-
ern Language Association, and Per­for­mance Studies International.
For reading and offering feedback on portions of this manuscript, I am
im­mensely grateful to the anonymous readers, as well as my loving interlocu-
tors including David Hughes, Isaiah Wooden, Soyica Colbert, Derrais Car­ter,
Sarah Cervenak, Tim Rommen, Chad Infante, Julius Fleming Jr., and Nicole
Fleetwood. Thank you to Nicole and to Patricia J. Williams for writing the
breathtaking blurbs that appear on the back of this book. Many thanks to
Sarah Grey for the careful copyedits and to Derek Gottlieb for the exquisite
index.
Acknowl­edgments
xi
 I am indebted to the mentorship of Farah Jasmine Griffin, Guthrie
Ramsey, E.  Patrick Johnson, Soyica Colbert, Tsitsi Jaji, Margo Crawford,
Herman Beavers, and Nicole Fleetwood. I have also benefited from the coun-
sel and kindness of Marcellus Blount, Ezra Tawil, Monica Miller, Kara Keeling,
Kevin Quashie, Fred Moten, Koritha Mitchell, Robin Bern­stein, Lyrae Van
Clief-­Stefanon, Tavia Nyong’o, Joel Dinerstein, Tim Rommen, Mark Anthony
Neal, Imani Perry, Christina Sharpe, Carole Boyce Davies, Hortense Spillers,
Brenda LeFrançois, Tommy DeFrantz, and Therí Pickens.
I want to recite the names of a broader community of folks whose kind-
ness, inspiration, provocation, and love ­were instrumental to my thinking
before and beyond the writing of this book. Roughly in order of the first time
I encountered each of them, this list includes Lecynia Swire, Mecca Jamilah
­Sullivan, Christian Pierre, Joy-­Anne Mitchell, Alexander ­Sullivan, Marcus
Mitchell, Cheryl Greene, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, David Rease, Shaun Anthony
­Little, Frank Leon Roberts, Malaika Adero, Martha S­ ullivan, Scott Poulson-­
Bryant, James Earl Hardy, Steven G. Fullwood, Emily Bernard, Sandy Placido,
Javon Johnson, Darnell Moore, L. Lamar Wilson, Joseph Cermatori, Frederick
Staidum, Kai Green, Bryan Epps, Jasmine Johnson, Aida Mbowa, Douglas
Jones, Jayna Brown, Shayne Frederick, Enock Amankwah, Moses Serubiri,
Aimee Meredith Cox, Wendell  P. Holbrook, Don Gagnon, Tobias Spears,
J. T. Roane, Evan Starling Davis, Devin Michael Brown, Kenneth Anderson,
Joshua Bennett, Tina Post, Aquarius Gilmer, Jonathan Lykes, Khalid Long,
Michael Robinson, Andrew Anderson, Fatima Jamal, Phanuel Antwi, Rose-
mary Ndubuizu, DeRon Williams, Yomaira Figueroa, Regina Bradley, Kevin
Lawrence Henry Jr., Matthew Pettway, Lance Keene, Rhaisa Williams, Karen
Jaime, Marquis Bey, Justin Hosbey, Ronak Kapadia, Tanja Aho, Bettina Judd,
Ashanté ­Reese, Idris Mitchell, Chezare Warren, Antoine Crosby, Rahsaan
Mahadeo, and the entire House of Fullness. I am warmed by the sheer sight of
your names gathered together on ­these pages.
This proj­ect benefited from funding provided by the Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Car­ter G. Woodson Institute
for African-­American and African Studies at the University of V ­ irginia, the
Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation, the Ford Founda-
tion, the Summer Institute on Tenure and Professional Advancement at Duke
University, the Research and Scholarship Award from the University of Mary­
land, and the College of Arts & Humanities (Subvention Fund) from the Uni-
versity of Mary­land.
A brief portion of chapter 1 was published as “Mad Is a Place; or, the Slave
Ship Tows the Ship of Fools,” in American Quarterly 69, no. 2 (2017): 303–8
Acknowl­edgments
xii
(with gratitude to the “Mad ­Futures” forum coeditors, Tanja Aho, Liat Ben-­
Moshe, and Leon Hilton for inviting me to contribute). An early version of
chapter  5 appeared as “ ‘The ­People inside My Head, Too’: Madness, Black
Womanhood, and the Radical Per­for­mance of Lauryn Hill,” in African Ameri-
can Review 45, no. 3 (2012): 371–89. An early version of chapter 7 appeared as
“Interludes in Madtime: Black M ­ usic, Madness, and Metaphysical Syncopa-
tion,” in Social Text 35, no. 4 (2017): 1–31. I am grateful to Natasha Trethewey
for permitting me to include the full text of her poem “Calling His C ­ hildren
Home,” which originally appeared in Callaloo 19, no. 2 (1996): 351.

I close with a litany of praise for acts of love that saved me. To Eleanor Joyce
Bruce, who taught me a love that speaks when words dissolve, that knows
when memory fails; to Farah Jasmine Griffin, who helped set me flowing; to
Isaiah Wooden, for talking me through the night and not hanging up; to T. H.
Cox, for delivering that message from the other side; to Julius Fleming Jr., for
teaching and showing me patience; to Jasmón Bailey, for aspirin and prayer; to
Mpho Ndaba, in praise of softness; to James Padilioni Jr., in honor of much-
ness; to Tsitsi Jaji, for answering when I called and even when I ­didn’t; to Na’im
Surgeon, for helping me carry my t­hings; to Marcus Washington, for hold-
ing me steady, briefly, and letting me go; to Kondor Nunn, for picking me up
from that ­Virginia basement, and from something lower than that; to Ahmad
Washington, for picturing me more clearly and vividly than I saw myself; to
­Will Mosley, for reminding me to drink ­water and love—­because weeping ­will
dehydrate a body; to Derrais Car­ter, for always celebrating with me, and al-
ways being a mighty cause for cele­bration; to Ethan Isaiah Bruce and Alexander
Mason Bruce, for making the world brand new; to Kimberly Maria Bruce, for
your laughter, which is also a song, and also a prayer, and also a rally cry, and
also an instruction for living; and to Kim C. Bruce, infinity times infinity—­
infinity times.
While this book was in production, I suffered the most violent grief and
stunning sadness I have ever felt or known. David Anthony Hughes, my be-
loved, left this world unexpectedly and tore a hole in my chest that reached up
and split the sky. David, you ­were and are the most extravagantly, generously,
relentlessly, recklessly loving man I’ve ever known. You w ­ ere right all along,
babe. I’ll spend my ­whole life trying to gather up and bask in this miraculous
mess of love you leave ­behind. I now know that grief is a sort of gratitude.
God is good, life is brief, love is long, I am h ­ ere, you are close, we are
blessed, and it is done.

Acknowl­edgments
xiii
CHAPTER ONE

MAD IS A PLACE

Confined on the ship, from which t­here is no

­escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its
PRELUDE: THE SLAVE thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads, to
SHIP TOWS THE SHIP OF FOOLS the ­great uncertainty external to every­thing. He
is the Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner
Hold tight. The way to go mad of the passage. And the land he ­will come to is
without losing your mind is unknown—as is, once he disembarks, the land from
sometimes unruly. It might send which he comes. He has his truth and his home-
you staggering across asylum hallways, land only in that fruitless expanse between two
heckled by disembodied voices—or countries that cannot belong to him. —­michel
foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History
shimmying over spotlit stages, greeted
of Insanity in the Age of Reason, 1961
by loving applause. It might find you
freewheeling through fever dreams, ­Those African persons in “­Middle Passage” were
then marching ­toward freedom dreams, literally suspended in the “oceanic.” . . . ​[R]emoved
from the indigenous land and culture, and not-­yet
then scrambling from sleep, with blood “American” ­either, ­these captive persons, ­without
and stars in your eyes, the ­whole world names that their captors would recognize, w ­ ere in
a waking dream.1 But for now, we wade movement across the Atlantic, but they w ­ ere also
through a liquid void, among ominous nowhere at all. —­hortense spillers, “Mama’s
ships, where this study begins. Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar
The epigraphs above, supplied by Book,” 1987
the French phi­los­o­pher Michel Fou-
cault and the black feminist theorist Hortense Spillers, are our floating sign-
posts. They point us to the intersection of a “fruitless expanse” and “nowhere
at all”: an unmappable coordinate where a ship of fools crosses a slave ship,
where imprisoned madness meets captive blackness in a stifling tightness
through a groundless vastness. I ­shudder and flounder as I won­der: What
vertigo does a body undergo, caught between treacherous w ­ aters below and
treacherous captors above, with ­“nowhere” outside? How does it feel to be
forcibly hauled across the sea while forcibly stagnated on the ship—to en-
dure a cruelty in motion that is also a cruelty of stillness? What noise might
ring out if the sound of a laughing “fool” joined the sound of a weeping
“slave”—­and would the weeper and the laugher commiserate? How does one
keep time, or discern direction, or remember the way home from “nowhere
at all,” with no familiar beacon to behold ahead or b­ ehind? It seems to me
that neither imagination nor historiography is apt to apprehend the seasick-
ness of spirit, the existential dread, and the feverish homesickness that might
menace a mad prisoner or black captive trapped at sea.
An unimaginable scene may seem a strange place to launch a study of
­radical imagination. Likewise, a fruitless expanse makes a bleak backdrop for
pondering the fruit of mad black creativity. And furthermore, unanswerable
questions may sound odd opening a work of careful inquiry. But t­ here are les-
sons to learn from t­hose who make homeland in wasteland, freedom routes
to chart that start in a ship’s hull, debris of mad and black life to retrieve from
the sea, mad black worlds to make that rise from a ship’s wake, and questions
that refuse answers but rouse movements.2 Besides, if the anticolonial psychia-
trist Frantz Fanon is right, if ­there is “a zone of nonbeing . . . ​an utterly naked
declivity where an au­then­tic upheaval can be born,”3 then “nowhere at all”
may be an especially auspicious place to commence. By beginning at this curi-
ous crossing, I also hope to orient the reader—­which requires that I disorient
the reader—­for the errant, erratic routes to come. Remember that the way is
sometimes unruly.

­ ose opening epigraphs are passages of prose conjuring cataclysmic passages

Th
of persons across temporal, spatial, and metaphysical gauntlets. In the first epi-
graph, Foucault chases a “ship of fools” as it crisscrosses early modern Europe.
To have him tell it, ships of fools ­were fifteenth-­century nautical vessels whose
lunatic occupants ­were deemed nuisances to their communities, expelled from
home, made wards of sailors, and consigned to ­those ships as they drifted
along ­Eu­ro­pean rivers and seas. When Foucault declares that the mad sea-
farer has “his truth and his homeland only in that fruitless expanse between
two countries that cannot belong to him,” the words evoke a mad diaspora:
a scattering of captives across sovereign borders and over bodies of ­water; an
upheaval and dispersal of persons flung far from home; and an emergence of

Chapter One
2
unpre­ce­dented diasporic subjectivities, ontologies, and possibilities that trans-
gress national and rational norms.
To a scholar of black modernity, Foucault’s account may ring uncannily fa-
miliar. It brings to my mind many millions of Africans abducted from their na-
tive lands by slave traders in the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries. Th ­ ese
stolen ­people ­were stacked in the putrid pits of slave ships; made “prisoner of
the passage” called the ­Middle Passage; uprooted from solid “truth” and stable
“homeland”; drenched, instead, in oceanic uncertainty; dragged across a “fruit-
less expanse”; discharged onto a land that, arguably, “cannot belong to” them; and
cast into restlessness and rootlessness that persist in many of their descendants.
In the second epigraph, Spillers describes the Passage, and her words bear
repeating: “Removed from the indigenous land and culture, and not-­yet ‘Amer-
ican’ ­either, ­these captive persons, without names that their captors would rec-
ognize, ­were in movement across the Atlantic, but they w ­ ere also nowhere at
all.” Some pessimists claim that the progeny of slaves are still not American, still
vainly awaiting recognition as citizen and affirmation as h ­ uman, still existentially
captive, still suspended in that void.4 Wherever blackness dwells—­slave ship,
spaceship, graveyard, garden, elsewhere, everywhere—­those captives ­accessed
what Spillers calls a “richness of possibility.”5 They would realize black diasporic
kinesis, kinship, sociality, creativity, love, and myriad modes of being that flour-
ish in their marvelously tenacious heirs. In a “fruitless expanse,” the enslaved
bore fruit. The pit held seeds, as pits sometimes do.
Both the ship of fools and the slave ship provoke historiographic dispute.
Regarding the ship of fools, many historians insist that Foucault mistook an
early modern literary and visual motif for a material vessel.6 As for the slave
ship, it incites crises of calculation about the number of Africans who made it
to the other side—by which I mean the Amer­i­cas and/or/as the afterlife—­and
about the depth of the wound that the ­Middle Passage inflicts on modernity.7
Both ships defy positivist history: the ship of fools b­ ecause it was likely unreal;
the slave ship ­because it is so devastatingly real that it confounds comprehen-
sion, resists documentation, and spawns ongoing effects that belie the pur-
ported pastness of history. It is no won­der that when Spillers wanted to address
the historical and ontological functions of the ­Middle Passage and its ­ripples
across modernity, particularly black female modernity, she realized that “the
language of the historian was not telling me what I needed to know.”8 (Per-
haps the language of the mad methodologist, who I ­will introduce shortly, can
better speak to Spillers’s concerns.) Spillers further characterizes the ­Middle
Passage as a “dehumanizing, ungendering, and defacing proj­ect”—­and I would

Mad Is a Place
3
add deranging to that grave litany.9 To derange is to throw off, to cast askew,
“to disturb the order or arrangement of ” an entity.10 The M ­ iddle Passage liter-
ally deranged and threw millions of Africans askew across continents, oceans,
centuries, and worlds.11 I use derange also to signal how the Atlantic slave trade,
and the antiblack modernity it inaugurated, framed black people as always al-
ready wild, subrational, pathological, mentally unsound, mad.
Although it is unlikely that a slave ship ever crossed a ship of fools in geo-
graphic space,12 ­these vessels converged in the discursive domains and cultural
imaginations of early Euromodernity. According to the era’s emergent anti-
black and antimad worldviews, both of ­these ships ­were floating graveyards
of the socially dead. Both ships ­were ­imagined to haul inferior, unReasonable
beings who w ­ ere metaphysically adrift amid the rising tide of Reason. For the
purposes of this study, I distinguish reason (lowercase) from Reason (upper-
case). The former, reason, signifies a generic pro­cess of cognition within a given
system of logic and the “­mental powers concerned with forming conclusions,
judgments, or inferences.”13 Meanwhile, Reason is a proper noun denoting a
positivist, secularist, Enlightenment-­rooted episteme purported to uphold
objective “truth” while mapping and mastering the world. In normative West-
ern philosophy since the Age of Enlightenment, Reason and rationality are
believed essential for achieving modern personhood, joining civil society, and
participating in liberal politics.14 However, Reason has been entangled, from
­those very Enlightenment roots, with misogynist, colonialist, ableist, antiblack,
and other pernicious ideologies. The fact is that female ­people, indigenous
­people, colonized ­people, neurodivergent people, and black ­people have been
violently excluded from the edifice of Enlightenment Reason—­with Reason-
able doctrines justifying ­those exclusions.15
Regarding the hegemony of Reason, po­liti­cal theorist Achille Mbembe
remarks that “it is on the basis of a distinction between reason and unreason
(passion, fantasy) that late-­modern criticism has been able to articulate a cer-
tain idea of the po­liti­cal, the community, the subject—or, more fundamentally,
of what the good life is all about, how to achieve it, and, in the pro­cess, to be-
come a fully moral agent. The exercise of reason is tantamount to the exercise of
freedom.”16 While Mbembe names “passion” and “fantasy” as examples of “un-
reason,” a third entry belongs on this list: madness itself. If t­ hose late-­modern
critics claim that Reason is requisite for “becoming a fully moral agent,” they
also imply the inverse—­that unReason entails moral deficiency and inepti-
tude. (This is why throes of passion, flights of fantasy, and bouts of madness are
thought inimical to one’s moral sense.) Meanwhile, if “late-­modern criticism”
insists that “the exercise of reason is tantamount to the exercise of freedom,”
Chapter One
4
it also insinuates the inverse—­that the condition of unReason is commensu-
rate with the condition of unfreedom. While Mbembe’s point of reference is
late modernity, Enlightenment-­era phi­los­o­phers like David Hume, Immanuel
Kant, Thomas Jefferson, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel also asserted
that unReasonable beings were suited for unfreedom, that the unReason of
Africans ordained them for enslavement.17 Within white supremacist and an-
tiblack master narratives that calcified in the eigh­teenth century, to be white-­
cum-­rational was to inherit modernity’s pantheon and merit freedom; to be
black-­cum-­subrational was to be barred from modernity’s ­favor and primed for
slavery. The Euro-modern patriarch affirmed his Reason and freedom, in part,
by casting the black African as his ontological foil, his unReasonable and en-
slaved Other.18
In staging this encounter between the slave ship and ship of fools, I do
not intend to imply a simplistic analogy between the two. Rather, I want to
suggest that the slave ship (icon of abject blackness) commandeers the ship
of fools (icon of abject madness), tows the ship of fools, helps orient Western
notions of madness and Reason, and helps propel this turbulent movement we
call modernity.19

HOW TO GO MAD:
THEORY AND METHODOLOGY

How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind roves the intersections of madness
and radical creativity in black expressive culture, particularly African American
expressive culture, since the twentieth c­ entury. In the chapters that follow, I
seek the mad in the lit­er­a­tures of August Wilson, Amiri Baraka, Gayl Jones,
Ntozake Shange, Suzan-­Lori Parks, and Richard Wright; 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, Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar, and Frank Ocean, among many
other cultural producers and forms. In the works of ­these artists, madness
animates—­and sometimes agitates—­black radical artmaking, self-­making,
and worldmaking. Moreover, madness becomes content, form, symbol, idiom,
aesthetic, existential posture, philosophy, strategy, and energy in an enduring
black radical tradition.
The black in this book’s subtitle signifies a dynamic matrix of cultures, epis-
temologies, subjectivities, corporealities, socialities, and ontologies rooted in
sub-­Saharan African p­ eoples and traveling in diasporic cir­cuits and surges to
the ends of the world. Black coalesced as a racial category amid the A ­ tlantic

Mad Is a Place
5
slave trade and the advent of global antiblackness—­but blackness contains
creative and insurgent power, on display in this study, far exceeding ­those
wretched sites of origin and ­those cruel conditions of coalescence.
I do not typically capitalize black ­because I do not regard it as a proper
noun. Grammatically, the proper noun corresponds to a formal name or title
assigned to an individual, closed, fixed entity. I use a lowercase b b­ ecause I
want to emphasize an improper blackness: a blackness that is a “critique of the
proper”;20 a blackness that is collectivist rather than individualistic; a black-
ness that is “never closed and always u­ nder contestation”;21 a blackness that is
ever-­unfurling rather than rigidly fixed; a blackness that is neither capitalized
nor propertized via the protocols of Western grammar; a blackness that centers
­those who are typically regarded as lesser and lower cases, as it were; a blackness
that amplifies those who are treated as “minor figures,” in Western m ­ odernity.22
I ­appreciate that some use the big B to confer re­spect, signal gravitas, and indicate
specificity. However, the impropriety of lowercase blackness suits me, and this
mad black proj­ect, just fine. Besides, my minor b is replete with re­spect, gravi-
tas, and specificity-­in-­collectivity, too; its smallness does not limit the infinite
care it contains. As for the term black radical creativity, it signifies black expres-
sive culture that imagines, manifests, and practices other­wise ways of ­doing and
being—­all while confounding dominant logics, subverting normative aesthet-
ics, and eroding oppressive structures of power and feeling.23
But what of madness? My critical account of madness in modernity pro-
ceeds from two premises. On the one hand, madness is a floating signifier and
dynamic social construction that evades stable definition. On the other hand,
or maybe in the same hand, madness is a lived real­ity that demands sustained
attention. Accounting for ­these exigencies, I forward a model of madness that
is theoretically agile enough to chase floating signifiers while ethically rooted
enough to hold deep compassion for madpersons. Thus primed, I propose that
madness encompasses at least four overlapping entities in the modern West.
First is phenomenal madness: an intense unruliness of mind—­producing
fundamental crises of perception, emotion, meaning, and selfhood—as expe-
rienced in the consciousness of the mad subject. This unruliness is not neces-
sarily painful, nor is it categorically pleas­ur­able; it may induce distress, despair,
exhilaration, euphoria, and myriad other sensations. In elaborating this mode
of madness, I ­favor a phenomenological attitude attuned to what­ever pre­sents
itself to consciousness, including hallucinations and delusions that have no ma-
terial basis. Most impor­tant, phenomenal madness centers the lived experience
and first-­person interiority of the mad subject, rather than, say, the diagnoses
imposed by medical authority.
Chapter One
6
 Such diagnoses are the basis of medicalized madness, the second category
in this schema. Medicalized madness encompasses a range of “serious m ­ ental
illnesses” and psychopathologies codified by the psy sciences of psychiatry, psy­
chol­ogy, and psychoanalysis. ­These “serious” conditions include schizo­phre­nia,
dissociative identity disorder, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder,
and the antiquated diagnosis of medical “insanity,” among o­ thers.24 I label this
category medicalized madness—­emphasizing the suffix -­ize, meaning to become
or to cause to become—to signal that m ­ ental illness is a politicized pro­cess, epis-
temological operation, and sociohistorical construction, rather than an onto-
logical given. (Consider this brief example: A psychiatric patient who perceives
voices, with no empirically discernable outside source, might be diagnosed
with schizo­phre­nia. Modern Western psychiatry medicalizes and pathologizes
this experience as “auditory hallucination.”25 However, in another historical
context or social milieu, such a sound might be regarded as, say, prophetic hear-
ing, superhuman aurality, telepathic transmission, or merely an unremarkable
sensory variation.26 My point is that t­ here is nothing inherently, ontologically,
transhistorically pathological about hearing voices.)
Even forms of medicalized madness that are mea­sur­able in brain tissue
physiology, neuroelectric currents, and other empirical criteria are infiltrated
(and sometimes constituted) by sociocultural forces. The creation, standard-
ization, collection, and interpretation of psychiatric metrics take place in the
crucible of culture. Likewise, clinical procedures are designed and carried out
by subjective persons embedded in webs of social relations. And furthermore,
psychiatry is susceptible to ideology. Exploiting that susceptibility, vari­ous
antiblack, proslavery, patriarchal, colonialist, homophobic, and transphobic
regimes have wielded psychiatry as a tool of domination. Thus, acts and at-
tributes such as insurgent blackness, slave rebellion, willful womanhood,
anticolonial re­sis­tance, same-­sex desire, and gender subversion have all been
pathologized by Western psychiatric science.27 Beyond ­these overt examples
of hegemonic psychiatry, I want to emphasize that no diagnosis is innocently
objective. No etiology escapes the touch and taint of ideology. No science
is pure.28
The third mode of madness is rage: an affective state of intense and aggres-
sive dis­plea­sure (which is surely phenomenal, but warrants analytic distinction
from the unruliness above). Black p­ eople in the United States and elsewhere
have been subjected to heinous vio­lence and degradation, but rarely granted
recourse. Consequently, as singer-­songwriter Solange Knowles reminds us,
black ­people “got the right to be mad” and “got a lot to be mad about.”29 Alas,
when they articulate rage in American public spheres, black p­ eople are often
Mad Is a Place
7
criminalized as threats to public safety, lampooned as angry black caricatures,
and pathologized as insane. That latter process—­the conflation of black anger
and black insanity—­parallels the Anglophone confluence of madness meaning
anger and madness meaning insanity. In short, when black ­people get mad (as
in angry), antiblack logics tend to presume ­they’ve gone mad (as in crazy).
The fourth and most capacious category in this framework is p­ sychosocial
madness: radical deviation from the normal within a given psychosocial milieu.
Any person or practice that perplexes and vexes the psychonormative status
quo is liable to be labeled crazy. The arbiters of psychosocial madness are not
elite cohorts of psychiatric experts, but rather multitudes of avowedly Reason-
able people and publics who abide by psychonormative common sense. Thus,
psychosocial madness reflects how avowedly sane majorities interpellate and
often denigrate difference. What I have already stated about medicalized
madness can also be adapted to psychosocial madness: acts and attributes
such as insurgent blackness, slave rebellion, willful womanhood, anticolonial
re­sis­tance, same-­sex desire, and gender subversion have all been ostracized as
crazy by sane majorities who adhere to Reasonable common sense. Whereas
phenomenal madness is an unruliness of mind, psychosocial madness is some-
times an unruliness of ­will that resists and unsettles reigning regimes of the
normal.
In its psychosocial iteration, madness often functions as a disparaging
descriptor for any mundane phenomenon perceived to be odd and undesirable.
An unconventional hairstyle, unpop­u­lar po­liti­cal opinion, physical tic, inde-
cipherable utterance, eccentric outfit, dramatic flouting of etiquette, apathy
­toward money and wealth, or experience of spiritual ecstasy might be coded as
crazy in psychonormative discourse. Yet it seems to me that psychosocial mad-
ness reveals more about the avowedly sane society branding an object crazy
than about the object so branded. When you point at someone or something
and shout Crazy!, you have revealed more about yourself—­about your sensibil-
ity, your values, your attentions, your notion of the normal, the limits of your
imagination in pro­cessing dramatic difference, the terms you use to describe
the world, the reach of your pointing fin­ger, the lilt of your accusatory voice—­
than you have revealed about that supposedly mad entity.30
­These four categories are not all-­encompassing and do not cover ­every
pos­si­ble permutation of madness. Furthermore, ­these four categories are not
­mutually exclusive; in fact, they often intersect and converge. Rage, for example,
is always also phenomenal. Discourses of medicalized madness attempt to make
sense of phenomenal symptoms and inevitably harbor psychosocial biases. Black
people who articulate rage at unjust social conditions are often coded as
Chapter One
8
p­ sychosocial ­others (and sometimes diagnosed as medically unsound). The spill-
age of ­these categories into one another reminds us that madness is too messy
to be placed in tidy boxes and too restless to hold still for rigid frameworks.
Note, also, that ­these modes of madness might be taken up in manifold
ways for mad praxis. For example, rage might be harnessed to fuel impassioned
re­sis­tance. Medicalized madness might be deconstructed to expose and address
the biases in psy sciences. Phenomenal madness might be documented to teach
sane majorities about the lived experience of madness. Psychosocial alterity
might model other­wise ways of knowing and being, beyond entrenched status
quos. In t­ hese and other ways, the protagonists in this study get mad and go
mad to convey and confront the vio­lence, chaos, strangeness, ecstasy, won­der,
aporia, paradox, and danger—in short, the phenomenal madness—­suffusing
racial modernity.
Beyond approaching madness as an object of analy­sis, How to Go Mad
adapts madness as methodology. As I propose and practice it, mad methodol-
ogy is a mad ensemble of epistemological modes, po­liti­cal praxes, interpretive
techniques, affective dispositions, existential orientations, and ways of life.
Mad methodology seeks, follows, and rides the unruly movements of
madness. It reads and hears idioms of madness: ­those purported rants, raves,
rambles, outbursts, ­mumbles, stammers, slurs, gibberish sounds, and unseemly
silences that defy the grammars of Reason. It historicizes and contextualizes
madness as a social construction and social relation vis-­à-­vis Reason. It ponders
the sporadic vio­lence of madness in tandem and in tension with the structural
vio­lence of Reason. It cultivates critical ambivalence31 to reckon with the si-
multaneous harm and benefit that may accompany madness. It re­spects and
sometimes harnesses “mad” feelings like obsession and rage as stimulus for radi-
cal thought and action. Whereas rationalism roundly discredits madpersons,
mad methodology recognizes madpersons as critical theorists and decisive
protagonists in strug­gles for liberation. To be clear, I am not suggesting that
madpersons are always already agents of liberation. I am simply and as­suredly
acknowledging that they can be, which is a heretical admission amid antimad
worlds. I propose a mad methodology that neither vilifies the madperson as
evil incarnate, nor romanticizes the madperson as re­sis­tance personified, nor
patronizes the madperson as helpless ward awaiting aid. Rather, mad method-
ology engages the complexity and variability of mad subjects.
Regarding anger, the warrior poet Audre Lorde asserts that it is “loaded
with information and energy.”32 Mad methodology is rooted in the recognition
that phenomenal madness, medicalized madness, and psychosocial madness, like
angry madness, are all “loaded with information and energy.” Mad methodology
Mad Is a Place
9
proceeds from a belief that such information can instruct black radical theory
and such energy can animate black radical praxis.
Most urgently, mad methodology primes us to extend radical compassion
to the madpersons, queer personae, ghosts, freaks, weirdos, imaginary friends,
disembodied voices, unvoiced bodies, and unReasonable ­others, who trespass,
like stowaways or fugitives, in Reasonable modernity. Radical compassion is
a ­will to care for, a commitment to feel with, a striving to learn from, and an
openness to be vulnerable before a precarious other, though they may be dras-
tically dissimilar to yourself. Radical compassion is not an appeal to an idyl-
lic oneness where difference is blithely effaced. Nor is it a smug projection of
oneself into the position of another, thereby displacing that other.33 Nor is it
an invitation to walk a mile in someone ­else’s shoes and amble, like a tour-
ist, through their lifeworld, leaving them existentially barefoot all the while.
Rather, radical compassion is an exhortation to ethically walk and sit and fight
and build alongside another whose condition may be utterly unlike your own.
Radical compassion works to impart care, exchange feeling, transmit under-
standing, embolden vulnerability, and fortify solidarity across circumstantial,
sociocultural, phenomenological, and ontological chasms in the interest of
mutual liberation. It persists even and especially ­toward beings who are the
objects of contempt and condemnation from dominant value systems. It ex-
tends even and especially to t­ hose who discomfit one’s own sense of propriety.
Indeed, this book sometimes loiters in scenes and tarries with p­ eople who may
trou­ble readers. I hope that this book also models the sort of radical compas-
sion that persists through the trou­ble.
I characterize mad methodology as a parapositivist approach insofar as
it resists the hegemony of positivism. (As a philosophical doctrine, positivism
stipulates that meaningful assertions about the world must come from empiri-
cal observation and interpretation to generate veritable truth. However, when
engaging the phenomenal, the spiritual, the aesthetic, the affective, and the mad,
we must deviate from the logics of positivism.)34 Mad methodology finds g­ reat
inspiration in other cultural theorists’ parapositivist ­approaches, including the
Apostle Paul’s account of “faith,” Édouard Glissant’s “poetics of relation,” Avery
Gordon’s haunted and haunting sociology, Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabula-
tion,” Jack Halberstam’s “scavenger methodology,” Ann Cvetkovich’s compilation
of an “archive of feelings,” Christina Sharpe’s “wake work,” and Patricia J. Wil-
liams’s “ghost gathering.”35 ­These thinkers study sublime, opaque, formless, sub-
junctive, scarce, dead, and ghostly phenomena that thwart positivist knowing.
As a parapositivist approach, mad methodology does not attempt to
wholly, transparently reveal madness.36 How could it? Madness, a­ fter all, r­ esists
Chapter One
10
intelligibility and frustrates interpretation. Conceding that I cannot fully
understand the meaning of e­ very madness I encounter, I often precede my
observations with the qualifiers maybe, it might be, and it seems. Between
these ­covers, I embrace uncertainty and irresolution. I heed poet-­philosopher
Glissant’s insistence that “the transparency of the Enlightenment is fi­nally
misleading. . . . ​It is not necessary to understand someone—in the verb ‘to
understand’ [French: comprendre] ­there is the verb ‘to take’ [French: pren-
dre]—in order to wish to live with them.”37 I want to live with the madper-
sons gathered in this study, but I do not need or want to take them. I strive
to pursue madness, but not to capture it. Recall that I began this chapter by
warning you to hold tight. Mad methodology also, sometimes, entails letting
go: relinquishing the imperative to know, to take, to capture, to master, to lay
bare all the world with its countless terrors and won­ders. Sometimes we must
hold tight to steady ourselves amid the violent tumult of this world—­and
sometimes we must let go to unmoor ourselves from the stifling order im-
posed on this world. I am describing a deft dance between release and hold,
hold and release.
In short, mad methodology is how to go mad without losing your mind.
At length, this book ­will show you.

MAD INTERVENTIONS

How to Go Mad joins a robust corpus of post-2000 black studies scholarship

exploring radical imagination within black popu­lar culture, black feminist
­ingenuity, black queer art, the black avant-­garde, Afrofuturism, Afrosurrealism,
and beyond. I want to cite just a few entries in this scholarly corpus: In Free-
dom Dreams (2002), Robin Kelley illuminates black radical imagination and
freedom dreaming in black abolitionist, Marxist, surrealist, and feminist move-
ments across the diaspora.38 Fred Moten’s In the Break (2003) chronicles and
practices a black radical tradition—­animated by a ­will to re­sis­tance and pro-
pelled by a “freedom drive”—in twentieth-­century per­for­mance and poetics.39
Daphne Brooks’s Bodies in Dissent (2006) explores mid-­nineteenth- through
early twentieth-­ century circumatlantic per­ for­
mances that spectacularize
and instrumentalize alterity to disrupt racial and sexual hegemony.40 In his
“Afrosurreal Manifesto” (2009), D. Scott Miller taps into otherworldly fantasy,
mystical visions, ecstatic feeling, and aesthetic extravagance in order to defy
oppressive regimes of “real­ity.”41 In Wandering (2014), Sarah Cervenak charts
practices of (physical and metaphysical) wandering as black feminist strate-
gies to evade the coercive constrictions of antiblackness, misogyny, and racial
Mad Is a Place
11
capitalism.42 L. H. Stalling’s Funk the Erotic (2015) theorizes black “funk” as
a sensuous amalgam of erotic, ethical, and epistemological rebellion against
antiblack, misogynist, cap­i­tal­ist, and sex-­negative status quos.43 Radical Aes-
thetics and Modern Black Nationalism (2016) is GerShun Avilez’s study of the
insurgent imaginations that propelled the Black Arts Movement, the fractures
and ruptures that opened up within that movement, and its bustling queer af-
terlives and reincarnations.44
While How to Go Mad is foremost in league with such black studies schol-
arship, this book also speaks to—­and talks back to—­Western canon-­dwellers
from antiquity through postmodernity. Indeed, to ponder the juncture of mad-
ness and art in the West is to join a conversation with preeminent storytellers
and philosophers in the Eurocentric context.45 For example, in Phaedrus, the
Athenian phi­los­o­pher Plato (writing in the guise of Socrates) suggests that
Eros, prophecy, and poetry are forms of “divine madness.”46 Throughout his
dramatic oeuvre, Elizabethan playwright William Shakespeare endows char-
acters like King Lear, Hamlet, and Ophelia with madness that begets ingenu-
ity, cunning, and revelation; regarding Hamlet, the character Polonius opines:
“Though this be madness, yet ­there is method in’t.”47 American gothic author
Edgar Allan Poe writes that “the question is not yet settled, ­whether madness
is or is not the loftiest intelligence—­whether much that is glorious—­whether
all that is profound—­does not spring from disease of thought.”48 Nineteenth-­
century Eurocontinental phi­los­o­pher Friedrich Nietz­sche extols the revolu-
tionary potential in madness, arguing that “almost everywhere [in Western
history] it was madness which prepared the way for the new idea, which
broke the spell of a venerated usage and superstition.”49 In perhaps the most
influential study of madness in the West, Madness and Civilization (1961),
Foucault details the sequestering and silencing of madness in Euromodernity.
He contends that Eu­rope’s ruling classes, religious leadership, and psychiat-
ric authorities colluded to expel madness (itself a sort of epistemology, com-
municative mode, and wandering way of life) into physical confinement and
existential exile.50 In Anti-­Oedipus (1972), phi­los­o­phers Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari find insurgent energy in schizo­phre­nia, treating it as a locus of
unruly, free-­flowing desire that defies repressive incursions of capitalism and
psychoanalysis.51
Clearly, the conjunction of madness and creativity is a common concern
in Western culture writ large. However, that madness-­creativity intersec-
tion is especially fraught and charged when occupied by black folks. This
is ­because antiblack discourse constantly codes black p­ eople as savage,
­irrational, subrational, pathological, and effectively mad. Black artists must
Chapter One
12
c­ontend with—­and also can draw upon—­these associations of blackness
and madness interlaid with ­those broader associations of artistic genius and
madness.
This proj­ect owes much to disability studies.52 Among that field’s signal
contributions is its interrogation of the medical model of disability, the domi-
nant framework for understanding disability in the West. The medical model
regards a disability as a physical or cognitive dysfunction residing in an indi-
vidual body and/or mind—­a dysfunction that should be corrected or cured
by medical intervention. In contrast, disability studies advances a social model,
contending that disability is a social construction: a set of social exclusions,
obstructions, and derogations imposed on persons who diverge from a domi-
nant, “abled” norm.53 The medical and social models of disability roughly cor-
respond to my medicalized and psychosocial iterations of madness. However,
my own schema does not treat the medical and psychosocial as dichotomous;
rather, I emphasize their entanglements and convergences.
Dominant discourses of “disability” tend to center the physical body,
treating disabled ­people as “physically” feeble, infirm, undercapacitated. In
contrast, normative notions of madness cast madpersons as dangerously
hypercapacitated—­that is, able and liable to do harm that sane persons could
barely fathom, let alone act upon. Addressing such exigencies, the burgeon-
ing field of mad studies centers the lived experience of madpersons—­especially
consumers, survivors, and ex-­patients of psychiatric systems—­and advances
agendas for mad liberation. Brenda A. LeFrançois, Robert Menzies, and Geof-
frey Reaume are the editors of Mad M ­ atters: A Critical Reader in Canadian
Mad Studies (2013), the most extensive collection of writings in mad studies
to date. In an introduction articulating a comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and
intersectional platform for mad studies, they write:
To work with and within the language of madness is by no means to
deny the psychic, spiritual, and material pains and privations endured
by countless ­people with histories of encounters with the psy disciplines.
To the contrary, it is to acknowledge and validate t­hese experiences
as being authentically h ­ uman, while at the same time rejecting clini-
cal labels that pathologize and degrade; challenging the reductionistic
­assumptions and effects of the medical model; locating psychiatry and
its ­human subjects within wider historical, institutional, and cultural con-
texts; and advancing the position that m ­ ental health research, writing,
and advocacy are primarily about opposing oppression and promoting
­human justice.54

Mad Is a Place
13
I share their commitment to mad study that honors the personhood, lived
experience, and agency of madpersons while recognizing the abjection that
frequently haunts mad life. Like the editors of Mad ­Matters, I am invested in
“promoting ­human justice”—­alongside, I might add, relief, revelation, joy, and
liberation—­for madpersons and other psychosocial outcasts. However, I
­respectfully diverge from the editors’ quest, articulated ­later in their introduc-
tion, for a mad studies “steadfastly arrayed against biomedical psychiatry.”55
While I decry the dire harm that biomedical psychiatry has wrought on many
pathologized ­people, I also know that some patients and survivors find utility
in it. To “validate and celebrate survivor experience and cultures,” as the editors
rightly intend, we might sometimes cautiously, provisionally, ambivalently,
improperly, subversively take up biomedical psychiatry—­all while we pursue
its radical transformation.56
Another compendium of mad studies appears in “Mad ­Futures: Affect/
Theory/Violence,” a 2017 special issue of the scholarly journal American
Quarterly. Guest editors Tanja Aho, Liat Ben-­Moshe, and Leon  J. Hilton
remark that the field of mad studies “draws on de­cades of scholarship and
activism examining how psychiatric disabilities or differences must be
understood not only as medical conditions but also as historical formations
that have justified all manner of ill-­treatment and disenfranchisement—­
even as they have also formed the basis for po­liti­cal identities, social move-
ments, and cultural practices of re­sis­tance.”57 In this passage, they note the
multiplicity of madness, which is at once a “medical,” “historical,” “po­liti­
cal,” “social,” and “cultural” formation. Furthermore, they acknowledge both
the abjection that may beset madness and the insurgent energy that may
emanate from it. Foundational to my own study is attention to madness as
a complex and dynamic pro­cess that may entail both devastating abjection
and mighty agency.
This complexity is illustrated in the juxtaposition of two common figures
of speech: to snap and to click. In Anglophone idiom, to snap is to break, to
come undone, to lose control, to go crazy; to click is to come together, to fall
into place, to make sense. Much as the sounds of physical snaps and physi-
cal clicks are sometimes indistinguishable to the ear, the pro­cesses signified
in ­these idioms are sometimes indistinguishable to critical interpretation. As
this book reveals, sometimes coming undone is precisely how one falls into
place. Sometimes a breakdown doubles as a breakthrough. Sometimes a snap
is a click. Sometimes. I recognize and reckon with occasions where madness
entails pain, danger, terror, degradation, and harm for t­ hose who experience it

Chapter One
14
and ­those in its vicinity. But I hasten to mention that Reason may entail pain,
terror, abjection, and harm, too. In fact, far more modern harm has been perpe-
trated u­ nder the aegis of Reason—­I have in mind chattel slavery, colonialism,
imperialism, genocide, war, and other evils both momentous and mundane—­
than committed by rogue madpersons.58
As we work to destigmatize madness, including the medicalized madness
of ­mental illness, it is crucial that we resist romanticizing it. Feminist bioethicist
and disability studies scholar Elizabeth Donaldson warns that “the madness-­
as-­feminist-­rebellion meta­phor might at first seem like a positive strategy for
combating the stigma traditionally associated with m ­ ental illness. However,
this meta­phor indirectly diminishes the lived experience of many p­ eople dis-
abled by ­mental illness.”59 Indeed, the “madness-­as-­feminist-­rebellion meta­phor”
risks evacuating madness of its lived complexity in order to flatten and polish it
into a shiny po­liti­cal badge. Whereas Donaldson admonishes against abstract-
ing madness into a positive symbol, psychiatrist Robert Barrett critiques how
madness is reduced to a negative sign. He suggests that schizo­phre­nia is co-­
opted to “represent symbolically much of what has gone wrong in the modern
world,” forcing schizophrenic p­ eople to bear “the responsibility of representing
an alienated, fragmented, meaningless, self-­absorbed society—­a schizophrenic
society.”60 While simplistic meta­phors may be rhetorically expedient, they
come at grave ethical cost if they distort and objectify ­people. With ­these cau-
tions in mind, I center repre­sen­ta­tions of madness that illuminate, rather than
efface, its lived experience.
No ­matter how carefully I qualify my mobilization of madness, and de-
spite my work to avoid romanticizing it, this study might incite the ire of a
cohort I call rationalist readers. Analogous to the moral reader hailed in slave
narratives and sentimental novels, the rationalist reader—­and more broadly, the
rationalist audience—is the presumed paradigmatic consumer of psychonorma-
tive culture. Such a reader possesses psychonormative sensibilities, adheres to
Reason’s common sense, and shuns madness as categorically detrimental. Some
rationalist readers may fear that my focus on mad blackness reinforces myths
of black savagery and undermines the “respectable” proj­ect of Reasonable black-
ness. The latter proj­ect puts faith in Reason, a structure that I approach with
well-­warranted suspicion (and perhaps paranoia). Rather than integrate black
­people into the pantheon of Reason, or seek a place for them at its hallowed
­table, I want to interrogate the logics that undergird that pantheon and prop
up that ­table. I am especially interested in artists who refuse to have a seat, but
would rather flip the ­table and carry their meals outside.

Mad Is a Place
15
DRAPETOMANIACAL SLAVES AND REBELS
(OR, MAD BLACK MOVEMENTS)

Some of ­those black captives in slave ships resolved to go outside, too.61 They
leapt from the decks of t­ hose vessels and into the Atlantic Ocean, choosing bio-
logical death over the wretchedness that sociologist Orlando Patterson deems
“social death.”62 Typically, psychiatry labels such leaps suicide and pathologizes
them as the outcome of absolute self-abnegation. While the frame of psycho-
pathology is apt for apprehending why some ­people take their own lives, it
cannot hold all ­those Flying Africans. Amid the misery of the ­Middle Passage,
suicidal ideation might be a mode of radical dreaming, an urge to escape to a
distant elsewhere in an afterlife, otherworld, ancestral gathering place, heaven,
or home. For the captive on the ship, suicide might be an act of radical self-­care,
intended to relieve and leave the hurt of the hold and expedite arrival in that
elsewhere.63 Sometimes the leap was not a plummet to doom, but a launch into
flight; not an outcome of self-­abnegation, but an act of self-­assertion; not a bog
of hopelessness, but an outburst of radical hope hurled into another world. To
be clear, I do not glibly romanticize suicide; I know and ardently assert that
each life is sacred, singular, precious, miraculous, and should be treated with
ineffable care. At the same time, I acknowledge that t­here are conditions of
unbearable duress where taking one’s own life might be a critical and ethical
act—­albeit dreadful and woeful, too. How to Go Mad attends to ­people and
practices who, like t­hose Flying Africans, w ­ ill not be captured by normative
Reason.
By the nineteenth c­ entury, the slave ship gave way to the plantation as
the paradigmatic site of black abjection and confinement in the Western
Hemi­sphere. Meanwhile, the ship of fools, if it ever existed, was succeeded
by the prison ­house and ­later the asylum as the preferred receptacle for the
allegedly insane.64 Amid ­these shifts, the association of blackness and madness
­remained. In antebellum Amer­i­ca, that association manifested in the similar
logics used to justify the plantation and the asylum. Literary and cultural his-
torian Benjamin Reiss writes that “both institutions revoked the civil liberties
of a confined population in the name of public order and the creation of an
efficient ­labor force, and both ­housed a purportedly subrational population . . . ​
with the asylum’s triumph over madness paralleling the white race’s subduing
of the black.”65 The plantation and asylum w ­ ere forums in which arbiters of
antebellum Reason rehearsed methods of domination and developed logics of
justification.
I want to linger at the site of the asylum to highlight the salience of space
and movement in modern notions of madness. Within Anglophone idiom,
Chapter One
16
 subjects go crazy, as though mad is a place or constellation of places. The ship
of fools, the insane asylum, the psychiatric hospital, the carnival, the wrong
side of the supposed line between genius and madness, and even the continent
of Africa are frequently mapped as mad places within Western discourse. It
is as though madness is a metaphysical zone, a location outside the gentrified
precincts and patrolled borders of Reason. Or maybe madness is a mode of
motion occasioned in treacherous terrain: a wavering, trembling, swelling, zig-
zagging, brimming, bursting, shattering, or splattering movement that disrupts
Reason’s supposedly steady order and tidy borders. It seems to me that mad-
ness, like diaspora, is both location and locomotion. Madness, like diaspora, is
both place and pro­cess.66 Madness and diaspora transgress normative arrange-
ments—of the sane and sovereign, in turn.
The transgressive motion of fugitive slaves was framed as madness-­as-­
kinesis by proslavery psychiatry. In 1851, the prominent Confederate physician
Samuel Cartwright coined drapetomania, which he described as “the disease
causing Negroes to run away.”67 As formulated by Cartwright, drapetomania
is a racialized diagnosis that exclusively afflicts “Negroes”-as-slaves, reflecting
an antiblack antebellum insistence on conflating blackness and slaveness.68 Of
course, this discursive conflation was allied with the material, l­egal, and exis-
tential yoking of blackness and slaveness in chattel slavery.
Cartwright further argues that “the cause in the most of cases, that in-
duces the negro to run away from ser­vice, is as much a disease of the mind as
any other species of ­mental alienation, and much more curable, as a general
rule.” He suggests that drapetomania can be cured if the slaveholder upholds a
dual role as disciplinarian master (with use of the whip, so that slaves w ­ ill fear-
fully obey) and paternalistic protector (so that slaves w­ ill be made agreeable by
bonds of affection and the incentive of protection).69 In pathologizing black
self-­emancipation, Cartwright joins a proslavery, antiblack conspiracy against
black freedom: antiblack slave codes criminalized black freedom; antiblack
religion demonized black freedom; antiblack philosophy stigmatized black
freedom; and antiblack slaveholders and vigilantes terrorized black freedom. It
is no won­der, then, that antiblack medicine would pathologize black freedom.
­Under the obscene regime and episteme of antebellum slavery, black freedom
was crime, sin, stigma, liability, and sickness, too.
Whereas drapetomania supposedly compelled black ­people to flee ser-
vitude, Cartwright coined another psychopathology to ail them once they
found freedom. He writes that “Dysaesthesia Aethiopica is a disease peculiar
to negroes, affecting both mind and body. . . . ​[I]t prevails among f­ ree negroes,
nearly all of whom are more or less afflicted with it, that have not got some
Mad Is a Place
17
white person to direct and to take care of them.” Cartwright claims that black
­people are constitutionally unfit for freedom, sickened by it, and that they are
mentally and physically healthier when enslaved. To have Cartwright tell it, the
motley symptoms of dysaesthesia aethiopica include cognitive decline, leth-
argy, lesions, and skin insensitivity. In a flourish of melodramatic antiblackness,
he decrees that to “narrate [dysaesthesia aethiopica’s] symptoms and effects
among them would be to write a history of the ruins and dilapidation of Hayti,
and ­every spot of earth they have ever had uncontrolled possession over for any
length of time.”70 He names the first ­free black republic as ground zero in a sort
of hemispheric epidemic of dysaesthesia aethiopica. If mad is a place, according
to Cartwright, it might be “Hayti.”71
The notion that slavery was salutary for black p­ eople also infused antebellum
po­liti­cal rhe­toric. John C. Calhoun, an eminent nineteenth-­century ­politician
whose ­career included stints as US Secretary of State and US Vice President,
offered this justification for antiblack chattel slavery circa 1840: “­Here is proof
of the necessity of slavery. The African is incapable of self-­care and sinks into
lunacy u­ nder the burden of freedom. It is a mercy to him to give him the guard-
ianship and protection from ­mental death.”72 Calhoun claims that freedom
­will careen Africans into lunacy, into a helpless and mindless oblivion that
he deems “­mental death.” If slavery was social death and freedom was ­mental
death, ­those Africans ­were caught in a deadly double bind—­doomed one way or
another. Within the wicked machinations and pernicious logics of antebellum
antiblackness, black ­people, ­whether enslaved or ­free, ­were the living dead.
Beyond discursive conflations of blackness and madness, slavery induced
lived convergences of blackness and madness. It perpetrated systematic trauma,
induced ­mental distress, and ignited crises of subjectivity—­which is to say, it
produced phenomenal madness—in black p­ eople both enslaved and ­free.
Regarding black ­women in colonial and antebellum Amer­i­ca, for example,
Nobel laureate and novelist Toni Morrison explains that “black ­women had to
deal with post-­modern prob­lems in the nineteenth ­century and ­earlier. . . . ​Cer-
tain kinds of dissolution, the loss of and the need to reconstruct certain kinds
of stability. Certain kinds of madness, deliberately ­going mad in order, as one
of the characters [from the novel Beloved] says, ‘in order not to lose your mind.’
­These strategies for survival made the truly modern person. Th ­ ey’re a response
to predatory Western phenomena.”73 Morrison suggests that “­going mad” was
sometimes a strategy to doggedly clutch hold of one’s mind when Reason
would steal or smash it. If Reason is benefactor of white supremacy, proponent
of antiblack slavocracy, and underwriter of patriarchal dominion, an enslaved

Chapter One
18
black ­woman might fare better by ­going insane instead. Rather than remain
captive ­behind the barbed fences of slavocratic sanity, she might find refuge—­
however tenuous, vexed, and incomplete—in the fugitivity of madness.
Morrison fleshes out ­these themes in her Pulitzer Prize–­winning novel
Beloved (1987). The story is inspired by the life of Margaret Garner, a fugi-
tive from slavery who escaped a Kentucky plantation with her f­ amily in 1856
and settled in the neighboring “­free” state of Ohio. When slave catchers
­(authorized by the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act to legally stalk and abduct black per-
sons living in “­free” states) apprehended Garner, she attempted to kill her four
­children rather than see them repossessed into slavery. Like the Flying Africans,
Garner preferred biological death over social death and sought the former for
her ­children to spare them the latter. She succeeded in killing only her two-­
year-­old ­daughter, Mary.
Margaret Garner is the basis for the novel’s primary protagonist, Sethe,
while Mary is inspiration for the novel’s titular character, Beloved. As nar-
rated in the story, Sethe goes mad in order to perform a killing that is utterly
­unconscionable within nearly ­every model of motherhood. And yet, her deed
is also an astonishing, unflinching, unconditional attempt at motherly pro-
tection; she intends to save her sons and ­daughters from enslavement by any
means, at any cost. In the moment before the killing, Sethe has a breakdown
that feels like beating wings and probing beaks:
She was squatting in the garden and when she saw them coming and rec-
ognized schoolteacher’s hat, she heard wings. ­Little hummingbirds stuck
their needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat
their wings. And if she thought anything it was No. No. Nono. Nonono.
­Simple. She just flew. Collected ­every bit of life she had made, all the parts
of her that w
­ ere precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed,
dragged them through the veil, out, away, over ­there where no one could
hurt them. Over ­there.74
Sethe originally sought sanctuary in an “over t­ here” north of the Ohio River,
but its freedom proved ephemeral and illusory. Now she seeks freedom in a
more distant “over ­there,” in an otherworldly elsewhere outside the jurisdic-
tion of fugitive slave laws and beyond the reach of a slaveholder called “school-
teacher.”75 The man who reigns over the Kentucky plantation that Sethe fled,
schoolteacher is an atrocious agent of antiblack Reason. He proposes that black
­people are inhuman, and he methodically tortures and dehumanizes them
in order to fabricate tautological proof of his claim. He commits merciless

Mad Is a Place
19
cruelty ­under the auspices of Reasonable inquiry and scientific method. When
he arrives in Ohio to find Sethe in a shed covered in the blood of her dead
child, slain only moments before, schoolteacher resolves against re-­enslaving
her and her offspring. His decision does not appear to be an act of compassion
upon beholding that dreadful scene. He seems, instead, to be driven by eco-
nomic calculation: the f­amily is damaged goods unworthy of repossession.76
Schoolteacher also appears to judge infanticide as an especially base depravity,
unaware or unconcerned that his own evil is what drives the m ­ other to kill her
child. After all, Sethe’s infanticidal madness is a desperate attempt to escape
schoolteacher’s genocidal Reason.
Twenty-­five years before Garner’s tragedy, another enslaved person’s violent
defiance and alleged madness attracted far greater notoriety in the US public
sphere. Nathaniel Turner was a self-­avowed prophet who claimed that divine
inspiration led him to or­ga­nize a bloody revolt in Southampton, ­Virginia, in
1831. Turner and his co-­conspirators massacred some sixty local white ­people
and incited horror in countless o­ thers. ­After his capture, while confined in jail
and awaiting execution, Turner supposedly dictated his account of the insur-
rection to his court-­appointed counsel, Thomas Gray. In the resulting docu-
ment, “The Confessions of Nat Turner: The Leader of the Late Insurrection
in Southampton, VA,” Turner purportedly confesses the following about the
weeks before the uprising: “Many w ­ ere the plans formed and rejected by us,
and it affected my mind to such a degree, that I fell sick, and the time passed
without our coming to any determination how to commence.”77 This unspeci-
fied sickness resulted from the anxiety of devising revolt, of plans proposed and
rejected, of apocalyptic dreams deferred, which “affected” his mind. It seems
that Turner is describing ­mental illness and distress.
If Turner’s own language implies ­mental illness, Gray charges madness out-
right. He deems Turner “a gloomy fanatic” and refers to his “dark, bewildered,
and overwrought mind.”78 It comes as no surprise that Gray would label Turner
mad. Turner committed the most severe violations of slavery’s psychosocial
­status quo: he rejected the subjection demanded of slaves and chose bloody
insurrection instead. More curiously, Gray opines that Turner “is a complete
fanatic, or plays his part most admirably. On other subjects he possesses an
uncommon share of intelligence, with a mind capable of attaining any t­hing;
but warped and perverted by the influence of early impressions.”79 The posses-
sion of “a mind capable of attaining any ­thing” is commensurate with m ­ odern
­notions of genius. Remarkably, then, the deadliest slave insurrectionist in the
history of the antebellum United States was a self-­proclaimed prophet, an alleged
madman, and, in Gray’s estimation, a perverse genius. The prophet, madper-
Chapter One
20
son, and genius all occupy epistemic alterity. B ­ ecause of the prophet’s access to
heaven’s revelations, the madperson’s exile from the domain of Reason, and the
genius’s elevation above ordinary intelligence curves, all three of ­these figures
inhabit spheres of mind supposedly inaccessible to normal-­minded masses. As
portrayed in “Confessions,” Turner traverses a genius | prophet | madman trip-
tych, partitioned by t­ hose proverbially thin lines that separate madness from
genius and lunacy from prophecy.
Gray also suggests that Turner could be pretending all along, “play[ing]
his part most admirably.” The implication is that Turner might be feigning in-
sanity to elicit mercy or strike fear in his punishers. Fifty years ­later, Nietz­sche
would write that ­those “irresistibly drawn to throw off the yoke of any kind of
morality and to frame new laws had, if they ­were not actually mad, no alterna-
tive but to make themselves or pretend to be mad.”80 ­Whether or not this char-
acterization applies to Turner, it alerts us to another use of madness: as equip-
ment for dissemblance. As this study w ­ ill show, some crazy persons exploit the
inscrutability of madness to use it as mask, cloak, and shield.

BLACK RADICAL MADNESS IN

THE TWENTIETH ­CENTURY

I have surveyed several discursive conflations, historical intersections, and

phenomenal convergences of madness and blackness in early modern through
antebellum contexts. Now I turn to a few key expressions and theorizations of
black radical madness in the twentieth ­century.
The figure of the “crazy nigger”81 swaggered prominently in African Amer-
ican vernacular imagination at the dawn of the twentieth c­ entury, the period
that historian Rayford Logan labels the “nadir” of (postslavery) US race rela-
tions.82 The “crazy nigger” is an outlaw persona who does as he or she pleases,
who is reckless, defiant, courageous, and profane, who flagrantly flouts codes
of middle-­class respectability and racial propriety. Whereas Reasonable p­ eople
are chastened by fear of vio­lence, stigma, and death, the “crazy nigger” seems
undaunted by such concerns. He or she ­will fearlessly face any adversary—­
including power­ful white racists—­and thus emerges as a superlative represen-
tative of insurgent blackness.
The “crazy nigger” was a polarizing figure among black p­ eople in the nadir:
a folk hero or villain depending upon the perspective of his or her beholder. He
or she was a hero to ­those who sought a model of black defiance—­providing
vicarious wish fulfillment for black ­people who dreamed of, but never acted
upon, revenge fantasies against antiblack racists. ­These would-be avengers

Mad Is a Place
21
might utter the phrase crazy nigger like an honorific. On the other hand, this
mad figure would be viewed as a nuisance by t­ hose invested in placating white-
ness and aligning with bourgeois respectability. To such avowedly respectable
persons, the “crazy nigger” was a liability for the race, a dangerous rabble-­rouser
stoking racial antagonism and courting racist retribution. From the mouths of
­these conformists, the words crazy nigger might sound like an invective. What
I want to emphasize is that black vernacular cultures recognized and theorized
the po­liti­cal resonance of craziness, deploying the term crazy nigger to describe
agents of rebellion.
At the dawn of the twentieth c­ entury, black studies trailblazer William
Edward Burghardt Du Bois also theorized a sort of racialized madness. In his
1903 tome The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois famously describes “double con-
sciousness”: “one ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls,
two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body,
whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”83 Double
consciousness entails internecine “warring” in mind that might resemble the
psychic unruliness and crisis I call phenomenal madness. Whereas the con-
dition is often regarded as an existential affliction and impairment, I want to
emphasize that it is also an endowment. Double consciousness grants black
Americans a perceptual aptitude and epistemic access unavailable to their white
counter­parts. To live with this split subjectivity is to behold the spectacular
scene of Amer­i­ca’s black-­white racial drama while also privy to the backstage
content of black life, full of complex socioracial phenomena concealed from
white gazes. Thus, for all of the existential angst it entails, double conscious-
ness might also serve as an instrument for insurgency: a scopic tool and radar
technology to secretly seek black horizons of being that are hidden from white
surveillance.
Other prominent antiracist and anticolonial theorists centered madness
in their accounts of black suffering and black insurgency in the first half of
the twentieth ­century. In 1941, amid world war, anticolonial foment, and Pan-­
African awakenings, the Négritude critic and theorist Suzanne Roussy Césaire
intervened in the discourse of madness and space. In a letter to the surrealist
magazine View, she refuses to characterize madness as a pit of abjection; rather,
she imagines “the domain of the strange, the Marvelous, and the fantastic,”
wherein lies “the freed image, dazzling and beautiful, with a beauty that could
not be more unexpected and overwhelming. H ­ ere are the poet, the painter, and
the artist, presiding over the metamorphoses and the inversions of the world
­under the sign of hallucination and madness.”84 Césaire’s domain of the Mar-
velous blooms at the crossroads of a surrealist rebuke of rationalism, an antico-
Chapter One
22
 lonial rejection of colonial Reason, and Négritude’s affirmation of black radical
possibility. She conjures a decolonial fantasia where radical creativity begets
beauty that is surreal, sublime, subversive, and mad.
Suzanne Césaire’s collaborator and husband, Aimé Césaire, was a ­Martinican
poet, essayist, and statesman who championed surrealism, despised colonialism,
and marched at the vanguard of the Négritude movement. Furthermore, he
reportedly described his poetic pro­cess as “beneficial madness.”85 His 1947 epic
poem, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, portrays a colonized black
protagonist who endures existential despair but eventually emerges into revo-
lutionary consciousness and embraces the ontological blackness of Négritude.
The poem’s speaker professes “hate” for colonial “reason” (Reason) and pledges
allegiance to a living madness: “the madness that remembers, the madness that
howls, the madness that sees, the madness that is unleashed.”86 This madness
possesses memory, voice, vision, and agency. Thus vivified, it is a power­ful ally
of colonized ­peoples against the colonizer’s pernicious Reason.
A mentee of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon was a black Martinican doctor
who developed a radical psychiatry that has influenced black and anticolo-
nial freedom strug­gles worldwide. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon
describes “a massive psychoexistential complex” erected by antiblackness and
­colonialism.87 That complex is a metaphysical prison h ­ ouse that confines
black ­people and incites maddening crises of subjectivity, identity, humanity,
and ontology. But Fanon, like both Césaires, believes that revolution can rise
amid such wretched states. At the start of this chapter, I referenced Fanon’s
“zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly naked
­declivity where an au­then­tic upheaval can be born.”88 Fanon’s declivity is so low
and empty that it grants unobstructed space to gather momentum for “au­then­
tic upheaval.”
The meta­phorical proximity of Fanon’s “zone of nonbeing” and Spillers’s
“nowhere at all” is not the only place ­these theorists adjoin. The two also share
a commitment to adapting psychoanalysis to address the lifeworlds of Afrodia-
sporic ­peoples. In “All the ­Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud’s
Wife Was Your ­Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race,” Spillers contends that the
African American “lifeworld offers a quin­tes­sen­tial occasion for a psychoana-
lytic reading, given the losses that converge on its naming. . . . ​The situation of
the African American community is more precisely ambivalent than any Amer-
ican case we can concoct, in light of its incomplete ‘Americanization’ even at
this late date.”89 She endorses the efficacy of psychoanalysis for interpreting
the deep ambivalence that marks blackness in Amer­i­ca. For Spillers, however,
generic psychoanalysis ­won’t do. She refashions psychoanalytic equipment to
Mad Is a Place
23
 enhance its utility for black subjects—­cutting, pushing, stretching, and sutur-
ing psychoanalysis in ways that Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan prob­ably
did not intend or foresee. For example, Spillers writes that “African persons in
‘­Middle Passage’ w ­ ere literally suspended in the ‘oceanic,’ if we think of the lat-
ter in its Freudian orientation as an analogy for undifferentiated identity.”90 In
Spillers’s custody, the oceanic is not merely a feature of infant subjectivity in a
transhistorical model of psychological development. ­Here, the oceanic also sig-
nifies racialized subjection and subjectmaking amid the atrocity of the M ­ iddle
Passage. Spillers stands among a critical mass of black cultural theorists and,
more broadly, cultural theorists of color, who critically adapt psychoanalysis to
address exigencies of race. Joining this cohort, I occasionally recalibrate Freud-
ian and Lacanian psychoanalysis to engage the specificities of blackness and its
antagonists.91
Activist-­psychiatrists Price Cobbs and William Grier also retool Eurocen-
tric psy science to address the lives of black ­people. Published in the immediate
aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and amid the righ­teous and
riotous rage that ensued, their 1968 study Black Rage is a sweeping explora-
tion of the psychosocial lives of black Americans from the colonial era through
the age of Black Power. Interweaving psychiatric case studies, historiography,
so­cio­log­i­cal data, and social psy­chol­ogy, the authors chart purportedly “path-
ological” features of black life as well as the psychosocial and psychocultural
adaptations that black p­ eople develop for self-­protection, catharsis, and heal-
ing.92 The “black rage” announced in their book title is at once a symptom of
antiblack trauma, a defense against antiblack trauma, and a mighty force in
­battles against antiblackness.
In fact, the shift from Civil Rights to Black Power po­liti­cal paradigms
might be framed as a pivot from a politics of respectability to a politics of rage.
Frustrated with models of passive re­sis­tance, some black activists and artists got
mad—­embracing rage as a power­ful resource against antiblackness. The furious
speeches of Kwame Ture; the incendiary, incantatory writings of Amiri Baraka;
the exquisitely outraged outbursts of Nina Simone; the seething anger and
schizophrenic angst surging through Adrienne Kennedy’s drama; Malcolm X’s
status as “the angriest black man in Amer­i­ca”;93 and the “race riots” that King
described as “the language of the unheard,”94 all reflect a politics of rage and
mobilization of madness in black radical traditions of the 1960s.
The sociopo­liti­cal fervor of the 1960s also fomented the antipsychiatry
movement, propelled by a motley array of psychiatric dissidents, including
consumers, survivors, ex-­patients, activists, academics, and radical clinicians.
Members of this movement question the legitimacy of psychiatric diagnosis,
Chapter One
24
 alleging that mainstream psychiatry has l­ittle or no basis in objective science.
Often regarded as a key figure in the movement, Thomas Szasz suggests that
the very notion of ­mental illness is a sham: a system of subjective moral and
ideological judgments masquerading as scientific facticity. He contends that
the diagnosis of ­mental illness is merely an expression of social disapproval
shrouded in medical jargon and granted exorbitant power. R.  D. Laing, an-
other key figure in the antipsychiatry movement, argues that schizo­phre­nia
is not an organic disease, but rather the effect of existential antagonisms and
alienation from repressive ­family and social structures.95
Like antipsychiatry activists, I recognize that degradation, dispossession,
disenfranchisement, dishonor, torture, murder, and other forms of harm have
been inflicted on madpersons by psychiatry. Furthermore, I re­spect antipsychia-
try’s attention to racism, sexism, classism, colonialism, homophobia, transpho-
bia, and other pernicious ideologies that have effected and affected mainstream
psychiatry. And yet, I hasten to note that many psychiatric clients and consum-
ers find healing and even empowerment through clinical intervention. Consid-
ering that psychiatry has engendered both harm and benefit for madpersons, we
would be wise to approach it with critical ambivalence—­rebuking its malicious
modes while embracing its therapeutic and insurgent potential. In this vein, I
appreciate the radical psychiatry of Fanon, Cobbs, and Grier—as well as ­later
progressive innovations of clinicians like Alvin Poussaint and Joy DeGruy96—­
who grapple with the psychosocial exigencies of blackness.
The 1960s are the primary focus of The Protest Psychosis: How Schizo­phre­
nia Became a Black Disease (2010), by Jonathan Metzl, a psychiatrist and cul-
tural critic. By the turn of the twenty-­first ­century, African Americans w ­ ere
three to five times as likely as their white counter­parts to be diagnosed with
schizo­phre­nia, arguably the most stigmatized ­mental illness.97 Metzl traces
the blackening of schizo­phre­nia to Civil Rights–­era psychiatry and the wea-
ponization of the diagnosis against rebellious black men.98 He culls his book
title from a term that two racist psychiatrists coined in 1960s Amer­i­ca to char-
acterize schizo­phre­nia. Metzl writes, “Walter Bromberg and Franck Simon
­described schizo­phre­nia as a ‘protest psychosis’ whereby black men developed
‘hostile and aggressive feelings’ and ‘delusional anti-­whiteness’ ­after listening to
the words of Malcolm X, joining the Black Muslims, or aligning with groups
that preached militant re­sis­tance to white society. According to [Bromberg
and Simon], the men required psychiatric treatment ­because their symptoms
threatened not only their own sanity, but the social order of white Amer­i­ca.”99
I hasten to note that black ­women are also widely psychopathologized—as
­ferocious Sapphires and nymphomaniacal Jezebels—­even if patriarchy presumes
Mad Is a Place
25
them incapable of posing as grave a threat as black men.100 The fact is that black
women are subject to misogynist myths of female hysteria and antiblack fanta-
sies of black savagery.
Bromberg and Simon are heirs to the ignominious legacy of Samuel Cart-
wright. Their invention of “protest psychosis,” like Cartwright’s invention of
“drapetomania,” leverages medical authority to discredit black insurgency in
an era of racial unrest. Convinced that their antiblackness is perfectly Reason-
able, Bromberg and Simon denounce the “delusional anti-whiteness” of black
activists. I want to linger briefly on this notion of antiwhiteness. It seems to
me that when whiteness is a prized possession whose preservation is pretext
for the systematic degradation of black p­ eople, antiwhiteness is a justifiable
­position. When whiteness is a weapon of devastating power wielded against
black ­people, it is no won­der that some would become militant in the interest
of self-­defense. When whiteness is a structure of power commensurate with
white supremacy and antiblackness, “hostile and aggressive feelings” strike me
as neither “delusional” nor objectionable. Th­ ose “hostile and aggressive feelings”
reflect a ­will to rise up against tyranny, an impulse to thrust the foot off your
neck, a manifestation of the freedom drive. To be clear, the antiwhiteness that
I am describing is not hatred for white p­ eople; rather, it is animus t­ oward the
white supremacy that is militated beneath the banner of whiteness. It is pos­
si­ble to care for white ­people while also despising and opposing the world-­
historical ravages of whiteness-­as-­domination.
Remarkably, racist psychiatrists like Cartwright, Bromberg, and Simon
share an impor­tant conviction with antiracist psychiatrists like Fanon, Grier,
Cobbs, Poussaint, and DeGruy. Both groups agree that black ­people in the
West are susceptible to racialized psychopathologies. However, ­these camps
propose dramatically dif­fer­ent etiologies. Cartwright, Bromberg, and Simon
attribute such madness to inherent defects in black psyches and black cultures.
To the contrary, Fanon, Grier, Cobbs, Poussaint, and DeGruy indict antiblack
racism as the cause of racialized maladies ailing black ­people.
Proposing such divergent etiologies and espousing such contrary ideolo-
gies, it is no won­der that ­these cohorts prescribe dif­f er­ent treatments. Antiblack
psychiatry has variously encouraged enslavement, colonization, institutional-
ization, incarceration, disenfranchisement, assimilation to whiteness, abnega-
tion of blackness, and mind-­dulling or mind-­destroying medical procedures
as “treatments.” To the contrary, antiracist psychiatry prompts us to reckon
with the pathology of white supremacy, to attend to the ongoing trauma of
antiblackness, and, most ambitiously, to overturn the extant racial order.101
Regarding that “massive psychoexistential complex” imperiling black ­people,
Chapter One
26
for instance, Fanon writes: “I hope by analyzing it to destroy it.”102 By disclos-
ing its sinister blueprint and exposing its corroded foundation, Fanon hopes to
help demolish the complex.

A SHORT NOTE ON THE MADNESS

OF ANTIBLACKNESS

This study centers insurgent madness in black expressive cultures. However, I

want to remark upon the tyrannical madness at the core of antiblackness. In an
interview with journalist Charlie Rose, Morrison describes the psychopathol-
ogy of antiblack racism: “The ­people who do this ­thing, who practice racism,
are bereft. ­There is something distorted about the psyche. It’s a huge waste and
it’s a corruption. . . . ​It’s a profound neurosis that nobody examines for what
it is. It feels crazy. It is crazy. . . . ​It has just as much of a deleterious effect on
white ­people . . . ​as it does [on] black ­people.”103 Regarding the madness of
“extreme racism,” Poussaint puts it this way: “It is time for the American Psy-
chiatric Association to designate extreme racism as a ­mental health prob­lem by
recognizing it as a delusional psychotic symptom. Persons afflicted with such
psychopathology represent an immediate danger to themselves and o­ thers.”104
Both Morrison and Poussaint recognize that racism is an existential threat to
its targets as well as its adherents. Appropriating psychiatric and psychoana-
lytic discourse, we might conceptualize any number of racist pathologies: rac-
ist neurosis, racist delusion, racist narcissism, racist melancholia, racist anxiety
disorder, homicidal racist angst, and so forth.
The risk in framing antiblack racism as m ­ ental illness is that it poten-
tially locates the prob­lem of racism in individual psychopathology rather than
deeply entrenched systems and structures. Such a maneuver might cast racism
as a medical issue to be treated primarily in the psychiatric office or examina-
tion room, when, in fact, racism is a global catastrophe that must be eradicated
with social, cultural, po­liti­cal, epistemological, and, indeed, psychic upheaval.
It is worthwhile to pursue psychiatric understanding of individual racists, but
this pursuit must take place within a broader proj­ect of denouncing, disman-
tling, and demolishing racist structures. We can and must address individual
psychopathology and systemic injustice at once—­recognizing how they are
co-­constitutive and symbiotic.
If Donald J. Trump, the forty-­fifth president of the United States, is men-
tally ill, he offers a colossal case study in the convergence of individual psycho-
pathology and structural vio­lence. Trump’s power as US president means that
his individual m ­ ental condition can generate structural outcomes and alter

Mad Is a Place
27
global history. However, glib attempts to label Trump mentally ill are fraught
with psychonormative presumptions and distortions. Trump’s unpredictable
be­hav­ior, astounding incompetence, extreme egotism, and profound evil
have led some to conclude that he must be mentally ill—as though unpredict-
ability, incompetence, egotism, and evil must be symptoms of m ­ ental illness.
­These pseudodiagnoses reflect a psychonormative tendency to cast bad be­hav­
ior as ­mental illness and to conflate evil with madness.105
The term evil is often affixed to anything that dramatically opposes
the moral codes of an avowedly good majority—­much like the term mad
is ascribed to what­ever perplexes and vexes the avowedly sane majority.
However, over the past thousand years, myriad atrocities have ensued when
supposedly good majorities label outsiders evil and set upon combatting,
correcting, or cleansing away said evil. The Crusades, the Atlantic Slave
Trade, and the Holocaust, for example, all entailed leaders labeling ­others
evil and stoking vio­lence against that alleged evil. I propose a dif­fer­ent no-
tion of evil: I r­ egard it as a radical w
­ ill to harm, without mercy or compunc-
tion, that seeks , wreaks, and ­relishes said harm. This definition indicts many
of the so-­called good leaders and majorities I’ve referenced above, exposing
the vicious irony that much evil is committed in the name of, and ­under the
cover of, “good.”
In short, the discourse around Trump occasions four critical reminders:
not all bizarre be­hav­ior is ­mental illness; not all ineptitude results from psychi-
atric deterioration; not all egregious deeds are clinical symptoms; and madness
is not synonymous with evil.
Though I caution against the haphazard use of crazy to describe Trumpian
malfeasance, I acknowledge that Trump might be mad on some register. He
might experience a chaos of mind and crisis of meaning that is phenomenal
madness; he might meet diagnostic criteria for any number of m ­ ental illnesses,
perhaps antisocial or narcissistic personality disorder; and he surely exploits
and channels right-­wing, white supremacist rage. However, I hold that Trump
does not instantiate psychosocial madness. Across the broad arc of American
and Western modernity, his worrisome be­hav­ior is not psychosocial alterity;
instead, it is white supremacist Reason laid hideously bare. More broadly, he is
a blatant extension of, rather than a rupture from, the white supremacist, anti-
black, sexist, xenophobic, belligerent, and chauvinist psychosocial norms that
have historically prevailed in the United States. The Afropessimist phi­los­o­pher
Frank Wilderson has proclaimed, citing and riffing on the work of David Mar-
riott, that antiblack psychopathology is “supported and coordinated with all
the guns in the world.”106 If Trump is crazy, his madness is literally “supported
Chapter One
28
and coordinated” with more guns than the madness of any other living person
as I write ­these words.107
If we are invested in black liberation, it may feel satisfying to condemn
antiblackness as pathological and affirm black re­sis­tance as sane. However,
such a move would reinforce the psychonormative binary that casts madness as
patently bad and Reason as inherently good on opposite sides of a metaphysical
wall; we would simply be swapping the occupants from one side to the other. I
propose a more profound transformation: topple the wall and create liberated
spaces where psychosocial variance and racial plurality (among infinite other
modes of variance and plurality) can thrive in the care of radical compassion.

HOW TO GO MAD: CHAPTER BY CHAPTER

The chapters in this book span a broad range of genres and forms, from
experimental fiction to hip-­hop per­for­mance to stand-up comedy to poetry
to memoir. Each chapter is also polyvalent, exploring madness in its phe-
nomenal, medicalized, psychosocial, and furious forms. Furthermore, each
chapter is transdisciplinary, traversing and taking up approaches including
cultural studies, discourse analy­sis, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, black
feminist theory, disability theory, performative writing, mad methodology,
and beyond.
Following the pre­sent chapter’s meditation on madness and modernity,
chapter 2 is “ ‘He Blew His Brains Out through the Trumpet’: Buddy Bolden
and the Impossible Sound of Madness.” Set in New Orleans at the dawn of
the twentieth ­century, amid the nadir of post-­slavery US race relations and
the rise of jazz ­music, chapter  2 illuminates the lifeworld and afterlifeworld
of Charles “Buddy” Bolden. He was a turn-­of-­the-­twentieth-­century ragtime
phenom sometimes credited as the “inventor” of jazz m ­ usic; an alleged mad-
man who spent a quarter-­century in a Louisiana insane asylum; and a historical
enigma and archival phantom who cannot be apprehended with positivism,
but demands a mad methodology instead. I am interested in both Bolden’s his-
torical life, which leaves scant archival trace, and his mythical afterlife, which
teems with activity. That mythical afterlife is an assemblage of artistic surroga-
tions, fantasies, and recuperations—­created by artists like Jelly Roll Morton,
Ralph Ellison, Nina Simone, August Wilson, Michael Ondaatje, and Natasha
Trethewey—­inspired by Bolden and proliferating into his wake. Beyond inspiring
this surge of art, Bolden also inaugurates an intriguing archetype in the pantheon
of jazz: the mad jazzman. In the de­cades ­after Bolden’s ­confinement, a number of
jazz icons, including Sun Ra and Charles Mingus, would also allegedly go mad
Mad Is a Place
29
and spend time in psychiatric confinement. The chapter closes by convening
Bolden, Ra, and Mingus in a mad trio.108
From the specter of a mad jazzman, I turn to the “soul” of a mad blues-
woman in an interlude called “ ‘No Wiggles in the Dark of Her Soul’: Black
Madness, Meta­phor, and ‘Murder!’ ” This section begins with a provocation
from Clay, the protagonist of Amiri Baraka’s 1964 play Dutchman. In his
climactic monologue, Clay declares, “If Bessie Smith had killed some white
­people she ­wouldn’t have needed that ­music. . . . ​No meta­phors. No grunts. No
wiggles in the dark of her soul. Crazy niggers turning their backs on sanity.
When all it needs is that s­ imple act. Murder. Just murder! Would make us all
sane.”109 Amid his incendiary speech, Clay diagnoses a racialized madness
afflicting black Americans and argues that it must be sated by “meta­phor” or
“murder!” Launching from Clay’s words, this interlude carefully considers
interrelations between meta­phor and murder to set the scene for two subse-
quent chapters: one concerning a mad black w ­ oman who commits murder and
the other centering a mad black ­woman who makes art.
Chapter  3, “The Blood-­Stained Bed,” surrounds the life of Eva Canada,
the protagonist of Gayl Jones’s 1976 novel Eva’s Man. Since her working-­class
girlhood in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s, Eva’s life has been over-
run by sexual predation and vio­lence. At age thirty-­eight, as though unleashing
de­cades worth of rage and vengeance, Eva murders and mutilates a man who
seeks to sexually objectify her. She is quickly apprehended, deemed criminally
insane, and condemned to a psychiatric prison. Carefully, I read Eva’s vio­
lence as a terrible catharsis aimed at (a man who becomes proxy for) a racist-­
sexist world. The chapter reveals how madness animates and structures Eva’s
first-­person narrative, how symptomology becomes narratology in the book,
how an act of “murder!” and a creation of “meta­phor” converge in the story.
­Because Eva’s deeds violently violate moral norms, she pushes the limits of radi-
cal compassion.
Chapter 4 is “A Portrait of the Artist as a Mad Black W ­ oman.” Therein
I read Ntozake Shange’s 1994 experimental novel, Liliane: Resurrection of the
­Daughter, as a meditation on black sublimation where black madness becomes
black art. Born to black elites in suburban New Jersey circa World War II,
Liliane Lincoln grows to become an avant-­garde per­for­mance artist, painter,
sculptor, sexual adventurer, cosmopolitan world-­wanderer, feminist, and faith-
ful patient of psychoanalysis. Her peculiar madness—­the product of antiblack
antagonisms, misogynist traumas, and bourgeois repressions, all revealed in
stylized scenes of psychoanalysis—­achieves release through meta­phor and
art. Liliane spins neurosis into artful language and constantly sublimates fury,
Chapter One
30
 angst, and self-­avowed “crazy” into beauty. But she is not always an exemplar
of sublimation. When demeaned and imperiled by a white male lover, Lil-
iane ponders the ethics and efficacy of killing. Alongside Eva’s Man, Liliane
prompts a careful meditation on artistic and violent vicissitudes of madness.
Shifting from lit­er­a­ture to per­for­mance, but remaining in the field of black
­women’s radical creativity, chapter 5 is “ ‘ The ­People Inside My Head, Too’: Ms.
Lauryn Hill Sings Truth to Power in the Key of Madness.” At the heart of this
chapter is hip-­hop musician Lauryn Hill, who was twenty-­three years old when
her 1998 solo debut ­album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, became one of the
most critically and commercially successful hip-­hop releases in history. Within
three years, however, Hill had supposedly fallen from f­ avor in American pop
culture and had allegedly gone mad. This chapter illuminates how vari­ous pun-
dits and publics impute madness to Hill and how Hill herself produces, acti-
vates, and brandishes madness in ser­vice of poignant protest ­music. ­Toward
­these aims, I chart the specter of madness in several of her per­for­mances, espe-
cially her 2001 mtv Unplugged No. 2.0 ­album; I examine interviews wherein
she explains her “crazy” ­music and conduct; and I analyze media depictions of
Hill as a black w ­ oman askew. This chapter also features hip-­hop musician and
producer Kanye West, who cites Hill as one of his greatest influences, makes
black radical ­music (sometimes interspersed with right-­wing provocations),
and endures widespread accusations of madness.
Chapter 6 considers another iconic postsoul performer supposedly gone
mad: the comedian Dave Chappelle. Titled “The Joker’s Wild, but That Nig-
ga’s Crazy: Dave Chappelle Laughs ­until It Hurts,” this sixth chapter begins
with an incident in 2004 on the set of his hit series Chappelle’s Show. When
he performed a satirical blackface sketch, Chappelle heard what sounded like
a sinister inflection in a crewmember’s laughter. The moment was both snap
and click for Chappelle, who suddenly realized that his comedy might inadver-
tently endorse antiblackness. He became disillusioned with fame, abandoned
the third season of his show, reneged on a lucrative contract, absconded from
Amer­i­ca altogether, and headed to South Africa. Remarkably, tabloid media
and public discussion insinuated that he went crazy and went to Africa—as
though the two w ­ ere parallel journeys—­evoking racist tropes of Africa as epi-
center of unReason and savagery. In this chapter, I examine the specter of mad-
ness within Chappelle’s per­for­mance repertoire and public persona. In par-
ticular, I read his comical threats that he might lose his mind; his satires of the
madness of white supremacy and black abjection; the tabloid allegations that
he had gone mad; his journey across a mad diaspora; and his affinities with the
iconoclastic comedian and self-­avowed “crazy nigger,” Richard Pryor.
Mad Is a Place
31
 Collectively, chapters 5 and 6 investigate what I call the maddening of black
genius, a phrase denoting the antiblack derision of blackness as “crazy,” the out-
rage of black artists antagonized by such antiblackness, and the unruliness of
mind that sometimes ensues.
The seventh and final chapter, “Songs in Madtime: Black ­Music, Madness,
and Metaphysical Syncopation,” advances a theory of madtime. As I conceive it,
madtime is a transgressive temporality that coincides with phenomenologies of
madness. It includes the quick time of mania; the slow time of depression; the
infinite, exigent now of schizo­phre­nia; and the spiraling now-­then-­now-­then-­
now of melancholia, among other polymorphous arrangements. As a critical
supplement to colored ­people’s time, queer time, and crip time, madtime flouts
the normative schedules of Reason, trips the lockstep of Western teleology,
disobeys the dominant beat, and swerves instead into a metaphysical offbeat. I
contend that some black musicians are prime prac­ti­tion­ers of madtime, adapt-
ing it as a time signature in protest m ­ usic. In order to bear out and sound out
this claim, I sample the ­music of Buddy Bolden, Nina Simone, Charles Mingus,
Lauryn Hill, Kendrick Lamar, and Frank Ocean—­featuring the lyrical language
of Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, and Suzan-­Lori Parks—to stage a medley in
madtime. Throughout the chapter, I consider how black protest movements
might critically, ethically, radically activate madtime in pursuit of liberation.
I close with a brief afterword, “The Nutty Professor (A Confession),”
which ponders the specter of madness and the figure of the black scholar. In
the pro­cess, I reveal my personal investments in mad black study.
Across ­these chapters, I recognize and foreground madpersons as sub-
jects and protagonists. Indeed, many of the cultural producers centered in this
study are “mad,” ­whether they have been diagnosed with serious ­mental illness
(Bolden, Mingus, and Simone), institutionalized (Bolden, Ra, M ­ ingus, and
very briefly Jones), labeled suicidal (Ra and Shange), subject to pop culture
­allegations of madness (Hill and Chappelle), or known to channel spectacular
outrage (Simone, Baraka, and Hill). It bears noting that, alongside ­these his-
torical persons, my proj­ect’s protagonists include fictional characters and psycho-
logical phantasms. I know better than to crudely conflate t­ hese three categories
of being—so I traverse them gingerly and meticulously. Yet the most careful
approach cannot guarantee a neat account of madness. Indeed, madness erodes
neat epistemological and ontological taxonomies, throwing into question—­
and sometimes into crisis—­distinctions between history, fiction, and delusion.
Madness induces uncertainty over what counts as real.
Consider Buddy Bolden, for example. In the artifacts I examine, he is a his-
torical person, a fictionalized character, and sometimes an outburst of m ­ arvelous
Chapter One
32
sound that invades the senses like a voice in one’s head. Then ­there are perform-
ers like Ra, Chappelle, Hill, and Lamar, who cultivate public personae blending
biographical personhood with dramatized character. Another poignant blur-
ring of the “real” and “unreal” occurs in Charles Mingus’s memoir. He some-
times recounts historical events, sometimes crafts fabrications, and sometimes
swerves into ostensibly psychotic-­cum-­fantastic reveries, often without clear
indication or notice. The result is a narrative that is alternately—­and some-
times si­mul­ta­neously—­historical, fictional, and delusional. In short, mad black
study must crisscross metaphysical registers to follow the sometimes unruly
flows of madness. I warned you: our passage, which began where a “fruitless
expanse” joined “nowhere at all,” may be dizzying.110

­TOWARD HEALING

In “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” Spillers annotates an “American Grammar

Book,” a complex assemblage of symbols, discourses, archetypes, themes, and
recursive dramas reflecting and reproducing Amer­i­ca’s racial and sexual regimes.
Following Spillers, I want to envision some contents in what we might call an
American Picture Book, a repertoire of images that lately abound in American
public spheres. I have in mind scenes of state-­sanctioned black wounding and
death that saturate our information age: black ­people fleeing, charging, hands
up, hands clenched, battered, throttled, shot, kneeling, flailing, staggering,
convulsing, slumped over, prostrate on asphalt or grass, then photographed or
video-­recorded, then bandied about endlessly on social media timelines and
network news broadcasts. While spectacles of antiblack vio­lence are perennial
tableaux in a centuries-­old American Picture Book,111 twenty-­first-­century pro-
liferation of camera technologies and social media platforms enable unpre­ce­
dented capture, circulation, and consumption of such images. Then t­ here are
the terrifying sounds, which might be said to constitute an American Score:
shouted commands, invectives, pleas of ­Don’t shoot!, gasps, gunshots, shrieks,
bloody gurgling, cries out to God, weeping, the hissing and crackling of walkie-­
talkies, calls for backup, and stretches of stunned silence.
Exposure to such spectacular images and strident sounds of antiblackness—­
compounding first-­person encounters with everyday antiblackness—is enough
to drive a person mad. I mean mad on multiple registers. It is enough to incite
crises of selfhood and meaning that I call phenomenal madness; it is enough to
instigate the impassioned discontent that is rage; it is enough to inspire rejection
of extant psychonorms and an embrace of psychosocial alterity; and it is also
enough to induce symptoms that meet diagnostic criteria for medicalized mad-
Mad Is a Place
33
 ness. Regarding the latter, psychologist Monnica Williams suggests that watch-
ing and listening to loops of mediatized black death inflicts “vicarious trauma”:
empathic second­hand trauma born of witnessing ­others’ pain, especially ­others
with whom one holds affinity or shares identity. According to Williams,
onslaughts of vicarious trauma, as amplified in cultures of spectacle, “can lead
to depression . . . ​and, in some cases, psychosis.”112
But m­ ental illness is not only a potential outcome of witnessing such vio­
lence; ­mental illness is also a risk ­factor correlated with an increased likelihood
of suffering such vio­lence. In the United States, ­people with untreated serious
­mental illness are sixteen times more likely than other civilians to be killed
in encounters with law enforcement.113 Meanwhile, black ­people in the US
are 2.5 to 3 times more likely than their white counter­parts to be murdered
by police.114 I have found no statistical data on the par­tic­u­lar vulnerability of
­people who are both mentally ill and black. Nevertheless, the names E ­ leanor
Bumpurs, Anthony Hill, Danny Ray Thomas, Isaiah Lewis, and ­Deborah
Danner—­all mentally ill black ­people killed in outrageous confrontations with
police—­testify to the tragedy of mad black death at the hands of Reasonable
law enforcement.115
In the face of antiblack vio­lence and trauma, theater historian and critic
Harry Elam advances a theory of “racial madness” and proposes a proj­ect of
“healing.” Elam explains that
within modern Amer­i­ca, racial madness has been inextricably connected
to the abuses of racism and oppression as well as to the strug­gle for black
liberation. My point h ­ ere is not to pathologize blackness. Rather, by
foregrounding this concept of racial madness, I want to recognize the
­relationship of, and work between, the clinical, the literary, and the phil-
osophical, between the literal and figurative symptoms and significance of
this dis-­ease, always conscious of the cultural and the social orientation
of this condition. Racial madness was and is not simply a ­mental condition,
not simply a social one, but one that demands nevertheless a healing.116
How to Go Mad is animated by deep concern for black ­people, mad ­people, and
other beleaguered beings. If this proj­ect brings attention to p­ eople who have
been persecuted b­ ecause of their blackness and/or/as madness; if it alerts
rationalist readers to the grave repercussions of demeaning the mentally ill; if
it teaches techniques for practicing ethical, radical, critical, and beautiful mad-
ness; if it instigates righ­teous rage in the interest of social transformation; if it
broadens understanding of who and what comprises a black radical tradition;
if it ­encourages black studies to more carefully address madness; if it prompts
Chapter One
34
mad studies to think more rigorously through blackness; if it urges black stud-
ies and mad studies to join forces;117 if it testifies to the possibility of bearing
fruit in a “fruitless expanse” and finding home “nowhere at all”; if it models
radical compassion; if it urges us toward liberation; or if it simply contributes
to someone’s relief or healing, then, to my mind, this book succeeds.
For some, healing might mean banishing madness. For ­others, healing
might mean harnessing madness and putting it to good use—­a readiness to
rally the voices inside one’s head rather than silence them.118 Now, ­toward the
voice calling from the “deep black mouth” of jazz’s “first man.”119

Mad Is a Place
35
NOTES

Chapter One: Mad Is a Place

Epigraphs: Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in
the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1988), 11; emphasis
mine; Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar
Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (summer 1987): 72.
1 The phrase freedom dreams comes from Robin D. G. Kelley’s theorization of black
radical thought in Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Bea-
con Press, 2002). My reference to “blood in my eyes” recalls the title of George
Jackson’s prison memoir, Blood in My Eye (New York: Random House, 1992).
2 Christina Sharpe theorizes the “wake” of the slave ship—and its various historical
and existential effects—in her book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
3 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London:
Pluto Press, 1986), 2.
4 Regarding the Afropessimistic perspective, see Frank B. Wilderson III, Red,
White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2010).
5 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 72; emphasis in original.
6 See Winifred B. Maher and Brendan Maher, “The Ship of Fools: Stultifera Navis
or Ignis Fatuus?,” American Psychologist 37, no. 7 (1982): 756–61.
7 Concerning these controversies over the number dead and the harm done in
the Middle Passage, see Maria Diedrich and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds., Black
Imagination and the Middle Passage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999);
Herbert S. Klein, Stanley L. Engerman, Robin Haines, and Ralph Shlomowitz,
“Transoceanic Mortality: The Slave Trade in Comparative Perspective,” William
and Mary Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2001): 93–117; Patrick Manning and William S.
Griffiths, “Divining the Unprovable: Simulating the Demography of African
Slavery,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 19, no. 2 (1988): 177–201.
8 Hortense
ortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelly Eversley, and
Jennifer L. Morgan, ““‘‘Whatcha
Whatcha Gonna Do?’: Revisiting ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s
Maybe: An American Grammar Book,’ ” Women’s Studies Quarterly 35, nos. 1–2
(2007): 308.
 9 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 72.
10 Collins English Dictionary, http://collinsdictionary.com/. My attention to the
spatial registers of the word derange parallels Foucault’s emphasis upon the
etymology of the word delirium. He writes: “The simplest and most general defi-
nition we can give of classical madness is indeed delirium: ‘This word is derived
from lira, a furrow; so that deliro actually means to move out of the furrow, away
from the proper path of reason.’ ” Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 99–100;
citing Dictionnaire universel de medicine, vol. III, translated, 1746–48.
11 Marcus Rediker generates an extensive cultural and social history of the slave ship
in The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin, 2007).
12 According to Foucault’s account, ships of fools peaked in prevalence during the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Madness and Civilization, 8). Meanwhile, slave
ships began to proliferate after the 1452 issuance of the papal bull Dum Diversas,
which sanctioned Catholic nations in perpetual enslavement of “pagan” peoples,
and granted moral license to Portugal to take its place at the vanguard of the At-
lantic slave trade. If Foucault’s account of the ship of fools is historically accurate,
the two sorts of vessels overlapped in time. A packed slave ship and a ship of fools
would scarcely encounter each other in space, though, since laden slave ships pri-
marily traversed the Atlantic Ocean, while ships of fools, if they physically existed,
commuted primarily along Europe’s internal rivers and canals.
13 Wordference.com, reason from Random House Unabridged Dictionary 2020.
14 See V. B. Schneider, “What Is It to Be Rational?” Philosophy Now: A Magazine of
Ideas 1, no. 1 (summer 1991), https://philosophynow.org/issues/1/What_Is_It_To
_Be_Rational; Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2019); and James Bohman and William Rehg, eds., Deliberative Democracy:
Essays on Reason and Politics (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1997).
15 Regarding the exclusions of nonwhite people from Enlightenment ideals, see
Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed., Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 1997). Eze compiles key passages on race authored by David
Hume, Thomas Jefferson, and Immanuel Kant, and other philosophers. Essays
excerpted include David Hume, “Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations” and
“Of National Characters”; Immanuel Kant, “Geography” and “On National
Characters”; and Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on the State of Virginia.”
Concerning the exclusion of women from Enlightenment ideals, see Susanne
Lettow, “Feminism and the Enlightenment,” in Companion to Feminist Philosophy,
ed. Ann Gary, Serene Khader, Alison Stone (London: Routledge, 2017), 94–107.
See also Carina Pape, “ ‘Race,’ ‘Sex,’ and ‘Gender’: Intersections, Naturalistic Falla-
cies, and the Age of Reason,” in Thinking about the Enlightenment: Modernity and
its Ramifications, ed. Martin L. Davies (London: Routledge, 2016).
Regarding the exclusion of poor people from Enlightenment ideals, see Fred
Powell, “Civil Society History IV: Enlightenment,” in International Encyclopedia
of Civil Society
Society,, ed. Helmut Anheier and Stefan Toepler (New York: Springer,
2010).
bembe, Necropolitics
16 Mbembe, Necropolitics, 67.

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240
17 See Eze, Race and the Enlightenment.
18 I use the masculine possessive pronoun his because the patriarchal protocols
of early modern Europe dictated that the paradigmatic early modern person
was male. Regarding the function of such othering and ontological foiling in
colonial and antebellum America, Toni Morrison proclaims that “black slavery
enriched [America’s] creative possibilities. For in that construction of blackness
and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic
polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not-me. The result was a
playground for the imagination.” Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993), 38. These formulations exist within a
broader system of binaries—man|woman, light|dark, mind|body, and good|evil,
among them—that structure Western modernity and arrange its epistemic orders.
19 In his own articulation of the centrality of black slavery to the invention of West-
ern modernity, Paul Gilroy designates the slave ship as the “central organizing
symbol.” He announces that “getting on board [the slave ship] promises a means
to reconceptualise the orthodox relationship between modernity and what passes
for its prehistory. . . . [M]odernity might itself be thought to begin in the con-
stitutive relationship with outsiders that both found and temper a self-conscious
sense of western civilization.” Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and
Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), 17.
20 In “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50, no. 22 (2008), Fred Moten describes a
(black) “radicalism” that is “the performance of a general critique of the proper”
(177).
21 Rinaldo Walcott, Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada (Toronto: Insomniac
Press, 1997), xiv.
22 In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), Saidiya Hartman honors and centers black
girls and women who “have been credited with nothing: they remain surplus
women of no significance, girls deemed unfit for history and destined to be minor
figures” (xv).
23 My notion of black radical creativity is influenced by Angela Y. Davis, Blues Lega-
cies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday
(New York: Pantheon, 1998); Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of
the Black Radical Tradition, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2000); Robin D. G. Kelly, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
(Boston: Beacon, 2002); and Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black
Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
24 Though the term insanity has been disavowed by the Anglophone medical estab-
lishment since the 1920s, its clinical connotation endures in its current legalistic
and colloquial usage. See Janet A. Tighe, “ ‘What’s in a Name?’: A Brief Foray into
the History of Insanity in England and the United States,” Journal of the American
Academy
Acade my of Psychiatry and the Law 33, no. 2 (2005): 252–58.
255 See
ee “Schizo phre
“Schizophre ia Spectrum and Other Psychotic Disorders,” Diagnostic
nia
hrenia
and Statistical Manual of M Mental Disorders, 5th ed. (Arlington, VA: American

Notes to Chapter One

241
 Psychiatric Association, 2013), https://doi-org.proxy-um.researchport.umd.edu
/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425596.dsm02.
26 Regarding the myriad frames through which schizophrenic symptoms have
been interpreted, see John M. Ingham, Psychological Anthropology Reconsidered
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); John Weir Perry, Trials of the Vi-
sionary Mind: Spiritual Emergency and the Renewal Process (Albany: suny Press,
1998); Dick Russell, “How a West African Shaman Helped My Schizophrenic
Son in a Way Western Medicine Couldn’t,” Washington Post, March 24, 2015;
Tanya Marie Luhrmann and Jocelyn Marrow, eds., Our Most Troubling Madness:
Case Studies in Schizophrenia across Cultures (Oakland: University of California
Press, 2016); and Ann Cooke, ed., Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia, rev.
ed. (Leicester, UK: British Psychological Society, 2017).
27 Concerning the pathologization of blackness, see, for example, Sander Gilman,
Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1985) (especially chapter 5); and Jonathan Metzl, The
Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease (Boston: Beacon,
2009). Concerning the pathologization of (rebellious) femininity, see Maria
Ramas, “Freud’s Dora, Dora’s Hysteria: The Negation of a Woman’s Rebellion,”
Feminist Studies 6, no. 3 (1980). Regarding the pathologization of transness, see
Cecilia Dhejne, Roy van Vlerken, Gunter Heylens, and Jon Arcelus, “Mental
Health and Gender Dysphoria: A Review of the Literature,” International Review
of Psychiatry 28, no. 1 (2016): 44–57. Concerning the pathologization of homo-
sexuality, see Ronald Bayer, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics
of Diagnosis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). Concerning the
pathologization of poverty, see Helena Hansen, Philippe Bourgois, and Ernest
Drucker, “Pathologizing Poverty: New Forms of Diagnosis, Disability, and
Structural Stigma under Welfare Reform,” Social Science and Medicine 103 (2014):
76–83.
28 For an especially eloquent discussion of how hegemonic judgments impact sci-
ence and medicine in the United States, see Steven Epstein, Impure Science: aids,
Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1996). My declaration that “no science is pure” is inspired, in part, by Epstein’s
study and its title.
29 The words are lyrics from Solange, “Mad,” A Seat at the Table (New York: Saint/
Columbia, 2016).
30 Kelly Baker Josephs arrives at a similar conclusion. She observes, “While mad can
define a person, situation, or event, it more often describes the person attempting
to define said person, situation, or event. That is, the term says as much, if not
more, about the subject employing it as about the object it attempts to label” in
Disturbers of the Peace: Representations of Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Liter-
aature
ture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 8.
31 Regarding
Regarding “critical ambivalence,” I have written elsewhere that “Sometimes it is
useful, even crucial, to tarry in the openness of ambiguity; in the strategic vantage
point available in the interstice (the better to look both ways and beyond); in

Notes to Chapter One

242
 the capacious bothness of ambivalence; in the sheer potential in irresolution . . .
Lingering in ambivalence, we can access multiple, even dissonant, vantages at
once, before pivoting, if we finally choose to pivot, toward decisive motion. To be
clear, I am not describing an impotent ambivalence that relinquishes or thwarts
politics. Rather, I am proposing an instrumental ambivalence that harnesses the
energetic motion and friction and tension of ambivalent feeling. Such energy
might propel progressive and radical movement.” La Marr Jurelle Bruce, “Shore,
Unsure: Loitering as a Way of Life,” glq 5, no. 2 (2019): 357.
32 Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” in Sister
Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 127.
33 In Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century
America, Saidiya Hartman unpacks the epistemic violence wrought by hegemonic
empathy. She writes: “Properly speaking, empathy is a projection of oneself into
another in order to better understand the other or ‘the projection of one’s own
personality into an object, with the attribution to the object of one’s own emo-
tions.’ ” Hartman further writes that “by exploiting the vulnerability of the captive
body as a vessel for the uses, thoughts, and feelings of others, the humanity
extended to the slave inadvertently confirms the expectations and desires defini-
tive of the relations of chattel slavery . . . empathy is double-edged, for in making
the other’s suffering one’s own, this suffering is occluded by the other’s oblitera-
tion.” Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in
Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 18–19.
Empathy entails a projection of oneself into another’s shoes, a feeling into
their predicament, and an imaginative occupation, as it were, of their perspective.
The em- in empathy is a prefix signifying “to put (something) into or on” (as per
“en-, prefix1,” oed Online, Oxford University Press, https://www-oed-com/view/
Entry/61499). I prefer compassion, containing the prefix com-, signifying that
which is “together, together with, in combination or union” (as per “com-, prefix,”
oed Online, Oxford University Press, https://www-oed-com/view/Entry/36719?
rskey=hS5I9y&result=2).
34 For further information on positivism as a philosophical tradition and orienta-
tion, see Seth B. Abrutyn, “Positivism,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Sociology
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
35 Regarding these respective parapositivist formulations, see Hebrews 11:1–31 in
the King James Bible; Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wang
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly
Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2008); Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12,
no. 2 (2008): 1–14; Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1998), 13; Patricia J. Williams, “Gathering the Ghosts,” A-Line
(August 30, 2018), https://alinejournal.com/vol-1-no -3-4/gathering-the-ghosts.
36 I am grateful
rateful to the audience at the 2018 Harold Stirling Lecture at Vanderbilt
University for encouraging me to center this unknowability. Special thanks to
Robert Engelman for his important comments on this matter.

Notes to Chapter One

243
37 Édouard Glissant, The Collected Poems of Édouard Glissant (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 2005), xxxii–xxxiii. Bracketed definitions in original.
38 Kelley, Freedom Dreams.
39 Moten, In the Break, 39.
40 Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom,
1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
41 D. Scott Miller, “Afrosurrealist Manifesto: Black Is the New Black—A
21st Century Manifesto,” D. Scott Miller: AfroSurreal Generation, May 20, 2009,
http://dscotmiller.blogspot.com/2009/05/afrosurreal.html.
42 Sarah Cervenak, Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual
Freedom (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
43 L. H. Stallings, Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures (Cham-
paign: University of Illinois Press, 2015).
44 GerShun Avilez, Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism (Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 2016).
45 Emma Bell provides a pithy genealogy of the embrace of madness by Western
artists and theorists. See Emma Bell, “Imagine Madness: Madness, Revolution,
Ressentiment and Critical Theory,” Madness: Probing the Boundaries, Interdisci-
plinary.Net 1st Global Conference, Mansfield College, Oxford, September 2008,
unpublished.
46 Plato, “Phaedrus,” in Symposium and Phaedrus (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2012), 79.
47 William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Washington,
DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, n.d.), II.II.204–5, www.folgerdigitaltexts.org.
48 Edgar Allen Poe, “Eleonara,” Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales and Poems (Edison,
NJ: Castle Books, 2002), 591.
49 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J.
Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 13–14.
50 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, especially chapters 1–3.
51 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). That this list of Western canon-
dwellers from antiquity through postmodernity consists entirely of white men
reflects the gendered and racialized exclusions that permeate Western canonicity.
52 Within disability studies, I am especially inspired by the critical race interven-
tions of Christopher Bell; the queer “crip” provocations of Robert McRuer;
the feminist-materialist correctives of Nirmala Erevelles; Alison Kafer’s careful
critique of the social construction of “health,” and the harm it potentially perpe-
trates on people deemed unhealthy or pathological; and the recent black feminist
intersectional innovations of Sami Schalk and Therí Pickens. Significantly, each
of the aforementioned scholars recognizes and theorizes how disability is co-
constitutive
onstitutive with other categories of difference.
See Christopher Bell, “Introducing White Disability Studies: A Modest Pro-
posal,” in The Disability Studies Reader (2nd ed.), ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York:
Routledge, 2006); Robert McRuer, “Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/
Disabled Existence,” in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities,
Humanities ed. Sharon L.

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244
 Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (New York:
Modern Language Association, 2002); Nirmala Erevelles and Andrea Minear,
“Unspeakable Offenses: Untangling Race and Disability in Discourses of Inter-
sectionality,” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 4, no. 2 (2010):
127–45; Margaret Price, “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain,”
Hypatia 30, no. 1 (2014): 268–84; Alison Kafer, “Health Rebels: A Crip Mani-
festo for Social Justice,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqcOUD1pBKw
(2017); Sami Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in
Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018);
and Therí Alyce Pickens, Black Madness :: Mad Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2019).
53 Regarding the medical and social models of disability, see Justin Anthony
Haegele and Samuel Hodge, “Disability Discourse: Overview and Critiques
of the Medical and Social Models,” Quest 68, no. 2 (2016): 193–206; Tom
Shakespeare, “The Social Model of Disability,” in The Disability Studies
Reader (2nd ed.), ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York: Routledge, 2006), 214–21;
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Feminist Disability Studies,” Signs 30, no. 2
(2005): 1557–87; and Arlene S. Kanter, The Development of Disability Rights
under International Law: From Charity to Human Rights (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2015).
54 Brenda A. LeFrançois, Robert Menzies, and Geoffrey Reaume, “Introducing Mad
Studies,” in Mad Matters: A Critical Reader in Canadian Mad Studies (Toronto:
Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2013), 10.
55 LeFrançois, Menzies, and Reaume, “Introducing Mad Studies,” 13.
56 LeFrançois, Menzies, and Reaume, “Introducing Mad Studies,” 13.
57 Tanja Aho, Liat Ben-Moshe, and Leon J. Hilton, “Mad Futures: Affect/Theory/
Violence,” American Quarterly 69, no. 2 (2017): 291–302.
58 According to the landmark MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study, mental
illness alone does not correspond to a statistically significant increased likelihood
of committing violent crimes. However, the mentally ill are significantly more
likely to be victims of violent crimes. See John Monahan, Henry J. Steadman, Eric
Silver, Paul S. Appelbaum, Pamela Clark Robbins, Edward P. Mulvey, Loren H.
Roth, et al., Rethinking Risk Assessment: The MacArthur Study of Mental Disorder
and Violence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). See also MacArthur Re-
search Network on Mental Health and the Law, “The MacArthur Violence Risk
Assessment Study: September 2005 Update of the Executive Summary,” MacAr-
thur Research Network, http://www.macarthur.virginia.edu/risk.html.
59 Elizabeth Donaldson, “The Corpus of the Madwoman: Toward a Feminist Dis-
ability Studies Theory of Embodiment and Mental Illness,” nwsa Journal 14,
no. 3 (autumn 2002): 102.
60 Robert J.
obert J. Barrett, “The ‘Schizophrenic’ and the Liminal Persona in Modern Soci-
ety,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 22, no. 4 (December 1998): 488.
611 ction head echoes the title and theme of Soyica Colbert’s Black Movements:
The section
Perfor
Perf mance
forman
orman ce and Cultural Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,

Notes to Chapter One

245
 2017), with its emphasis upon the convergence of physical movement and social
movement.
62 Sociologist Orlando Patterson suggests that the status of the slave is one of
“social death,” which entails three primary characteristics: violent subjection,
natal alienation, and general dishonor. See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and
Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1982), 1–16.
63 For an extended account of suicide as a mode of agency among slaves, see Terri L.
Snyder, The Power to Die: Slavery and Suicide in British North America (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2015).
64 Concerning the campaign of confinement that swept Europe in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries—and in particular the treatment of purportedly violent
madmen—Foucault writes that “those chained to the cell walls were no longer
men whose minds had wandered, but beasts preyed upon by a natural frenzy. . . .
This model of animality prevailed in the asylums and gave them their cagelike
aspect, their look of the menagerie” (Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 72).
Alas, Foucault does not connect the “animality” imputed to the insane and the
animality concomitantly ascribed to Africans; he does not note any resemblance
between “cagelike” asylum technology and cagelike slave ship and plantation
technology. Foucault fails to critically engage the matter of blackness—especially
noteworthy considering the importance of blackness as foil to whiteness in the
drama of Western modernity and the worldwide colonial and racial upheav-
als concurrent with the composition of History of Madness. For a discussion of
asylums in the mid-twentieth century (based on extensive ethnographic research),
see Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and
Other Inmates (New York: Anchor Books, 1961).
65 Benjamin Reiss, Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century
American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 15. Regarding
the “association of blackness and madness,” Gilman explains that is “product of
distortive fantasies of both the black and the mad. . . . Both are focuses for the
projection of Western culture’s anxieties” in Difference and Pathology, 148.
66 For a rich exegesis of diaspora as process, see Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of
Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
67 Samuel Cartwright, “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” DeBow’s
Review: Southern and Western States 11 (1851): 331.
68 Frank Wilderson suggests that black people in modernity are subjected to
relentless and categorical social death, which positions them structurally as
slaves. Wilderson writes “Blackness and slaveness cannot be dis-imbricated,
cannot be pulled apart.” See Frank B. Wilderson III, “Blacks and the Master/
Slave Relation,” in Afro-
Afro-pe
pessimism:
pessimism: An Introduction (Minneapolis: Racked and
Dispatched, 2017), 15–30, https://rackedanddispatched.noblogs.org/files/2017
01/Afro-Pessimism2
Afro -Pessimism2
//01/Afro .pdf.
Pessimism2.pdf.
69 Cartwright,
C artwright, “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” 332.

Notes to Chapter One

246
70 Cartwright, “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” 333. John C. Calhoun,
prominent proslavery senator, similarly asserted that freedom had a detrimental
impact on the mental health of blacks. As Douglas C. Baynton explains, “John C.
Calhoun, senator from South Carolina and one of the most influential spokesmen
for the slave states, thought it a powerful argument in defense of slavery that the
‘number of deaf and dumb, blind, idiots, and insane, of the negroes in the States
that have changed the ancient relation between the races’ was seven times higher
than in the slave states.” See Douglas C. Baynton, “Disability and the Justification
of Inequality in American History,” in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Len-
nard J. Davis (New York: Routledge, 2017), 20.
71 Regarding such pathologization of black freedom, Barbara Browning writes that
“the terrifying contagion which the United States really feared in 1793 [amid the
Haitian Revolution] was the contagion of black political empowerment.” See
Barbara Browning, Infectious Rhythm: Metaphors of Contagion and the Spread
of African Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998), 82. US slaveholders feared that
black slaves might be inspired by Louverture to seek black revolution and black
liberty—not to be confused with the decidedly white revolution and white liberty
accomplished by the slave-holding, settler-colonial state in 1776.
72 Robert W. Wood, Memorial of Edward Jarvis, M.D. (Boston: American Statistical
Association, 1885), 11.
73 Toni Morrison quoted in Paul Gilroy, “Living Memory: A Meeting with Toni
Morrison,” in Small Acts (Essex, UK: Serpent’s Tail, 1993), 178. Morrison’s insight
about “deliberately going mad, as one of the characters says, ‘in order not to lose
your mind,” helped inspire the title of the present book.
74 Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987), 192.
75 The name schoolteacher is written in lowercase in the novel. I have preserved that
syntax in my own usage.
76 Margaret Garner’s fate was different. She, her husband, and her surviving off-
spring were confiscated, as it were, and plunged back into Southern slavery. Avery
Gordon offers a poignant meditation on the life of Margaret Garner in Ghostly
Matters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 137–92.
77 Nat Turner and Thomas Gray, The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the
Late Insurrection in Southampton (Baltimore: T. R. Gray, 1831); electronic edition
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1999), 254, https://docsouth.unc
.edu/neh/turner/turner.html.
78 Turner and Gray, The Confessions of Nat Turner, 246.
79 Turner and Gray, The Confessions of Nat Turner, 261–62.
80 Nietzsche, Daybreak, 14; emphasis in original.
81 For further insights on the figure of the “crazy nigger,” see Nathan McCall, Makes
Me Wanna Holla: A Young Black Man in America (New York: Vintage, 1994),
55–56; and Adam Gussow, “ ‘Shoot Myself a Cop’: Mamie Smith’s ‘Crazy Blues’ as
Social Text,” Callaloo 25, no. 1 (2002): 8–44.
ee Rayford Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir,
822 See
1877–1901 (New York: Dial Press, 1954).

Notes to Chapter One

247
83 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007), 8.
84 This passage is excerpted from a letter originally published in American Surrealist
magazine View, in 1941. See the full text of the letter in Suzanne Césaire, “The
Domain of the Marvelous,” in Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, ed.
Penelope Rosemont (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998).
85 Along with Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor and Léon Damas are credited
with cofounding the Négritude Movement. As described on the back cover of
the Wesleyan Poetry Series edition of Notebook of a Return to the Native Land,
“Césaire considered his style a ‘beneficial madness’ that could ‘break into the
forbidden’ and reach the powerful and overlooked aspects of black culture.” See
Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, trans. Clayton Eshleman
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), back cover.
86 Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, 18.
87 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 14.
88 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 2.
89 Hortense Spillers, “ ‘All the Things You Could Be by Now, If Sigmund Freud’s
Wife Was Your Mother’: Psychoanalysis and Race,” boundary 2, 23, no. 3 (autumn
1996): 88.
90 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,” 72.
91 Alongside the works of Fanon and Spillers, the following studies mobilize psycho-
analysis to analyze the lives of various peoples of color: Claudia Tate, Psychoanaly-
sis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1998); Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis,
Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); David
Eng and Shinhee Han, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and
Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018);
Margo Crawford, Dilution Anxiety and the Black Phallus (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 2008); Badia Sahar Ahad, Freud Upside Down: African American
Literature and Psychoanalytic Culture (Champaign: University of Illinois Press,
2010); and Michelle Stephens, Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male
Performer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
92 William Grier and Price Cobbs, Black Rage (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
93 Regarding Malcolm X’s legendary status as “the angriest black man in America,”
see TaNoah Morgan, “Malcolm X Gets Stamp of Approval; Leader Honored
on King’s Birthday by Government He Faulted,” Baltimore Sun, January 16,
1999, and Frank James, “The Malcolm X Factor,” Chicago Tribune, Novem-
ber 8, 1991.
94 Martin Luther King, “September 27, 1966: mlk—A Riot Is the Language of
the Unheard,” interview with Mike Wallace, 60 Minutes, 1966, YouTube video,
www.youtube
https://www.
https:// wwwyoutube
www. .com/watch?v=_K0BWXjJv5s.
.youtube.com
95 B
Both
oth Szasz and Laing rebuked coercive forms of psychiatric treatment, pursuing
radical therapeutic alternatives. Szasz suggested “autonomous psychotherapy,”
wherein the therapist would not medicalize or pathologize the patient, but rather

Notes to Chapter One

248
 would unobtrusively converse with the patient and serve as “catalyst” for the
patient’s own self-discovery. See Thomas Szasz, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis:
The Theory and Method of Autonomous Psychotherapy (New York: Basic Books,
1965). Meanwhile, Laing experimented with patient-therapist cohabitation in
an immersive therapeutic community. See Cheryl McGeachan, “ ‘The World
Is Full of Big Bad Wolves’: Investigating the Experimental Therapeutic Spaces
of R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson,” History of Psychiatry 25, no. 3 (2014):
283–98.
96 See Alvin F. Poussaint, “Is Extreme Racism a Mental Illness?,” Western Journal of
Medicine 176, no. 1 (2002): 4; and Joy DeGruy, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome:
America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing (Milwaukee, WI: Uptone Press,
2005).
97 Robert C. Schwartz and David M. Blankenship, “Racial Disparities in Psychotic
Disorder Diagnosis: A Review of Empirical Literature,” World Journal of Psychia-
try 4, no. 4 (2014): 135.
98 Metzl, The Protest Psychosis, ix. Concerning the psychopathologization of Africa-
nity and blackness, see, for example, Cartwright, “Diseases and Peculiarities of the
Negro Race”; Grier and Cobbs, Black Rage; Metzl, The Protest Psychosis.
99 Metzl, The Protest Psychosis, ix.
100 Regarding these stereotypes of Sapphires and Jezebels, see Patricia Hill Collins,
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empower-
ment (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990).
101 See Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; Grier and Cobbs, Black Rage; Alvin F. Pous-
saint, “Is Extreme Racism a Mental Illness?” Western Journal of Medicine 176, vol.
1, no. 4 (2002); and Metzl, The Protest Psychosis.
102 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 14.
103 Toni Morrison and Charlie Rose, “Novelist Toni Morrison Looks Back on Her
Youth and Family and Presents Her Newest Book, ‘Jazz,’ ” The Charlie Rose Show,
pbs, May 7, 1993, https://charlierose.com/episodes/18778.
104 Poussaint, “Is Extreme Racism a Mental Illness?,” 4.
105 Regarding Trump’s alleged madness, see, for example, Bandy X. Lee, ed., The Dan-
gerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a
President (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017); and Keith Olbermann, Trump Is
F*cking Crazy (New York: Penguin Random House, 2017).
106 I’Nasah Crockett, “ ‘Raving Amazons’: Antiblackness and Misogynoir in Social
Media,” Model View Culture, June 30, 2014, https://modelviewculture.com/pieces
/raving-amazons-antiblackness-and-misogynoir-in-social-media.
107 Realizing the derogatory power in allegations of madness and pathologizing
rhetoric, Trump argues that his opposition suffers from “Trump Derangement
Syndrome”—as though suspicion of presidential malfeasance must be delusion, as
though acts of protest are bouts of hysteria, as though speaking truth to his power
is rant and rave. See Anne Flaherty, “Trump’s Diagnosis for Critics: ‘Trump De-
rangement Syndrome,’ ” Associated Press News,
News July 18, 2018, https://apnews.com/
48225d1360864dcb861b12e5cda12a32.
8225d1360864dcb861b12e5cda12a32.

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249
108 I am grateful to Wendell Holbrook for his invocation of a mad jazz ensemble in
his response to my own keynote, “Looking for Lauryn: Madness, Genius, and
the Black Prophetess,” at the “Ruminations on Blackness” conference at Rutgers
University, New Brunswick, NJ, in 2011.
109 Amiri Baraka, Dutchman and the Slave (New York: Harper Perennial, 1971), 35.
110 It bears mentioning that there are extraordinary depictions and practices of
madness in black expressive culture that I do not address at length in this book.
I could write another dozen chapters on Huey Newton’s call for radical personal
and collective upheaval under the sign of “revolutionary suicide”; on Beauford
Delaney’s exquisite portraits produced as he lived with schizophrenia and was
eventually destitute in a French insane asylum in 1979; on Kara Walker’s paper
silhouettes of perverse plantation scenes that resemble Rorschach inkblots and
reveal the racial madness that is America’s inheritance; or the final flourish of
George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum (1986), when the character Topsy chants
“there’s madness in me, and that madness sets me free,” before
beckoning the full cast of characters and announcing, “My power is in my . . .”
to which they respond, “Madness!”; or Victor LaValle’s The Ecstatic (2002),
whose darkly comedic narrator is “a girthy goon suffering bouts of dementia”; or
Gloria Naylor’s 1996 (2007), a semifictionalized memoir espousing conspiracy
theories about government-led mind control and read, by many, as an account
of paranoid madness. I encourage the reader to seek out these mad artists and
materials.
111 See Elizabeth Alexander, The Black Interior (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press,
2004), 79.
112 Monnica Williams, qtd. in Kenya Downs, “When Black Death Goes Viral, It Can
Trigger ptsd-like Trauma,” pbs News Hour, pbs .org, July 22, 2016, www.pbs.org
/newshour/nation/black-pain-gone-viral-racism-graphic-videos-can-create-ptsd
-like-trauma. See also Jacob Bor, Atheendar S. Venkataramani, David R. Williams,
and Alexander C. Tsai, “Police Killings and Their Spillover Effects on the Mental
Health of Black Americans: A Population-based, Quasi-Experimental Study,”
Lancet 392 (10), no. 144 ( July 2018). Regarding racial trauma, see Kristin N.
Williams-Washington and Chmaika P. Mills, “African American Historical
Trauma: Creating an Inclusive Measure,” Journal of Multicultural Counseling and
Development 46, no. 4 (2018): 246–63. See also E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture:
The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rut-
gers University Press, 2005), especially chapter 4, “Vicarious Trauma and ‘Empty’
Empathy: Media Images of Rwanda and the Iraq War.”
113 Doris A. Fuller et al. report that mentally ill people are sixteen times more likely
to be killed in encounters with law enforcement. See Doris A. Fuller, H. Richard
Lamb, Michael Biasotti, and John Snook, “Overlooked in the Undercounted: The
Role of Mental
ental Illness in Fatal Law Enforcement Encounters” (Arlington, VA:
Treatment Advocacy Center, 2015), TACReports.org/overlooked-undercounted.
114
14 Surveying
Surveying civilian mortality in encounters with police officers 2010–14, James W.
Buehler determined that black males 10+10 years old were 2.8 times as likely as their

Notes to Chapter One

250
 white counterparts to die in lethal encounters with police. See Buehler, “Racial/
Ethnic Disparities in the Use of Lethal Force by US Police, 2010–2014,” American
Journal of Public Health 107, no. 2 (February 2017). According to the Mapping
Police Violence Project, in 2019, black people were three times as likely as their
white counterparts to be killed by police; https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/.
115 Concerning Eleanor Bumpurs, see Michael Wilson, “When Mental Illness Meets
Police Firepower; Shift in Training for Officers Reflects Lessons of Encounters
Gone Awry,” The New York Times, December 28, 2003; Nirmala Erevelles and
Andrea Minear, “Unspeakable Offenses: Untangling Race and Disability in
Discourses of Intersectionality,” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies
4, no. 2 (2010): 127–45. Regarding Anthony Hill, see Richard Fausset, “Police
Killing of Unarmed Georgia Man Leaves Another Town in Disbelief,” New York
Times, March 11, 2015; Christian Boone, “Who Was Anthony Hill? Figure in
DeKalb Police Shooting Case Suffered from Mental Illness,” Atlanta Journal-
Constitution, January 22, 2016. With respect to Danny Ray Thomas, see Shaun
King, “Danny Ray Thomas Was a Broken Man Who Needed Help. Instead He
Was Gunned Down by a Cop in Broad Daylight,” The Intercept, March 30, 2018;
Alex Horton, “A Deputy in Houston Shot and Killed an Unarmed Black Man—
Days after Stephon Clark’s Death,” Washington Post, March 24, 2018. Concerning
Isaiah Lewis, see Tasneem Nashrulla, “An Unarmed Teen Was Running Around
Naked in an Oklahoma Neighborhood. Then Police Shot and Killed Him,”
Buzzfeednews.com, May 2, 2019. Regarding Deborah Danner, see Kenrya Rankin,
“nypd Officer Kills Deborah Danner, Mentally Ill Black Woman,” Colorlines
.com, October 19, 2016, and Joseph Goldstein and James C. McKinley Jr., “Police
Sergeant Acquitted in Killing of Mentally Ill Woman” New York Times, Febru-
ary 15, 2018.
116 Harry Elam, The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2004), 60.
117 I share this commitment with Pickens, whose Black Madness :: Mad Blackness is
devoted to placing these fields in critical conversation.
118 Lauryn Hill and Joan Morgan, “They Call Me Ms. Hill,” Essence, December 2009,
https://www.essence.com/news/they-call-me-ms-hill/.
119 This “first man” designation appears in the title of Donald Marquis’s biography
of Bolden, In Search of Buddy Bolden: First Man of Jazz (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 2005).

Chapter Two: “He Blew His Brains Out through the Trumpet”

Epigraph: Natasha Trethewey, “Calling His Children Home,” Callaloo 19, no. 2
(1996): 351.
1 Cultural
ultural studies scholar Krin Gabbard credits Bolden with inventing jazz among
other pathbreaking accomplishments in trumpet-playing and black masculine
per
perfo
formance.
formance.
ance. Gabbard writes, “Buddy Bolden did more than invent jazz. He took
hold of the royal, ceremonial, and military aspects of the trumpet and remade

Notes to Chapter Two

251