Book Review
Book Review | How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity, by La Marr Jurelle Bruce (Duke University Press, 2021)
New York University
jacobhood@nyu.edu
La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s book How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity is guided by the mad sounds of Buddy Bolden’s cornet. Bruce introduces the mad jazzman as a recurring figure in the book’s second chapter, “‘He Blew His Brains Out through the Trumpet’: Buddy Bolden and the Impossible Sound of Madness.” In it, he pushes against the limits of the musician’s non-existent archive to challenge how we think about madness in black1 cultural production. Bolden, whose unruly life and musical practices culminated in his death in a Louisiana psychiatric institution, epitomizes the book’s focus on how madness and blackness intersect in lived experience and creative practice.
The key claim of the book is that blackness is always already intertwined with madness in ways that allow ideals of Enlightenment Reason to cohere: ideals of order, rationality, and transparency. In Bruce’s framework, blackness and madness function against these logics of Reason. Bruce shows that madness is not a lack, but an ambivalent place where the possibilities of radical creativity exist alongside the deadly stakes of anti-madness and antiblackness. Working from the transformative place of a mad-black nowhere, new ways of reading black life and cultural production become possible.
How to Go Mad explores intonations of madness in black radical art. Bruce searches for underappreciated expressions of an “unruliness of mind” and an “unruliness of will” (8) in, for instance, the lives and jazz of Buddy Bolden and Sun Ra, the literature of Gayl Jones and Ntozake Shange, and the music of Nina Simone and Kanye West, exploring how madness shapes their art and public lives. Throughout, going mad is understood as an often necessary strategy for black people to “doggedly clutch hold of one’s mind when Reason would steal or smash it” (18).
To theorize the intersections of madness and blackness, Bruce curates a dialogue across black studies, disability studies, and queer and trans studies. The author’s use of “madness” builds from a social model of disability constructed and contrasted against a hegemonic medical model that fails to understand disability as socially constructed. In his modification of this social model, Bruce “does not treat the medical and the psychosocial as dichotomous” (13). He instead theorizes four overlapping ideas of madness that he lingers with across the book: phenomenal madness, which centers the lived experience of madness; medicalized madness, the hegemonic approach built on classification of mental illnesses; rage, that centers black anger and its historical equation to insanity; and psychosocial madness, which speaks to how madness is positioned against Western social norms more generally.
Madness is multiple, or what Bruce terms a “multivalent technology for insurgent performance and personhood” (171). As it intersects with a blackness that has “no top, no limit” (206), madness can function as a tool of transformation. Madness is thus not a standardizing technology, but a “deranging” (4) one—it throws accepted reality into crisis. Madness is something one “can claim, wield, and do…something that might be adapted as methodology and praxis” (137) that defies full transparency and exactness.
In the first chapter, Bruce introduces a central contribution of “mad methodology” as a set of “para-positivist” (10) approaches to moving with the unruliness of madness. Specifically, mad methodology “recognizes madpersons as critical theorists and decisive protagonists in struggles for liberation” (9), and understands madness within its lived realities, but does not seek to “wholly, transparently reveal madness” (10). It asks us to take deviations from Reason seriously for their radical potential. Mad methodology is primarily shown through two approaches: critical ambivalence and radical compassion. Critical ambivalence honors the multiplicity and complexity of madness without romanticizing it, witnessing its liberatory potential, as well as the harm done to and sometimes by madpersons. Radical compassion, as the book’s guiding ethic, asks readers to “ethically walk and sit and fight and build alongside another whose condition may be utterly unlike your own” (10). It is a call for care across difference that honors opacity.
Following his exploration of Buddy Bolden, Bruce reworks the Freudian concept of sublimation in an interlude. This concept guides the third and fourth chapters in unpacking the gendered and sexual dynamics of black madness in literature. The third chapter looks at Gayl Jones’s 1976 novel Eva’s Man in a reconsideration of the titular character’s act of murder and institutionalization after a lifetime of sexual violation. Departing from previous readings of the text, Bruce considers how Eva’s madness, beyond highlighting the structural ties between black girls and women and sexual violence, also functions as a technology of self-assertion that signals Eva’s “beleaguered agency” (81). The fourth chapter reads Ntozake Shange’s novel Liliane: Resurrection of the Daughter (1994) in a complementary discussion of black womanhood, psychoanalysis and sexuality, and mad potentiality. Bruce demonstrates how the maddening experience of existing in a misogynistic, antiblack, and anti-mad world can “reveal vicissitudes of mad black womanhood between metaphor and murder” (113). Within the racial-sexual terror of antiblackness, mad potentiality persists as an insurgent force that can erupt as violence and radical self-creation.
The fifth and sixth chapters consider personal and public impressions of madness, showing Bruce’s dexterity in moving between a madness claimed and embodied by an artist, and a madness imputed into and gleaned from their work. The former analyzes Lauryn Hill’s rise and fall from grace after accusations of madness, reading her lyrics, performances, and interviews with and against media interpretations of her alleged instability. The chapter examines how black genius often serves as a proxy for unruliness, and speaks to how “madness might be desirable amid a corrupt world order that deems itself Reasonable” (163). Hill is situated within a lineage of black women artists whose musical genius was undermined in the face of the public trauma they endured. Bruce theorizes Hill’s mad performance and protest as “rich with black feminist, womanist, antiracist, anti-racial-capitalist, and liberation resonance” (141) that shows the critical ambivalence of mad methodology. The sixth chapter continues examining the “maddening of black genius” (32) in the comedic performances and changing public image of Dave Chapelle. This chapter becomes even more complex following Chapelle’s numerous anti-trans statements, and is a necessary place to (re)consider the gendered foundations of mad black genius.
The non-linear form of the text comes to a head in the seventh chapter, “Songs in Madtime: Black Music, Madness, and Metaphysical Syncopation,” where several figures return to narrate the space-time of madness. If madness is a place, as Bruce argues, then what is its rhythm? In defiance of Western Standard Time, madtime speaks to those “various modes of doing time and feeling time coinciding with spasms and rhythms of madness” (204) that appear in at least four ways: manic time, depressive time, schizophrenic time, and melancholic time. This chapter includes a frenetic but not undisciplined invocation of Bolden’s sounds to guide Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam,” alongside more contemporary musings on black fury and longing in the music of Kendrick Lamar and Frank Ocean. From his focus on the lives/sounds of musicians, to his meditations on silence as a technology of survival (94), Bruce illustrates the revolutionary potential of sound. In this chapter’s mad dialogue, the tempos and rhythms of the artists do not blend together into homophony, but chart discordant realities. Indeed, if How to Go Mad is lyrical, it is set to the unruly tempo of madtime.
Finally, in a brief afterword, Bruce once more chooses to “linger at the site of confinement” (210). As carceral power shapes the lives or work of nearly every figure examined in the book, the stakes of Bruce’s argument are made clear. Captivity is the lingua franca of madness and blackness. Abolition is thus both a mad project (that which can liberate mad people) and a maddening project (that which defies Reason’s demands to capture and contain).
How to Go Mad will undoubtedly influence conversations in black studies, science and technology studies, disability studies, and other fields. It is a lyrical, nuanced model of how radical care produces new approaches beyond the rehearsal of pathology. Bruce takes apart the common assumption that antiblackness is a form of pathological mental illness, arguing that it reinforces a “psychonormative binary” (29) of good and evil that leaves mad people vulnerable to violence. The book shows that there can be no black liberation without mad liberation. It demands an attentiveness to the experiences of black mad lives at the nexus of the prison- and medical-industrial complexes. At the same time, How to Go Mad is a litany against scientific capture. Instead of trying to define and dissect madness, Bruce lingers with, embraces, and lets go: a working with and through madness, not just a working on madness. The book’s conceptual breadth and refusal of completeness testify to the mad methodology Bruce activates—a methodology that does not ask us to capture, but to live among.
Notes
1 Bruce specifies that he uses the lowercase “black” in order to center an “improper blackness...a blackness that is neither capitalized nor propertized via the protocols of Western grammar” (6).
Author Bio
Jacob Hood is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at New York University. His research focuses on the connections between carcerality, technoscience, and (anti)blackness.