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 t­ oward 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 p­ eople ­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 Amer­ic­ as 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 p­ eople 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 b­ ecause 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 ­because 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 a­ ppreciate 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 f­ avor 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 o­ thers (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 t­ hese 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 b­ ecause 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 ­Matters: 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 m­ ental 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 m ­ atter 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 p­ eople 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 h ­ ouse 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 e­ very 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, t­ hose 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 Amer­ic­ a, 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 t­ hing” 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 Amer­ic­ a. 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 Amer­ic­ a”;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 m ­ ental 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 Amer­ic­ a.”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 p­ eople, 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 p­ eople . . . ​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
D ­ aughter, 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. T ­ oward
­these aims, I chart the specter of madness in several of her per­for­mances, espe-
cially her 2001 mtv Unplugged No. 2.0 a­ lbum; 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,” w ­ hether 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 Amer­ic­ a’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 D ­ on’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
­ ental illness is not only a potential outcome of witnessing such vio­
But m
lence; ­mental illness is also a risk ­factor correlated with an increased likelihood
of suffering such vio­lence. In the United States, p­ eople 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