How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind
2021 book by La Marr Jurelle Bruce
How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Creativity is a 2021 book by La Marr Jurelle Bruce. It addresses the intersections of madness and black creativity from a contemporary perspective, exploring the nuance in practice by several acclaimed and enigmatic artists, especially in jazz, hip hop, and theatre.
Synopsis
The book begins with describing madness as a state of mind and of body, and strives to elucidate a spatial dimension of historical complexity in order to explore the inconspicuous side of creativity. The succeeding chapters highlight the artistic contributions of artists like Buddy Bolden (the fabled founder of jazz), Lauryn Hill, Dave Chappelle, and Eddie Murphy. Bruce provides a holistic and critical analysis of media sponsored claims of lunacy in regards to each artist, and articulates varied metaphorical ideas for more concrete expression. The book reveals madness as a species of suffering, through the context of the psychological plight of African Americans during the Plantocracy era. It attempts to prove that the subsequent political climate of the American postcolonial nation-state procured such emotional turbulence as to foster the cognitive realms that pioneered the contemporary creative industry.
He describes madness as phenomenal, medicalized, psychosocial, and enveloped within the emotion of rage. The book focuses on African American temporality as a specific realm of American consciousness and highlights mad creativity within media culture. He presents a psychological framework to navigate the existence of 'mad time', 'melancholic time' and 'jubilant time' within the American subaltern reality.
The public source identifies “How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind” as 2021 book by La Marr Jurelle Bruce. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Without, Losing and Your.
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