How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity (Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study)

How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind is a groundbreaking exploration of madness in black radical art, literature, music, and performance.

This book uncovers the multiple meanings of madness and how it has been used as a tool for creative expression and resistance throughout history.

With care and verve, La Marr Jurelle Bruce examines the works of influential artists such as Amiri Baraka, Gayl Jones, Ntozake Shange, Buddy Bolden, Sun Ra, Charles Mingus, Richard Pryor, Dave Chappelle, Nina Simone, Lauryn Hill, and Kendrick Lamar.

By mobilizing what he calls "mad methodology," Bruce shows how madness can inform and animate ways of reading, thinking, feeling, telling, being, and living.

This book is both a study and an act of critical, ethical, radical madness, and it will resonate with anyone interested in the intersection of race, creativity, and mental health.